I have made Punch something of a gourmand, and each meal has to contain, besides its foundation of wheaten chaff and its pièce de résistance of cracked maize, a flavouring of oats--say, three double handfuls--and a thorough sprinkling, well rubbed in, of bran. If the proportions are wrong, or any of the constituents of the meal lacking, Punch snorts, whinnies, turns his rump to the manger, and demands my instant attention. I was intensely amused one day when, sitting in the slab and bark stable, through whose crevices seeing and hearing are easy, to overhear the mail-man telling Mrs. Blades that, upon his Sam, I was for all the world like an old maid with her canary in the way I dry-nursed that blessed horse; by ghost, I was! He was particularly struck, was this good man, by my insane practice of sometimes taking Punch for a walk in the bush, as though he were a dog, and without ever mounting him.

Punch provided for, my own ablutions are performed in the wood-shed, where I have learned to bathe with the aid of a sponge and a bucket of water, and have a shower worked by a cord connected with a perforated nail-can. By this time my billy-can is probably spluttering over the hearth, and I make tea and toast, after possibly eating an orange. And so the day is fairly started, and I am free to think, to read, to write, or to enjoy idleness, after a further chat with Punch when turning him out to graze. My wood-chopping I do either before breakfast or towards the close of the day; the latter, I think, more often than the former. It makes a not unpleasant salve for the conscience of a mainly idle man, after the super-fatted luxury of afternoon tea and a biscuit or scone.

An Australian bushman would call my tea no more than water bewitched, and my small pinch of China leaves in an infuser spoon but a mean mockery of his own generous handful of black Indian leaves, well stewed in a billy to a strength suited for hide-tanning. Of this inky mixture he will cheerfully consume (several times a day) a quart, as an aid to the digestion of a pound or two of corned beef, with pickles and other deadly things, none of which seem to do him much harm. And if they should, the result rather amuses and interests him than otherwise; for, of all amateur doctors (and lawyers), he is the most enthusiastic and ingenuous. He will tell you (with the emphatic winks, nods, and gestures of a man of research who has made a wonderful discovery, and, out of the goodness of his heart, means to let you into the secret) of some patent medicine which is already advertised, generally offensively, in every newspaper in the land; and, having explained how it made a new man of him, will very likely insist with kindly tyranny upon buying you a flagon of the costly rubbish.

'I assure you, Mr. Freydon, you won't know yourself after takin' a bottle or two of Simpkins's Red Marvel.' I agree cordially, well assured that in such a case I should not care to know myself. 'Why, there was a chap down Sydney way, Newtown I think it was he lived in, or it mighter bin Balmain. Crooil bad he was till they put him on to the Red Marvel. Fairly puzzled the doctors, he did, an' all et up with sores, somethin' horrible. Well, I tell you, I wouldn't be without a bottle in my camp. Sooner go without 'baccy. An', not only that, but it's such comfortin' stuff is the Red Marvel. Every night o' my life I takes a double dose of it now; sick or sorry, well or ill--an' look at me! I useter to swear by Blick's Backache Pills; but now, I wouldn't have them on me mind. They're no class at all, be this stuff. Give me Simpkins's Red Marvel, every time, an' I don't care if it snows! You try it, Mr. Freydon. I was worsen you afore I struck it; an' now, why, I wouldn't care to call the Queen me aunt!' (His father before him, in Queen Victoria's reign, had no doubt used this quaint phrase, and it was not for him to alter it because of any such trifling episodes as the accession of other sovereigns.)

VIII

I gladly abide by my word of yesterday. The portion of my days here in the bush which I like best is the dawn time. But the nights have their good, and--well--and their less good times, too. My evening meal is apt to be sketchy. There is a special vein of laziness in me which makes me shirk the setting out of plates and cutlery, and, even more, their removal when used; despite the fact that I have had, perhaps, rather more experience than most men of catering for myself. Hence, the evening meal is apt to be sketchy; a furtive and far from creditable performance, with the vessels of the midday meal for its background.

Then, with a sense of relief, I shut the door upon that episode, and the evidences thereof, and betake me to the room which is really mine; where the big hearth is, and the camp-bed, and the writing-table, the books, and the big Ceylon-made lounge-chair. The first evening pipe is nearly always good; the second may be flavoured with melancholy, but yet is seldom unpleasing. The third--there are decent intervals between--bears me company in bed, with whatever book may be occupying me at the time. The first hour in the big chair and the first hour in bed are both exceedingly good when I am anything like well. I would not say which is the better of the two, lest I provoke a Nemesis. Both are excellent in their different ways.

Nine times out of ten I can be asleep within half an hour of dousing the candle, and it is seldom I wake before three hours have passed. After that come hours of which it is not worth while to say much. They are far from being one's best hours. And then, more often than not, will come another blessed two hours, or even more, of unconsciousness, before the first purple grey forecasts of a new day call me out into the bush for my morning lesson in serenity: Nature's astringent message to egoists and all the sedentary, introspective tribe, that bids us note our own infinite insignificance, our utter and microscopical unimportance in her great scheme of things, and her sublime indifference to our individual lives; to say nothing of our insectile hopes, fears, imaginings, despairs, joys, and other forms of mental and emotional travail.

It may or may not be evidence of mental exhaustion or indolence, but I notice that I have experienced here no inclination to read anything that is new to me. I have read a good deal under this roof, including a quite surprising amount of fiction; but nothing, I think, that I had not read before. During bouts of illness here, I have indulged in such debauches as the rereading of the whole of Hardy, Meredith, Stevenson, W. E. Henley's poems, and the novels of George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, and H. G. Wells. Some of the better examples of modern fiction have always had a special topographical appeal to me. I greatly enjoy the work of a writer who has set himself to treat a given countryside exhaustively. This, more even than his masterly irony, his philosophy, his remarkable fullness of mind and opulent allusiveness, has been at the root of the immense appeal Hardy's work makes to me. ('Q,' in a different measure, of course, makes a similar appeal.) Let the Wessex master forsake his countryside, or leave his peasants for gentlefolk, and immediately my interest wanes, his wonderful appeal fails.

Since I have been here in the bush I have understood, as never before, the great and far-reaching popularity of Thomas Hardy's work among Americans. He gives so much which not all the wealth, nor all the genius of that inventive race, can possibly evolve out of their New World. But, upon the whole, I ought not to have brought my fine, tall rank of Hardy's here, still less to have pored over them as I have. There is that second edition of Far From the Madding Crowd now, with its delicious woodcuts by H. Paterson. It is dated 1874--I was a boy then, newly arrived in this antipodean land--and the frontispiece shows Gabriel Oak soliciting Bathsheba: 'Do you happen to want a shepherd, ma'am?' No, I cannot say my readings of Hardy have been good for me here. There is Jude the Obscure now, a masterpiece of heart-bowing tragedy that. And, especially insidious in my case, there are passages like this from that other tragedy in the idyllic vein, The Woodlanders: