I became melancholy: my incessant practice and irregular meals had, for the time being, destroyed my nerves. I thought of my schooldays and my life at sea, and longed for my boyhood’s days in the Australian bush. I remembered the kingly stockman and his wife, and the surrounding bush loneliness; the leafy gum clumps and the parrots roosting in them; and the hours when I sat on the dead log by the scented wattles in the hollows and watched the fleets of cockatoos like tiny canoes fade away in the sunset. I heard in dreams the laughter of the romping bush children as I raced them down the scrub-covered slopes, and I longed for those ambitionless days to come again.
MEMORIES
I can still see the forest trees
All waving in the dusk,
As scents drift on the wandering breeze,
From wattle-blooms and musk;
And o’er the mountains far away
Where home the parrots flock,
Roams through the sunset’s crimson ray
The drover with his stock.