It was not the first time a similar crisis had happened, but before his wife had always taken matters in hand, looked up situations for him in the papers, interviewed influential people, brushed his clothes and sent him out with little to do but present himself to his employer.
But now he was completely at sea.
He wrote a few letters to Sydney friends, vaguely asking if they knew of 'a billet.' But seven years' silence makes strangers of ones best friends; some were scattered, and dead letters were the only reply; others wrote to say Sydney had never been in such a state of hopeless depression, and strongly advised him not to come to add to the frightful army of the unemployed.
'Why not go on the land?' said one or two of them. 'A man like you with a growing family should do well there, and you would at least be your own master and free from "a month's notice."'
Cameron first asked the children what they thought of 'going on the land.'
When they heard this meant moving to a new place, and having sheep and growing all their own things, and each one helping, they were enchanted.
Cameron was too shy and reserved to have made many friends in the township, but he put on a clean cool coat and filled his pipe and wandered forth, with the vague idea of asking some one's advice on the matter. But there was a race-meeting in a neighbouring township, and the streets were almost deserted, the tradespeople and the land-and-estate agent being the only men at their posts. The latter, however, struck Cameron as the very man to ask. And Cameron struck the agent as the very man for whom he had been waiting. There was a selection, he said, a few miles away—eighty acres of fine land that its drunken owner, Dunks, had hardly stirred since he had taken it up. There was a five-roomed cottage on it, there were fifty head of sheep, poultry, a couple of horses, a cart, and all tools. Dunks, anxious to get to Sydney, was willing to let all go for two hundred and fifty pounds.
But Cameron went home hopeless, he could as easily raise two thousand pounds as two hundred and fifty.
Hermie met him with a registered letter from which a cheque for a hundred fluttered. Challis's professors, it seemed, had allowed her to give a few concerts in the midst of her course of lessons, and five hundred pounds had been the result.
'The child insists that I shall send a hundred,' ran the letter, 'for you all to buy presents with, and though I don't know what you can buy—but sheep—in Wilgandra, I send it. More I do not enclose, my dear one, for well do I know how shockingly you would lose and give it away. But all have some fun with this hundred, and now every penny that comes I shall jealously bank for the future and for the child's own use, as is but fair and right.'