At this criticism, so naive and pithy and so like Nellie, there was a general laugh.

"At least the priests were wise and the slaves were cared for," retorted Ford, nothing abashed. "I recollect when I was a little fellow in England. My people were farm labourers, west of England labourers. We lived in a little stone cottage that had little diamond-paned windows.

The kitchen floor was below the ground, and on wet days my mother used to make a little dam of rags at the door to keep the trickling water back.

We lived on bread and potatoes and broad beans, and not too much of that.

We got a little pig for half-a-crown, and killed it when it was grown to pay the rent. Don't think such things are only done in Ireland! We herded together like pigs ourselves. The women of the place often worked in the fields. The girls, too, sometimes. You know what that means where the people are like beasts, the spirit worn out of them. The cottages were built two together, and our neighbour's daughter, a girl of 18 or so, had two children. It was not thought anything. The little things played at home with our neighbour's own small children, and their grandmother called them hard names when they bothered her.

"My father was a bent-shouldered hopeless man, when I recollect him. He got six shillings a week then, with a jug of cider every day. When he stopped from the wet, and there was no work in the barns, his wages were stopped. So he worked in the wet very often, for it generally rains in England, you know. The wet came through our roof. Gives the natives such pretty pink skins, eh, Geisner?" and he laughed shortly. "My father got rheumatism, and used to keep us awake groaning at nights. He had been a good-looking young fellow, my old granny used to say. I never saw him good-looking. In the winter we always had poor relief. We should have starved if we hadn't. My father got up at four and came home after dark.

My mother used to go weeding and gleaning. I went to scare crows when I was five years old. All the same, we were a family of paupers. Proud to be an Englishman, Geisner! Be an English pauper, and then try!"

"You'll never get to the priests, Ford, if you start an argument,"

interposed Mrs. Stratton.

"I'll get to them all right. Our cottage was down a narrow, muddy lane.

On one side of the lane was a row of miserable stone hovels, just like ours. On the other was a great stone wall that seemed to me, then, to be about a hundred feet high. I suppose it was about twenty feet. You could just see the tops of trees the other side. Some had branches lopped short to prevent them coming over the wall. At the corner of the highway our lane ran to was a great iron gate, all about it towering trees, directly inside a mound of shrub-covered rockery that prevented anybody getting a peep further. The carriage drive took a turn round this rockery and disappeared. Once, when the gate was open and n.o.body about, I got a peep by sneaking round this rockery like a little thief. There was a beautiful lawn and clumps of flowers, and a summer house and a conservatory, and a big grey-fronted mansion. I thought heaven must be something like that.

It made me radical."

"How do you mean?" asked Mrs. Stratton.

"Well, it knocked respect for const.i.tuted authority out of me. I didn't know enough to understand the wrong of one lazy idler having this splendid place while the people he lived on kennelled in hovels. But it struck me as so villainously selfish to build that wall, to prevent us outside from even looking at the beautiful lawn and flowers. I was only a little chap but I recollect wondering if it would hurt the place to let me look, and when I couldn't see that it would I began to hate the wall like poison. There we were, poor, ragged, hungry wretches, without anything beautiful in our lives, so miserable and hopeless that I didn't even know it wasn't the right thing to be a pauper, and that animal ran up a great wall in our faces so that we couldn't see the gra.s.s--curse him!" Ford had gradually worked himself into a white rage.

"He didn't know any better," said Geisner. "Was he the priest?"

"Yes, the rector, getting 900 a-year and this great house, and paying a skinny curate 60 for doing the work. A fat impostor, who drove about in a carriage, and came to tell the girl next door as she lay a-bed that she would go to h.e.l.l for her sin and burn there for ever. I hated his wall and him too. Out in the fields I used to draw him on bits of slate. In the winter when there weren't any crows or any weeding I went to school.

You see, unless you sent your children to the church school a little, and went to church regularly, you didn't get any beef or blanket at Christmas. I tell you English charity is a sweet thing. Well, I used to draw the parson at school, a fat, pompous, double chinned, pot-bellied animal, with thin side-whiskers, and a tall silk hat, and a big handful of a nose. I drew nothing else. I studied the question as it were and I got so that I could draw the brute in a hundred different ways. You can imagine they weren't complimentary, and one day the parson came to the school, and we stood up in cla.s.s with slates to do sums, and on the back of my slate was one of the very strongest of my first attempts at cartooning. It was a hot one." And at the remembrance Ford laughed so contagiously that they all joined. "The parson happened to see it. By gum! It was worth everything to see him."

"What did he do?"

"What didn't he do? He delivered a lecture, how I was a worthy relative of an uncle of mine who'd been shipped out this way years before for snaring a rabbit, and so on. I got nearly skinned alive, and the Christmas beef and blanket wore stopped from our folks. And there another joke comes in. An older brother of mine, 14 years old, I was about 12, took to going to the Ranters' meetings instead of to church. My mother and father used to tie him up on Sat.u.r.day nights and march him to church on Sunday like a young criminal going to gaol. They were afraid of losing the beef and blanket, you see. He sometimes ran out of church when they nodded or weren't looking, and the curate was always worrying them about him. It was the deadliest of all sins, you know, to go to the Ranters.

Well, when the beef and blanket were stopped, without any chance of forgiveness, we all went to the Ranters."

"I've often wondered where you got your power from, Ford," remarked Connie. "I see now."

"Yes, that great wall made me hate the great wall that bars the people from all beautiful things; that fat hypocrite made me hate all frauds. I can never forget the way we all swallowed those things as sacred. When I get going with a pencil I feel towards whatever it is just as I felt to the parson, and I try to make everybody feel the same. Yet would you believe it, I don't care much for cartooning. I want to paint."

"Why don't you?" asked Nellie.

"Well, there's money you know. Then it was sheer luck that made me a cartoonist and I can't expect the same run of luck always."

"Don't believe him, Nellie," said Connie. "He feels that he has a chance now to give all frauds such a hammering that he hesitates to give it up.

You've paid the parson, Ford, full measure, pressed down and running over!"

"Not enough!" answered Ford. "Not enough! Not till the wall is down flat all the world over! Do you think Egypt would have lasted 20,000 years if her priests had been like my parson, and her slaves like my people?"

"I'd forgotten all about Egypt," said Nellie. "But I suppose her rulers had sense enough to give men enough to eat and enough to drink, high wages and constant employment, as M'Ilwraith used to say. Yes; it was wiser than the rulers of to-day are. You can rob for a long while if you only rob moderately. But the end comes some time to all wrong. It's coming faster with us, but it came in Egypt, too."

"Here is Arty, finished!" interrupted Connie, who every little while had looked through the door at the young man. She jumped up. "Come along in and see what it is this time."

They all went in, jostling and joking one another. Arty was standing up in the middle of the room looking at some much blotted slips of paper. He appeared to be very well satisfied, and broke into a broad smile as he looked up at them all. Geisner and Ned found themselves side by side near the piano, over the keys of which Geisner softly ran his fingers with loving touch. "You are in luck to-night," he remarked to Ned. "You know Arty's signature, of course. He writes as----," mentioning a well-known name.

"Of course I know. Is that him?" answered Ned, astonished. "Verses which bore that signature were as familiar to thousands of western bushmen as their own names. Who is Ford?" he added.

"Ford! Oh, Ford signs himself----." Geisner mentioned another signature.

"Is he the one who draws in the Scrutineer?" demanded Ned more astonished than ever.

"Yes; you know his work?"

"Know his work! Had not every man in Australia laughed with his pitiless cartoons at the dignified magnates of Society and the utter rottenness of the powers that be?"

"And what is Mr. Stratton?"

"A designer for a livelihood. An artist for love of Art. His wife is connected with the press. You wouldn't know her signature, but some of her work is very fine. George there is a journalist."

"But I thought the newspapers were against unions."

"Naturally they are. They are simply business enterprises, conducted in the ordinary commercial way for a profit, and therefore opposed to everything which threatens to interfere with profit-making. But the men and women who work on the press are very different. They are really wage-workers to begin with. Besides, they are often intelligent enough to sympathise thoroughly with the Labour movement in spite of the surroundings which tend to separate them from it. Certainly, the most popular exponents of Socialism are nearly all press writers."

"We are only just beginning to hear about these things in the bush," said Ned. "What is Socialism?"

"That's a big question," answered Geisner. "Socialism is----"

He was interrupted. "Silence, everybody!" cried Mrs. Stratton. "Listen to Arty's latest!"

CHAPTER VIII.

THE POET AND THE PRESSMAN.

"Silence, everybody!" commanded Mrs. Stratton. "Listen to Arty's latest!"

She had gone up to him as they all came in. "Is it good?" she asked, looking over his arm. For answer he held the slips down to her and changed them as she read rapidly, only pausing occasionally to ask him what a more than usually obscured word was. There was hardly a line as originally written. Some words had been altered three and four times.

Whole lines had been struck out and fresh lines inserted. In some verses nothing was left of the original but the measure and the rhymes.

"No wonder you were worrying if you had all this on your mind," she remarked, as he finished, smiling at him. "Let me read it to them."

He nodded. So when the buzz of conversation had stopped she read his verses to the others, holding his arm in the middle of the room, her sweet voice conveying their spirit as well as their words. And Arty stood by her, jubilant, listening proudly and happily to the rhythm of his new-born lines, for all the world like a young mother showing her new-born babe.

THE VISION OF LABOUR.

There's a sound of lamentation 'mid the murmuring nocturne noises, And an undertone of sadness, as from myriad human voices, And the harmony of heaven and the music of the spheres, And the ceaseless throb of Nature, and the flux and flow of years, Are rudely punctuated with the drip of human tears --As Time rolls on!

Yet high above the beat of surf, and Ocean's deep resounding, And high above the tempest roar of wind on wave rebounding, There's a burst of choral chanting, as of victors in a fight, And a battle hymn of triumph wakes the echoes of the night, And the shouts of heroes mingle with the shriekings of affright --As Time rolls on!

There's a gleam amid the darkness, and there's sight amid the blindness, And the glow of hope is kindled by the breath of human kindness, And a phosph.o.r.escent glimmer gilds the s.p.a.ces of the gloom, Like the sea-lights in the midnight, or the ghost-lights of the tomb, Or the livid lamps of madness in the charnel-house of doom --As Time rolls on!

And amidst the weary wand'rers on the mountain crags belated There's a hush of expectation, and the sobbings are abated, For a word of hope is spoken by a prophet versed in pain, Who tells of rugged pathways down to fields of golden grain, Where the sun is ever shining, and the skies their blessings rain --As Time rolls on!