"Well, one evening I met her at the sliprails, and presently I asked her, for a joke, if she'd marry me. Mind you, I never wanted to marry _her_; I was only curious to know whether any girl would have me.

"She turned away her face and seemed to hesitate, and I was just turning away and beginning to think I was a dashed hopeless case, when all of a sudden she fell up against me and said she'd be my wife.... And it wasn't her fault that she wasn't."

"What did she do?"

"Do! What didn't she do? Next day she went down to our place when I was at work, and hugged and kissed mother and the girls all round, and cried, and told mother that she'd try and be a dutiful daughter to her.

Good Lord! You should have seen the old woman and the girls when I came home.

"Then she let everyone know that Bridget Page was engaged to Jack Mitch.e.l.l, and told her friends that she went down on her knees every night and thanked the Lord for getting the love of a good man. Didn't the fellows chyack me, though! My sisters were raving mad about it, for their chums kept asking them how they liked their new sister, and when it was going to come off, and who'd be bridesmaids and best man, and whether they weren't surprised at their brother Jack's choice; and then I'd gammon at home that it was all true.

"At last the place got too hot for me. I got sick of dodging that girl.

I sent a mate of mine to tell her that it was all a joke, and that I was already married in secret; but she didn't see it, then I cleared, and got a job in Newcastle, but had to leave there when my mates sent me the office that she was coming. I wouldn't wonder but what she is humping her swag after me now. In fact, I thought you was her in disguise when I set eyes on you first.... You needn't get mad about it; I don't mean to say that you're quite as ugly as she was, because I never saw a man that was--or a woman either. Anyway, I'll never ask a woman to marry me again unless I'm ready to marry her."

Then Mitch.e.l.l's mate told a yarn.

"I knew a case once something like the one you were telling me about; the landlady of a hash-house where I was stopping in Albany told me.

There was a young carpenter staying there, who'd run away from Sydney from an old maid who wanted to marry him. He'd cleared from the church door, I believe. He was scarcely more'n a boy--about nineteen--and a soft kind of a fellow, something like you, only good-looking--that is, he was pa.s.sable. Well, as soon as the woman found out where he'd gone, she came after him. She turned up at the boarding-house one Sat.u.r.day morning when Bobbie was at work; and the first thing she did was to rent a double room from the landlady and buy some cups and saucers to start housekeeping with. When Bobbie came home he just gave her one look and gave up the game.

"'Get your dinner, Bobbie,' she said, after she'd s...o...b..red over him a bit, 'and then get dressed and come with me and get married!'

"She was about three times his age, and had a face like that picture of a lady over Sappho Smith's letters in the Sydney _Bulletin_.

"Well, Bobbie went with her like a--like a lamb; never gave a kick or tried to clear."

"Hold on," said Mitch.e.l.l, "did you ever shear lambs?"

"Never mind. Let me finish the yarn. Bobbie was married; but she wouldn't let him out of her sight all that afternoon, and he had to put up with her before them all. About bedtime he sneaked out and started along the pa.s.sage to his room that he shared with two or three mates.

But she'd her eye on him.

"'Bobbie, Bobbie!' she says, 'Where are you going?'

"'I'm going to bed,' said Bobbie. 'Good night!'

"'Bobbie, Bobbie,' she says, sharply. 'That isn't our room; _this_ is our room, Bobbie. Come back at once! What do you mean, Bobbie? _Do you hear me, Bobbie?_'

"So Bobbie came back, and went in with the scarecrow. Next morning she was first at the breakfast table, in a dressing-gown and curl papers.

And when they were all sitting down Bobbie sneaked in, looking awfully sheepish, and sidled for his chair at the other end of the table. But she'd her eyes on him.

"'Bobbie, Bobbie!' she said, 'Come and kiss me, Bobbie!'" And he had to do it in front of them all.

"But I believe she made him a good wife."

HIS COUNTRY-AFTER ALL

The Blenheim coach was descending into the valley of the Avetere River--p.r.o.nounced Aveterry--from the saddle of Taylor's Pa.s.s. Across the river to the right, the grey slopes and flats stretched away to the distant sea from a range of tussock hills. There was no native bush there; but there were several groves of imported timber standing wide apart---sentinel-like--seeming lonely and striking in their isolation.

"Grand country, New Zealand, eh?" said a stout man with a brown face, grey beard, and grey eyes, who sat between the driver and another pa.s.senger on the box.

"You don't call this grand country!" exclaimed the other pa.s.senger, who claimed to be, and looked like, a commercial traveller, and might have been a professional spieler--quite possibly both. "Why, it's about the poorest country in New Zealand! You ought to see some of the country in the North Island--Wairarapa and Napier districts, round about Pahiatua.

I call this d.a.m.n poor country."

"Well, I reckon you wouldn't, if you'd ever been in Australia--back in New South Wales. The people here don't seem to know what a grand country they've got. You say this is the worst, eh? Well, this would make an Australian c.o.c.katoo's mouth water-the worst of New Zealand would."

"I always thought Australia was all good country," mused the driver--a flax-stick. "I always thought--"

"Good country!" exclaimed the man with the grey beard, in a tone of disgust. "Why, it's only a mongrel desert, except some bits round the coast. The worst dried-up and G.o.d-forsaken country I was ever in."

There was a silence, thoughtful on the driver's part, and aggressive on that of the stranger.

"I always thought," said the driver, reflectively, after the pause--"I always thought Australia was a good country," and he placed his foot on the brake.

They let him think. The coach descended the natural terraces above the river bank, and pulled up at the pub.

"So you're a native of Australia?" said the bagman to the grey-beard, as the coach went on again.

"Well, I suppose I am. Anyway, I was born there. That's the main thing I've got against the darned country."

"How long did you stay there?"

"Till I got away," said the stranger. Then, after a think, he added, "I went away first when I was thirty-five--went to the islands. I swore I'd never go back to Australia again; but I did. I thought I had a kind of affection for old Sydney. I knocked about the blasted country for five or six years, and then I cleared out to 'Frisco. I swore I'd never go back again, and I never will."

"But surely you'll take a run over and have a look at old Sydney and those places, before you go back to America, after getting so near?"

"What the blazes do I want to have a look at the blamed country for?"

snapped the stranger, who had refreshed considerably. "I've got nothing to thank Australia for--except getting out of it. It's the best country to get out of that I was ever in."

"Oh, well, I only thought you might have had some friends over there,"

interposed the traveller in an injured tone.

"Friends! That's another reason. I wouldn't go back there for all the friends and relations since Adam. I had more than quite enough of it while I was there. The worst and hardest years of my life were spent in Australia. I might have starved there, and did do it half my time. I worked harder and got less in my own country in five years than I ever did in any other in fifteen"--he was getting mixed--"and I've been in a few since then. No, Australia is the worst country that ever the Lord had the sense to forget. I mean to stick to the country that stuck to me, when I was starved out of my own dear native land--and that country is the United States of America. What's Australia? A big, thirsty, hungry wilderness, with one or two cities for the convenience of foreign speculators, and a few collections of humpies, called towns--also for the convenience of foreign speculators; and populated mostly by mongrel sheep, and partly by fools, who live like European slaves in the towns, and like dingoes in the bush--who drivel about 'democracy,' and yet haven't any more s.p.u.n.k than to graft for a few c.o.c.kney dudes that razzle-dazzle most of the time in Paris. Why, the Australians haven't even got the grit to claim enough of their own money to throw a few dams across their watercourses, and so make some of the interior fit to live in. America's bad enough, but it was never so small as that.... Bah! The curse of Australia is sheep, and the Australian war cry is Baa!"

"Well, you're the first man I ever heard talk as you've been doing about his own country," said the bagman, getting tired and impatient of being sat on all the time. "'Lives there a man with a soul so dead, who never said--to--to himself'... I forget the darned thing."

He tried to remember it. The man whose soul was dead cleared his throat for action, and the driver--for whom the bagman had shouted twice as against the stranger's once--took the opportunity to observe that he always thought a man ought to stick up for his own country.

The stranger ignored him and opened fire on the bagman. He proceeded to prove that that was all rot--that patriotism was the greatest curse on earth; that it had been the cause of all war; that it was the false, ignorant sentiment which moved men to slave, starve, and fight for the comfort of their sluggish masters; that it was the enemy of universal brotherhood, the mother of hatred, murder, and slavery, and that the world would never be any better until the deadly poison, called the sentiment of patriotism, had been "educated" out of the stomachs of the people. "Patriotism!" he exclaimed scornfully. "My country! The darned fools; the country never belonged to them, but to the speculators, the absentees, land-boomers, swindlers, gangs of thieves--the men the patriotic fools starve and fight for--their masters. Ba-a!"

The opposition collapsed.

The coach had climbed the terraces on the south side of the river, and was bowling along on a level stretch of road across the elevated flat.

"What trees are those?" asked the stranger, breaking the aggressive silence which followed his unpatriotic argument, and pointing to a grove ahead by the roadside. "They look as if they've been planted there.

There ain't been a forest here surely?"