We talked about grubbing and fencing and digging and droving and shearing all about the bush and it all came back to me as we talked. 'I can see it all now,' he said once, in an abstracted tone, seeming to fix his helpless eyes on the wall opposite. But he didn't see the dirty blind wall, nor the dingy window, nor the skimpy little bed, nor the greasy washstand: he saw the dark blue ridges in the sunlight, the grassy sidings and flats, the creek with clumps of sheoak here and there, the course of the willow-fringed river below, the distant peaks and ranges fading away into a lighter azure, the granite ridge in the middle distance, and the rocky rises, the stringy-bark and the apple-tree flats, the scrubs, and the sunlit plains―and all. I could see it, too―plainer than ever I did.
He had done a bit of fencing in his time, and we got talking about timber. He didn't believe in having fencing-posts with big butts; he reckoned it was a mistake. 'You see,' he said, 'the top of the butt catches the rain water and makes the post rot quicker. I'd back posts without any butt at all to last as long or longer than posts with'em―that's if the fence is well put up and well rammed.' He had supplied fencing stuff, and fenced by contract, and―well, you can get more posts without butts out of a tree than posts with them. He also objected to charring the butts. He said it only made more work, and wasted time―the butts lasted longer without being charred.
I asked him if he'd ever got stringy-bark palings or shingles out of mountain ash, and he smiled a smile that did my heart good to see, and said he had.
