silences of frail ferns that have not seen the day.
No man bred in the streets and the sheltered ways may know the glorious merciless joy that follows the first sob of the blade into green unhandled timber. And though an axeman be past all but the blurred memory, he will turn at that sound from all other music that earth may hold. For the bush is the Eternal Artist whose work no man makes sensuous or coarse, and to them that love her she gives that intuition which gets behind mystery and unbelief to prove that God has made in His own image the Almighty Peace which He lays on Nature the round world through.
In the cook-hut someone was bawling for a stolen crib. The clank of steel burred sharp on the air as a tram-horse bucked in the traces. Lou came over the beaten clearing with his long whip in his arm-pit, and swung to the jigger as Hoffman got it under way. His knee brushed Steve’s when he took the place opposite, and his gay chaff flicked the man at his side to haste. Steve lay to the handles in dogged silence. True hate marches ever with fear to goad it, and, for Maiden’s sake, Steve feared and hated Lou.
One by one the jiggers crawled out behind, strung along the grey line like shifting beads on a string. The utter peace of the morning broke under the grate of wheels and the deep
