isters, or is himself controlled by them, depends upon his strength of will and obstinacy, and the pliancy of the Ministers. George III generally succeeded in having his own way in policy and legislation. A plain, blunt and rather narrow-minded man, he could not understand the subtleties of a Constitution which told him in black and white that he was an absolute ruler incapable of ill-doing; and yet insisted by its unwritten laws and customs that, in practice, he must do nothing on his own responsibility, but everything he is told by his Ministers. In 1799 he informed Dundas how pleased he was to learn that a union between Ireland and Great Britain was in contemplation. "But," he added, "I hope it is not true that the Government is pledged to Good Words.

emancipate the Roman Catholics?" "No," replied the Minister, "that will be a matter for future consideration." The King protested that he could never consent to the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, as it would be a violation of his coronation oath which bound him to uphold the Protestant supremacy. Dundas endeavored to explain that this oath applied to the King in his executive capacity and not as part of the Legislature. "None of your Scotch metaphysics, Mr. Dundas," cried the monarch angrily. "None of your d-- Scotch metaphysics." The inconsistency between legal theory and actual practice in the Constitution is, indeed, somewhat bewildering. It is also amusing.

Michael MacDonagh.

This is a story-about the only oneof Job Falconer, boss of the Talbragar sheep-station up-country in New South Wales in the early eighties, when there were still runs in the Dingo Scrubs out of the hands of the banks, and yet squatters who lived on their stations.

Job would never tell the story himself, at least not complete; and as his family grew up he would become as angry as it was in his easy-going nature to become if reference were made to the incident in his presence. But his wife-little, plump, bright-eyed Gerty Falconer-often told the story with brightening eyes to women-friends over tea, and always to a new womanfriend, but always in the mysterious voice which women use in speaking of private matters amongst themselves. On such occasions she would be particularly tender towards unconscious Job, and ruffle his thin sandy hair in

a way that embarrassed him in company-made him look as sheepish as an old big-horned ram that has just been shorn and turned amongst the ewes. Then, on parting, the woman-friend would give Job's hand a squeeze that would surprise him mildly, and look at him as if she could love him.

According to a theory of mine, Job, to fit the story, should have been tall and dark and stern, or gloomy and quick-tempered; but he wasn't. He was fairly tall, but he was fresh-complexioned and sandy-his skin was pink to scarlet in some weathers, with blotches of umber-and his eyes were pale-gray; his big forehead loomed babyishly, his arms were short, and his legs bowed to the saddle. Altogether he was an awkward, unlovely bush-bird-on foot; in the saddle it was different.

The incident was brought about by

Job's recollection, still strong and vivid, of a certain occurrence many years before. Job was a boy of fourteen when he saw his father's horse come home riderless, circling and snorting up by the stockyard, head jerked down whenever the hoof trod on one of the snapped ends of the bridle reins; the saddle twisted over the side, with bruised pommel and knee-pad broken off. Job's father wasn't hurt much; but Job's mother, an emotional woman, and then in a delicate state of health, survived the shock for only three months. "She wasn't quite right in her head," they said, "from the day the borse came home till the last hour before she died." Strange to say, Job's father, from whom Job inherited his seemingly placid nature, died three months after his wife. The doctor from the town was of the opinion that Job's father must have "sustained irternal injuries" when the horse threw him. Doc. Wild (eccentric bush-doctor) reckoned that Job's father was hurt inside when his wife died, and hurt so badly that he couldn't pull round; but doctors differ all over the world.

Well, it came about in this way. Job Falconer had been married a year, and had lately started wool-raising on a pastoral lease he had taken up at Talbragar. It was a new run, with new slab-and-bark huts on the creek for a homestead, new shearing-shed, yardswife and everything new, and he was expecting a baby. Job felt brand-new himself at the time, so he said. It was a lonely place for a young woman; but Gerty was a settler's daughter. The newness took away some of the loneliness, she said, and there was truth in that.

A bush-home in the scrubs looks lonelier the older it gets, and ghostlier in the twilight, as the bark and slabs whiten, or rather grow gray, in fierce summers; and there's nothing under God's sky so weird, so aggressively

lonely, as a deserted old home in the bush.

Job's wife had a half-caste "gin" for company when Job was away on the run, and the nearest white woman-a hard but honest Lancashire woman from within the kicking radius in Lancashire, wife of a selector-was only seven miles away. She promised to be at hand, and came over two or three times a week; but Job grew restless as Gerty's time grew near, and wished that he had insisted on sending her to the nearest town, thirty miles off, as originally proposed. Gerty's mother, who lived in town, was coming to see ber over her trouble; Job had made arrangements with the town doctor; but prompt attendance could hardly be expected of a doctor who was very busy, who was too fat to ride, and who lived thirty miles away.

Job, in common with most bushmen and their families round there, had more faith in Doc. Wild, a weird American, who made medicine in a saucepan, and worked more cures on bushmen than the other three doctors of the district-maybe because the bushmen had faith in him, or he knew the bush and bush constitutions, or perhaps because he'd do things which no "respectable practitioner" dared do. I've described him in another story. Some said he was a quack, and some said he wasn't. There are scores of wrecks and mysteries like him in the bush. He drank fearfully, and "on his own," but was seldom incapable of prescribing or performing an operation. Experienced bushmen preferred him three-quarters drunk; when perfectly sober he was apt to be a bit shaky. He was tall and gaunt, and lad a pointed black moustache, bushy eyebrows and piercing black eyes. The worst of him was that his movements were eccentric. He lived where he happened to be; in a town hotel, in the best room of a homestead, in the skil

lion of a sly-grog-shanty, in a shearer's or digger's or shepherd's or boundaryrider's hut, in a surveyor's camp, in a black fellow's camp, or by a log in the lonely bush when the horrors were on him. It semed all one to him. He lost all his things sometimes, even his clothes; but he never lost a pig-skin bag which contained his surgical instruments and papers-except once; then he gave the blacks five pounds to find it for him.

His patients included all, from the big squatter to Black Jimmy; and he rode as far and fast to a squatter's home as to a swagman's camp. When nothing was to be expected from a poor selector or a station-hand, and the doctor was hard up, he went to the squatter for a few pounds. He had occasionally been offered checks of fifty and a hundred pounds by squatters for "pulling round" their wives or children; but such offers always angered bim. When he asked for five pounds he resented being offered a ten-pound check. He once, under the influence of his demon, sued a doctor for alleging that he held no diploma; but the magistrates, on reading certain papers, suggested a settlement out of court, which both doctors agreed to, the other doctor apologizing briefly in the local paper. It was noticed thereafter that the magistrate and town doctors treated Doc. Wild with great respect-even at his worst. The thing was never explained, and the case deepened the mystery which surrounded Doc. Wild. As Job Falconer's crisis approached Doc. Wild was located at a shanty on the main road, about half-way between Job's station and the town; township of Come-by-Chance-expressive name; and the shanty was the Dead Dingo Hotel, kept by James Myles, who was known as Poisonous Jimmy, either as a compliment to or a libel on the liquor he sold. Job's brother Mac was stationed at the Dead Dingo Hotel, with

instructions to hang around on some pretence, and see that the doctor didn't either drink himself into delirium tremens or get sober enough to become restless; to prevent his going away, or to follow him if he did; and to bring him to the station in about a week's time. Mac-rather more careless, brighter and more energetic than his brother-was carrying out these instructions while pretending, with rather great success, to be himself on the spree at the shanty.

One morning early in the specified week, Job's uneasiness was suddenly increased by certain symptoms; so he sent the black-boy for the neighbor's wife, and decided to ride to Come-byChance to hurry out Gerty's mother, and see, by the way, how Doc. Wild and Mac were getting on. On the arrival of the neighbor's wife, who drove cver in a spring-cart, Job mounted his horse, a freshly broken filly, and started.

"Don't be anxious, Job," said Gerty as he bent down to kiss her. "We'll be all right. Wait! you'd better take the gun-you might see those dingoes again. I'll get it for you."

The dingoes (native dogs) were very bad amongst the sheep, and Job and Gerty had started three together close to the track the last time they were out in company-without the gun of course. Gerty took the loaded gun carefully down from its straps on the bedroom wall, carried it out and handed it up to Job, who bent and kissed her again; she brought the powder and shot flasks, got another kiss, and then he rode off.

It was a hot day-the beginning of a long drought, as Job found to his bitter cost. He followed the track for five or six miles through the thick, monotonous scrub, and then turned off to make a short cut to the main road across a big, ring-barked flat. The tall gumtrees had been ring-barked (a ring of hark taken out round the butts), or

rather "sapped"-that is, a ring cut in through the sap-in order to kill them, so that the little strength in the poor soil should not be drawn out by the living roots, and the natural grass on which the Australian's stock depends should have a better show. For three or four miles the hard dead trees raised their barkless and whitened trunks and leafless branches, and the gray-andbrown grass stood tall between, dying in the first breath of the coming drought. All was becoming gray and ashen here, the heat blazing and dancing across objects, and the pale brassy dome of the sky cloudless over all, the sun a glaring white disc with its edges almost melting into the sky. Job held his gun carelessly ready—it was a double-barrelled muzzle-loader, one barrel smooth-bore for shot, and the other rifled-and he kept a lookout for dingoes. He was saving his horse for a long ride, jogging along in a careless bush-fashion, hitched a little to one side; and I'm not sure that he didn't have a leg thrown up and across in front of the pommel of his saddle. He was riding along, and thinking fatherly thoughts in advance perhaps, when suddenly a great, black, greasy-looking iguana scuttled off from the side of the track, amongst the dry tufts of grass and shreds of dead bark, and started up a sapling. "It was a whopper," Job said afterwards. "Must have been over six feet, and a foot across the body. It scared me nearly as much as the filly."

The filly shied off like a rocket. Job kept his seat instinctively, as was natural to him; but, before he could more than grab at the rein lying loosely on the pommel, the filly "fetched up" against a dead box-tree, hard as castiron; and Job's left leg was jammed from stirrup to pocket. "I felt the blood flare up," he said, "and I knowed that that"-Job swore now and then in an easy-going way-"I knowed that that

blanky leg was broken all right. I threw the gun from me and freed the left foot from the stirrup with my hand, and managed to fall to the right, as the filly started off again."

What follows comes from the statements of Doc. Wild and Mac Falconer, and Job's own "wanderings in his mind," as he called them. "They took a blanky mean advantage of me," he said, "when they had me down and I couldn't talk sense."

The filly circled off a bit, and then stood staring-as a mob of brumbies (wild horses-shot to save grass, for horse-hair, and because of the scrub stallions getting amongst station stock) when fired at will sometimes stand watching the smoke. Job's leg was smashed badly, and the pain must have been terrible; but he thought then instantaneously, as men do in a fix. Νο doubt the scene at the lonely bushhouse of his boyhood flashed before him; his father's horse appeared rider. less, and he saw the look in his mother's eyes

Now, a bushman's first, best and quickest chance in a fix like Job's is that his horse goes home riderless, the alarm is raised, and the horse's tracks are followed back to him; otherwise he might lie for days or weeks, till the growing grass buried his mouldering bones.

The place where Job lay was an old sheep-track across a flat where few might have occasion to come for months; but he did not consider this. He crawled to his gun, then to a log, dragging gun and smashed leg after him. How he did it he doesn't know. Half-lying on one side, he rested the barrel on the log, took aim at the filly, pulled both triggers, and then fell over and lay with his head against the log; and the gun-barrel, sliding down, rested on his neck. He had fainted. The crows were interested, and the ants would come by-and-by.

Doc. Wild had inspirations; anyway he did things which seemed, after they were done, to have been suggested by inspiration, and in no other possible way. He often turned up where and when he was wanted above all men, and at no other time. He had gypsy blood, they said; but anyway, being the mystery he was, and having the face he had, and living the life he lived, and doing the things he did, it was quite probable that he was more nearly in touch than we with that awful, invisible world all round and between us, of which we only see distorted faces and hear disjointed utterances when we are "suffering a recovery" or going mad.

On the morning of Job's accident, and after a long brooding silence, Doc. Wild suddenly said to Mac Falconer:

"Get the hosses, Mac. We'll go to the station."

Mac, used to the doctor's eccentricities, went to see about the horses.

Then, who should drive up but Mrs. Spencer, Job's mother-in-law, on her way from the town to the station. She stayed to have a cup of tea and give her horses a feed. She was squarefaced, and was considered a rather hard and practical woman; but she had plenty of solid flesh, good sympathetic common sense, and deep-set and humorous blue eyes. She lived in the town comfortably on the interest of some money which her husband had left in the bank, and drove an American wagonette with a good width and length of "tray" behind; and on this occasion she had a pole and two horses. In the trap was a new mattress and pillows, a generous pair of new white blankets, and boxes containing necessaries, delicacies and luxuries. All round, she was an excellent mother-inlaw for a man to have on hand at a critical time.

Speaking of the mother-in-law, I would like to put in a word for her

right here. She is universally considered a nuisance in times of peace and comfort; but when illness or serious trouble comes home, then it's "Write to mother!" "Wire for mother!" "Send some one to fetch mother!" "I'll go and bring mother!" If she is not near: "Oh, I wish mother was here!" "If mother were only near!" When she is on the spot, hear the anxious son-inlaw: "Don't you go, mother! You'll stay-won't you, mother-till we're all right? I'll get some one to look after your house, mother, while you're here." But Job Falconer was fond of his mother-in-law at all times.

Mac had some trouble in finding and catching one of the horses. Mrs. Spencer drove on, and Mac and the doctor caught up to her about a mile before she reached the homestead track, which turned in through the scrubs at the corner of the big ringbarked flat.

Doc. Wild and Mac followed the cartroad, and as they jogged along on the edge of the scrub the doctor glanced once or twice across the flat through the dead, naked branches. Mac looked that way.

The crows were hopping about the branches of a tree away out in the middle of the flat, flopping down from branch to branch to the grass, then rising hurriedly and circling. "Dead beast there!" said Mac, out of bis bushcraft.

"No, dying," said Doc. Wild, with less bush experience but more intellect.

"There's some steers of Job's out there somewhere," muttered Mac. Then, suddenly, "It ain't drought-it's the ploorer at last, or I'm blanked!"

Mac feared the advent of that cattleplague pleuro-pneumonia, which was raging on some stations, but had hitherto kept clear of Job's run.

"We'll go and see if you like," suggested Doc. Wild.

They turned out across the flat, the