the bad prospect ahead if the drought continued.

Many an extra line of care furrowed the brows of the disheartened bushmen
then. Not only was their living taken from them by the drought, but there
is nothing more heartrending than to have poor beasts, especially dairy
cows, so familiar, valued, and loved, pleading for food day after day in
their piteous dumb way when one has it not to give.

We shore ourselves of all but the bare necessaries of life, but even they
for a family of ten are considerable, and it was a mighty tussle to get
both ends within cover of meeting. We felt the full force of the heavy
hand of poverty--the most stinging kind of poverty too, that which still
holds up its head and keeps an outside appearance. Far more grinding is
this than the poverty inherited from generations which is not ashamed of
itself, and has not as an accompaniment the wounded pride and humiliation
which attacked us.

Some there are who argue that poverty does not mean unhappiness. Let
those try what it is to be destitute of even one companionable friend,
what it means to be forced to exist in an alien sphere of society, what
it is like to be unable to afford a stamp to write to a friend; let them
long as passionately as I have longed for reading and music, and be
unable to procure it because of poverty; let poverty force them into
doing work against which every fibre of their being revolts, as it has
forced me, and then see if their lives will be happy.

My school life had been dull and uneventful. The one incident of any note
had been the day that the teacher, better known as old Harris, "stood up"
to the inspector. The latter was a precise, collar-and-cuffs sort of
little man. He gave one the impression of having all his ideas on the