remain there for an hour. Waldo directed him to the farmhouse, but the
stranger declined. He would merely rest under the trees and give his horse
water. He removed the saddle and Waldo led the animal away to the dam.
When he returned, the stranger had settled himself under the trees, with
his back against the saddle. The boy offered him of the cakes. He
declined, but took a draught from the jug; and Waldo lay down not far off
and fell to work again. It mattered nothing if cold eyes saw it. It was
not his sheep-shearing machine. With material loves, as with human, we go
mad once, love out, and have done. We never get up the true enthusiasm a
second time. This was but a thing he had made, laboured over, loved and
liked--nothing more--not his machine.

The stranger forced himself lower down in the saddle and yawned. It was a
drowsy afternoon, and he objected to travel in these out-of-the-world
parts. He liked better civilised life, where at every hour of the day a
man may look for his glass of wine, and his easy-chair, and paper; where at
night he may lock himself into his room with his books and a bottle of
brandy, and taste joys mental and physical. The world said of him--the
all-knowing, omnipotent world, whom no locks can bar, who has the cat-like
propensity of seeing best in the dark--the world said, that better than the
books he loved the brandy, and better than books or brandy that which it
had been better had he loved less. But for the world he cared nothing; he
smiled blandly in its teeth. All life is a dream; if wine and philosophy
and women keep the dream from becoming a nightmare, so much the better. It
is all they are fit for, all they can be used for. There was another side
to his life and thought; but of that the world knew nothing, and said
nothing, as the way of the wise world is.

The stranger looked from beneath his sleepy eyelids at the brown earth that
stretched away, beautiful in spite of itself in that June sunshine; looked