he was a man's son, full of the vim of living, strong with the lust of
life. The sweat ran down his face, dirty with the dust kicked up by the
cattle in the stockyard. His clothes were not guiltless of mire, for he had
been knocked over more than once that morning, and there was an edge upon
his voice as he rapped out his orders to the stockmen who were working with
him. He did not look in the least degree pretty, and there was not enough
poetry about him just then to make an obituary jingle on a tombstone. I
little thought that day that a time would come when he would prove the
glory of his Australian breeding in the teeth of an enemy's guns on African
soil.

I saw him again--under silk this time--as a gentleman rider. He was the
same quiet, cool little fellow, grey-eyed, steel-lipped, stout-hearted,
with "hands" that Archer might have envied. He rode at his fences that day
as the Australian amateurs can ride, with a rip and a rattle, with the
long, loose leg, the hands well down, and head up and back, and "Over or
Through" was his motto. I did not know him to speak to in those old days.
We were to shake hands under peculiar circumstances away in a foreign land,
in a foreign hospital, both of us prisoners of war, both of us wounded.
That was where and how I spoke to little Dowling, lieutenant in the First
Australian Horse, as game a sample of humanity as ever threw leg over
saddle or loosed a rifle at a foe. He came to my bedside the morning after
I entered the hospital, and standing over me with a green shade over one
eye, and one hand in a sling, said laconically:

"Australian ain't you?"

"Yes, by gad, and I know you." He reached out his left hand, and placed it
in mine.