big weather-board Salvation Army barracks with two other "lassies,"
who did washing and sewing and nursing, and went shabby, and half
starved themselves, and were baked in the heat, like scores of women
in the bush, and even as hundreds of women, suffering from religious
mania, slave and stint in city slums, and neglect their homes,
husbands and children--for the glory of Booth.

The Pretty Girl was referred to as Sister Hannah by the Army people,
and came somehow to be known by sinners as "Miss Captain." I don't
know whether that was her real name or what rank she held in the Army,
if indeed she held any.

She sold _War Crys_, and the circulation doubled in a day.
One-eyed Bogan, being bailed up unexpectedly, gave her "half a
caser" for a _Cry_, and ran away without the paper or the
change. Jack Mitchell bought a _Cry_ for the first time in his
life, and read it. He said he found some of the articles intensely
realistic, and many of the statements were very interesting. He said
he read one or two things in the _Cry_ that he didn't know
before. Tom Hall, taken unawares, bought three _Crys_ from the
Pretty Girl, and blushed to find it fame.

Little Billy Woods, the Labourers' Union secretary--who had a poetic
temperament and more than the average bushman's reverence for higher
things--Little Billy Woods told me in a burst of confidence that he
generally had two feelings, one after the other, after encountering
that girl. One was that unfathomable far-away feeling of loneliness
and longing, that comes at odd times to the best of married men, with
the best of wives and children--as Billy had. The other feeling,
which came later on, and was a reaction in fact, was the feeling of a