long journey home, awake and up all night with grief and sympathy.
Some of the men had ridden till daylight; the women, worn out and
exhausted, had perhaps an hour or so of sleep towards morning--yet
they were all there, except Ben Duggan, on the long, hot, dusty road
back, heads swimming in the heat and faces and hands coated with
perspiration and dust--and never, never once breaking out of a slow
walk. It would have been the same had it been pouring with rain. I
have seen funerals trotting fast in London, and they are trotting more
and more in Australian cities, with only "the time" for an excuse.
But in the bush I have never seen a funeral faster than the slowest of
walks no matter who or what might wait, or what might happen or be
lost. They stood by their dead well out there. Maybe some of the
big, simple souls had a sort of vague idea that the departed would
stand a better show if accompanied as far as possible by the greatest
possible number of friends--"barrackers," so to speak.

Here all the shallow and involuntary sham of it, the shirking of a
dull and irksome duty--a bore, though the route be only a mile or so.
The satisfied undertaker, and the hard-up professional mutes and
mourners in seedy, mouldy, greeny-black, and with boozers' faces and
noses and a constant craving for beer to help them bear up against
their grief and keep their mock solemn faces. Out there you were
carried to the hearse or trap from your home, and from the hearse or
trap to your grave--and with infinite carefulness and gentleness--on
the shoulders of men, and of men who had known and loved you.

There had been wonder and waiting in the morning for Ben Duggan; and
the women especially, on the way home, when free from restraint, were
greatly indignant against him. To think that he should break out and
go on the drunk on this day of all days, when his oldest mate and