"O! Idon'tloveyoudear! Idon'tloveyounow! Andyouwon'tletmego!"
"There, then, sweetest. Kiss me now."
"Yes, Archie, my precious love."
There was more of it, but it fell unheeded on my ears. I paused, and thought vehemently. The white horse in the buggy, and Archie M, Superintendent of the E Sunday School, with his girl! No wonder I had met so many people, and all going in the same direction. They were the sediment of the pic-nic party, returning from their orgy. Here was the lost chord. The whole truth flashed upon me. Now, the solid earth wheeled right-about face; east became west, and west, east. I recognised the Victorian river road, because I saw things as they were, not as I had imagined them—though, to be sure, I still saw them as through a glass, darkly.
My worldly-wise friend, let us draw a lesson from this. If you have never been bushed, your immunity is by no means an evidence of your cleverness, but rather a proof that your experience of the wilderness is small. If you have been bushed, you will remember how, as you struck a place you knew, error was suddenly superseded by a flash of truth; this without volition of judgment on your part, and entirely by force of a presentation of fact which your own personal error—however sincere and stubborn—had never affected, and which you were no longer in a position to repudiate. It has always been my strong impression that this is very much like the revelation which follows death—that is, if conscious individuality be preserved; a thing by no means certain, and, to my mind, not manifestly desirable.
But if, after closing our eyes in death, we open them on an appreciable hereafter—whether one imperceptible fraction of a second, or a million centuries, may intervene—it is as certain as anything can be, that, to most of us, the true east will prove to be our former south-west, and the true west, our former north-east. How many so-called virtues will vanish then; and how many objectionable fads will shine as with the glory of God? This much is certain: that all private wealth, beyond simplest maintenance, will seem as the spoils of the street gutter; that fashion will be as the gilded fly which infests carrion; that "sport" will seem folly that would disgrace an idiot; that military force, embattled on behalf of Royalty, or Aristocracy, or Capital, will seem like Well, what will it seem like? Already, looking, or rather, squinting, back along our rugged and random track, we perceive that the bloodiest battle ever fought by our badly-bushed forefathers on British soil—and that only one of a series of twelve, in which fathers, sons, brothers, kinsmen, and fellow-slaves exterminated each other—was fought to decide whether a drivelling imbecile or a shameless lecher should bring our said forefathers under the operation of I Samuel, viii. (Read the chapter for yourself, my friend, if you know where you can borrow a Bible; then turn back these pages, and take a second glance at the paragraphs you skimmed over in that unteachable spirit which is the primary element of ignorance—namely, those reflections on the unfettered alternative, followed by rigorous destiny.)
Much more prosaic were my cogitations as I followed the buggy,
