slept for the most part within the same 12′ x 15′ calico walls. My first impression of him was also my final opinion. I thought he was one of the most reserved (even grumpy) individuals I had ever met. Not that I think he was selfish, but he was entirely self-absorbed, and brooding continually. On two subjects he would chat willingly—his pleasant memories of Rosedale station and his joyous days as a drover. When the talk led up to life among the cattle, overlanding, cutting out on the camp and so on, he was all right. There he had been happy in his work (he hated surveying); there he was again in a moment happy when his thoughts flew back to old times; and there, perhaps, he once more would have had happiness had he again handled his stockwhip, not as a means of ending his life, but for the purpose of sustaining and enjoying it.
Boake was brimming over with Adam Lindsay Gordon; and I have no hesitation in saying that Gordon was the father of his poetry. We used to chaffingly call him ‘the modern Gordon.’ He usually wrote his verses on any odd scraps of paper and copied them carefully into a MS. book, after which they were generally re-written and handed to me to punctuate before being sent for publication. When he wrote ‘Jack's Last Muster,’ in the metre of ‘How We Beat the Favourite,’ several remarks passed between us comparing the two poems. I laughingly said: ‘You know, if you want to be a second Gordon, you must complete the business properly, and finish up by committing suicide.’ He laughed quietly in reply, and I thought no more of it until some fifteen months afterwards, when I read in The Sydney Morning Herald first a request for information concerning Boake's whereabouts, as he had been missing some days from his home, and next, a few days later, a paragraph saying that his body had been found hanging by that stockwhip which I know he loved right well. Then I remembered my careless words.
The letters written by Boake at this time show how rapidly he was gathering and associating ideas,
