Selected Stories

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Selected Stories Page 61

by Henry Lawson


  The father lay silent and troubled for a few moments.

  “Why do you ask me that question to-night, sonny? I thought you’d done with all that. You were always asking me that question when you were a child. You’re getting too old for those foolish fancies now. Why have you always had such a horror of growing up to be a man?”

  “I don’t know, father. I always had funny thoughts—you know, father. I used to think that I’d been a child once before, and grew up to be a man, and grew old and died.”

  “You’re not well to-night, sonny—that’s what’s the matter. You’re queer, sonny; it’s a touch of sun—that’s all. Now, try to go to sleep. You’ll grow up to be a man; in spite of laying awake worrying about it. If you do, you’ll be a man all the sooner.”

  Suddenly the mother called out:

  “Can’t you be quiet? What do you mean by talking at this hour of the night? Am I never to get another wink of sleep? Shut those doors, Nils, for God’s sake, if you don’t want to drive me mad—and make that boy hold his tongue!”

  The father closed the doors.

  “Better try to go to sleep now, sonny,” he whispered, as he lay down again.

  The father waited for some time, then, moving very softly, he lit the candle at the kitchen fire, put it where it shouldn’t light the boy’s face, and watched him. And the child knew he was watching him, and pretended to sleep, and, so pretending, he slept. And the old year died as many old years had died.

  The father was up at about four o’clock—he worked at his trade in a farming town about five miles away, and was struggling to make a farm and a home between jobs. He cooked bacon for breakfast, washed up the dishes and tidied the kitchen, gave the boys some bread and bacon fat, of which they were very fond, and told the eldest to take a cup of tea and some bread and milk to his mother and the baby when they woke.

  The boy milked the three cows, set the milk, and heard his mother calling:

  “Nils! Nils!”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “Why didn’t you answer when I called you? I’ve been calling here for the last three hours. Is your father gone out?”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “Thank God! It’s a relief to be rid of his everlasting growling. Bring me a cup of tea and the Australian Journal, and take this child out and dress her; she should have been up hours ago.”

  And so the New Year began.

  Index

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

  A Bush Dance 426

  A Camp-fire Yarn 27

  A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father 558

  A Day on a Selection 36

  A Double Buggy at Lahey’s Creek 353

  A Gentleman Sharper and Steelman Sharper 209

  A Vision of Sandy Blight 168

  A Visit of Condolence 100

  A Wild Irishman 396

  An Incident at Stiffner’s 217

  An Old Mate of Your Father’s 1

  An Oversight of Steelman’s 193

  Another of Mitchell’s Plans for the Future 65

  Arvie Aspinall’s Alarm Clock 51

  Bill, The Ventriloquial Rooster 184

  Bogg of Geebung 141

  Brighten’s Sister-in-Law 302

  “Buckolts’ Gate” 455

  Going Blind 45

  His Colonial Oath 98

  His Country-After All 31

  His Father’s Mate 70

  How Steelman Told His Story 198

  Hungerford 23

  In A Dry Season 62

  In A Wet Season 105

  Joe Wilson’s Courtship 272

  Johnson’s Jag 550

  Jones’s Alley 129

  “Lord Douglas” 523

  Mitchell: a Character Sketch 112

  Mr Smellingscheck 189

  On the Edge of a Plain 60

  Our Pipes 123

  “Rats” 109

  Send Round the Hat 485

  Settling on the Land 6

  “Shall We Gather at the River?” 472

  Shooting the Moon 67

  “Some Day” 81

  Steelman’s Pupil 93

  Stiffner and Jim (Thirdly, Bill) 12

  Telling Mrs Baker 429

  That Pretty Girl in the Army 504

  That There Dog O’ Mine 42

  The Babies in the Bush 405

  The Blindness of One-eyed Bogan 535

  The Bush Undertaker 115

  The Darling River 241

  The Drover’s Wife 84

  The Geological Spieler 144

  The Golden Graveyard 374

  566

  The Hero of Redclay 224

  The Iron-Bark Chip 174

  The Little World Left Behind 444

  The Loaded Dog 388

  The Mystery of Dave Regan 180

  The Romance of the Swag 449

  The Selector’s Daughter 252

  The Shanty-keeper’s Wife 202

  The Shearer’s Dream 545

  The Songs They Used to Sing 153

  The Story of the Oracle 264

  The Union Buries Its Dead 55

  Two Dogs and a Fence 127

  “Water Them Geraniums” 324

  When the Sun Went Down 20

  About the author

  Henry Lawson was born in Grenfell, NSW, in 1867. At the age of fourteen he became totally deaf, an affliction which many have suggested rendered his world all the more vivid and subsequently enlivened his later writing. After a stint of coach painting, he edited a periodical, The Republican, and began writing verse and short stories. His first work of short fiction appeared in the Bulletin in 1888. He travelled to New Zealand and around Australia and in 1896 married Bertha Bredt. He continued to travel and to write short fiction and poetry throughout his life and published numerous collections of both even as his marriage collapsed and he descended into poverty and mental illness. He spent several productive sojourns in the country but died in 1922, leaving his wife and two children.

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  Also by Henry Lawson

  Short Stories in Prose and Verse (1894)

  While the Billy Boils (1896)

  In the Days When the World Was Wide (1896)

  On the Track (1900)

  Over the Sliprails (1900)

  Verses Popular and Humorous (1900)

  Joe Wilson and His Mates (1901)

  The Country I Come From (1901)

  Children of the Bush (1902)

  When I Was King (1905)

  The Romance of the Swag (1907)

  The Rising of the Court (1910)

  The Skyline Riders (1910)

  Mateship (1911)

  Triangles of Life (1913)

  For Australia (1913)

  My Army, O My Army (1915)

  Song of the Dardanelles (1916)

  Selected Poems (1918)

  Copyright

  Augus&Robertson

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia

  Print edition published in 2001

  This edition published in 2010

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  www.harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © Texts restored from original manuscripts and texts unpublished

  before 1972: Angus & Robertson Publishers

  This selection copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers Australia 2001

  The right of Henry Lawson to be identified as the author of this

  work has been asserted under the Copyright Amendment

  (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  2 Bloor Street East, 20th floor, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada

  10 East 53rd Street, New York NY 10022, USA

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Lawson, Henry, 1867-1922.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Selected stories.

  ISBN 978 0 207 19708 6 (pbk).

  ISBN 978 0 730 40065 3 (Epub).

  1. Frontier and pioneers life – Australia – Fiction.

  2. Australia – Social life and customs – Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.2

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