Selected Stories
Page 61
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.
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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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