that it occupied a commanding position such as became the local post-office—for Marmot had the distinction of being postmaster as well as monopolist storekeeper of the district. One advantage of the site was that from the verandah which graced the front of the building a view could be obtained from end to end of the township to the east, and away along the road to the west—the road which went, viâ Taylor's Flat, over Boulder Creek, away to the great expanse of the West.

The store was a long, weather-board structure of four walls, and a sloping roof of corrugated iron, unadorned save by an array of cylindrical tanks—also of corrugated iron—at each corner, for being on the top of a rise, there was no chance of possessing a well or a waterhole; and upon the contents of the tanks, saved from the rain, the residents depended for their water supply. The interior of the structure was as simple as the exterior. A passage-way ran down the centre between two counters, which extended the entire length of the building, and upon which Marmot displayed some of the varied assortment of articles he stocked for the benefit of his customers. Their range being somewhat wide, the counters could not hold all the samples, and upon shelves running along the walls behind the counters, upon the floor on the passage in front of the counters, round the doorway and out on the verandah, as well as from the cross-beams of the roof, other articles were displayed. A man might not be able to buy anything from a tin-tack to a sheet anchor on demand, but Marmot was quite prepared to furnish him with tin ware and lamp-glasses, saddlery or axe heads and handles, wool bales, sacking, pipes and tobacco, wax vestas and dress materials, flannel, hardware and soft goods, canned provisions and patent medicines, cotton for tents, boots, hats, flour, galvanized iron for roofs and water-tanks, barbed wire, kerosene oil, "reach-me-downers" or ready-made tweed suits, moleskins and Crimean shirts, sheath knives, cartridges and firearms, fire and life assurance proposals, postal notes, postage stamps, and money orders, as well as a few other minor details which might from time to time be called for. Behind the main building was another, which served as a store for the produce obtained either by purchase or in payment for outstanding "tallies" of goods supplied, a small annexe to the main building giving sleeping accommodation to Marmot, who, being a man of frugal habits and simple mind, "ran the store on his own," as they said in Birralong. His customers, as a general rule, were neither too proud nor too busy to mind lending him a hand at making up their orders, for when a man went to the store at Birralong, he went in a spring-cart or dray, if he were going to buy, and as often as not accompanied by any female attachment he might have about his selection, so that he was never pushed for time.

Facing the store, and along the side of the road, a row of posts fitted with ring-bolts stood for the convenience of customers who came in riding or driving, and chose to hitch up their horses. A verandah, ten feet wide, and with a roof resting on square, hard-wood posts, ornamented the front of the building, and formed, to the majority of the Birralong folk, its chief attraction—for it was here that men gathered to smoke a friendly pipe with one another, and discuss such items of news as are likely to be met with in a bush township. As a general rule, these related to the domestic and private affairs of neighbours, and it was said that if any one had a doubt as to the course which events and circumstances were taking with him, he had only to ascertain what was said on Marmot's verandah; every one's business was known better there than to the persons whom it mostly concerned.

The number of houses which made up the township was not large. A hundred yards back from the roadway the local saw-mill made the air melodious, all the working hours of the day, with the ringing song and whirr of the buzz-saws—a pleasant sound to listen to from the cool shade of a verandah on the hot, drowsy days of summer, when the clear, dry air was redolent with the scent from the neighbouring gums. Farther down the township stood the local smithy, where, bush horses rarely being shod, the work of the smith was combined with that of wheelwright and the making of galvanized iron water-tanks. An occasional job of repairing some farming implement necessitated the blowing up of the forge and the swinging of the anvil hammers, the sounds of which, mingling with those of the buzz-saws, would have led a chance visitor to regard Birralong as a thriving, busy centre.

Beyond the smithy were the school-house and the local constable's cottage, a few more cottages occupied by the schoolmaster, the smith, the saw-miller, and some unofficial residents, and, at the end of all, the Carrier's Rest, the township hotel. The roadway through the town was very dusty, and the dust, in the long, hot, dry seasons, lay upon the iron roofs of the houses—tin, it was locally called—and clung to the verandah posts and walls. A passing traveller on horseback, or in a dray, raised clouds of it, which drifted over everything and covered everything with a light film, but yet did not drive the inhabitants into the Carrier's Rest, for the Birralong people were sober, as they usually are in bush townships—sober, that is, as things are understood in the Southern Land of sunshine and freedom. Occasionally a man would come down the road who perhaps had not seen so much civilization for years before; who had, perhaps for years, been away in some outlying portion of the outlying West, boundary riding round a paddock or stock riding on a station; or, perchance, fossicking up and down the gullies of broken country under the mistaken idea that the specks and grains of gold he found, and which just kept him in "tucker," would lead him some day to a mighty reef which would make him a millionaire in a night; but who, in all those years, had drunk nothing but tea or water, and eaten nothing but beef and damper, living a glorious, free, untrammelled life, with the scent of the eucalypt ever in his nostrils and the pure, clear air of the bush ever in his lungs. And such a man, entering upon a new world, as it were, in his return to civilization, would greet that civilization—with a nip.

In an hour he would be "on a bender;" in three he would be "on the bust;" in six the "town would be red;" and soon afterwards the man himself would be stretched out across the door of the Carrier's Rest, senseless, helpless, "blind." Any one entering or leaving the bar stepped over him as he lay, so as not to disturb him while he was "sleeping it off" in the cool; and possibly some looked down on him with pity, and some with contempt, while yet others were moved to envy and exultant admiration. But generally the township went to Marmot's rather than to the Rest—generally.

There were occasions—such as when a Queensland horse won the Melbourne Cup, or when a drought broke up, or produce values took a leap, or the resident constable was transferred—when the township, speaking figuratively, migrated from one end of the town to the other, and Marmot's was deserted for the good of the Rest. There was a breezy freshness in the neighbourhood then, a wave of primitive goodfellowship, as it were, with a period of hazy indistinctness separating it from the time when the rising sun brought with it a succeeding wave of virtuous antagonism and a distressing dryness of the throat.

But such occasions were rare—too rare, some thought—and, as a general thing, Birralong had a reputation for sobriety, and maintained it with dignity.

A few days before, there had arrived at the Carrier's Rest a party of three men, who