Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/94

 near me,' he said, 'but I can't make out their faces. I can just make out the pavement and the houses close at hand, and all the rest is a sort of white blur.' He looked up: 'That ceiling is a kind of white, ain't it? And this,' tapping the wall and putting his nose close to it, 'is a sort of green, ain't it?' The ceiling might have been whiter. The prevalent tints of the wall-paper had originally been blue and red, but it was mostly green enough now―a damp, rotten green; but I was ready to swear that the ceiling was snow and that the walls were as green as grass if it would have made him feel more comfortable. His sight began to get bad about six years before, he said; he didn't take much notice of it at first, and then he saw a quack, who made his eyes worse. He had already the manner of the blind―the touch in every finger, and even the gentleness in his speech. He had a boy down with him―a 'sorter cousin of his,' and the boy saw him round. 'I'll have to be sending that youngster back,' he said, 'I think I'll send him home next week. He'll be picking up and learning too much down here.'

I happened to know the district he came from, and we would sit by the hour and talk about the country, and chaps by the name of this and chaps by the name of that―drovers mostly, whom we had met or had heard of. He asked me if I'd ever heard of a chap by the name of Joe Scott―a big sandy-complexioned chap, who might be droving; he was his brother, or, at least, his half-brother, but he hadn't heard of him for years; he'd last heard of him at Blackall, in Queensland; he might have gone overland to Western Australia with Tyson's cattle to the new country.