Dry-Eyed And Worn, The Man Moved About, Doing All That Should Be Done,
The Bushmen Only Helping Where They
Dared; then shouldering a pick and
shovel, he went to the tattle rise beyond the slip rails, and set doggedly
To work at a little distance from two lonely graves already there.
Doggedly he worked on; but, as he worked, gradually his burden lost its
overwhelming weight, for the greater part of it had somehow skipped on to
the Dandy's shoulders - those brave, unflinching shoulders, that carried
other men's burdens so naturally and so willingly that their burdens
always seemed the Dandy's own. The Dandy may have had that power of
finding "something decent" in every one he met, but in the Dandy all men
found the help they needed most.
Quietly and unassumingly, the Dandy put all in order and then, soon after
midday, with brilliant sunshine all about us, we stood by an open grave
in the shade of the drooping glory of a crimson flowering bauhenia. Some
scenes live undimmed in our memories for a lifetime - scenes where we have
seemed onlookers rather than actors seeing every detail with minute
exactness - and that scene with its mingling of glorious beauty, human
pathos, and soft, subdued sound, will bye, I think, in the memory of most
of us for many years to come:
"In the midst of life we are in death," the Maluka read, standing among
that drooping crimson splendour and at his feet lay the open grave,
preaching silently its great lesson of Life and Death, with, beside it,
the still quiet form of the traveller whose last weary journey had ended;
around it, bareheaded and all in white, a little band of bush-folk,
silent and reverent and awed; above it, that crimson glory, and all
around and about it, soft sun-flecked bush, murmuring sounds, flooding
sunshine, and deep azure blue distances.
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