Letters And Packets Are Weighed, Stamped, And
Repaired - Often Readdressed Where Addresses For South Are Blurred; Stamps
Are Supplied For
Outgoing mail-matter and telegrams; postage-dues and
duties paid on all incoming letters and parcels - in fact, nothing is
Left
for us to do but to pay expenses incurred when the account is rendered at
the end of each six months. No doubt our Department would also read and
write our letters for us if we wished it, as it does, at times, for the
untutored.
Wherever it can, it helps the bush-folk, and they, in turn, doing what
they can to help it in self-imposed task, are ever ready to "find room
somewhere" in pack-bags or swags for mail-matter in need of transport
assistance - the general opinion being that "a man that refuses to carry a
man's mail to him 'ud be mean enough to steal bread out of a bird-cage."
In all the knowledge of the bush-folk, only one man had proved "mean
enough." A man who shall be known as the Outsider, for he was one of a
type who could never be one of the bush-folk, even though he lived
out-bush for generations: a man so walled in with self and selfishness
that, look where he would, he could see nothing grander or better than
his own miserable self, and knowing all a mail means to a bushman, he
could refuse to carry a neighbour's mail - even though his road lay
through that neighbour's run - because he had had a difference with him.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 259 of 304
Words from 71865 to 72130
of 84691
