On the morrow, the first time we were alone, Horace seized the opportunity of holding forth on his woes.  It was no use, he was choke full of Possum Gully:  he would stick to it for another year, and then he would chuck it, even if he had to go on the wallaby.  He wasn’t going to be slaving for ever for the boss to swallow the proceeds, and there was nothing to be made out of dairying.  When it wasn’t drought it was floods and caterpillars and grasshoppers.

Among my brothers and sisters I quickly revived to a certain extent, and mother asserted her opinion that I had not been ill at all, but had made up my mind to torment her; had not taken sufficient exercise, and might have had a little derangement of the system but nothing more.  It was proposed that I should return to Barney’s Gap.  I demurred, and was anathematized as ungrateful and altogether corrupt, that I would not go back to M’Swat, who was so good as to lend my father money out of pure friendship; but for once in my life I could not be made submit by either coercion or persuasion.  Grannie offered to take one of us to Caddagat; mother preferred that Gertie should go.  So we sent the pretty girl to dwell among her kindred in a land of comfort and pleasure.

I remained at Possum Gully to tread the same old life in its tame narrow path, with its never-ending dawn-till-daylight round of tasks; with, as its entertainments, an occasional picnic or funeral or a day in town, when, should it happen to be Sunday, I never fail to patronize one of the cathedrals.  I love the organ music, and the hush which pervades the building; and there is much entertainment in various ways if one goes early and watches the well-dressed congregation filing in.  The costumes and the women are pretty, and, in his own particular line, the ability of the verger is something at which to marvel.  Regular attendants, of course, pay for and have reserved their seats, but it is in classing the visitors that the verger displays his talent.  He can cull the commoners from the parvenu aristocrats, and put them in their respective places as skilfully as an expert horse-dealer can draft his stock at a sale.  Then, when the audience is complete, in the middle and front of the edifice are to be found they of the white hands and fine jewels; and in the topmost seat of the synagogue, praying audibly, is one who has made all his wealth by devouring widows’ houses; while pushed away to the corners and wings are they who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow; and those who cannot afford good linen are too proud to be seen here at all.

“The choir sings and the organ rings,” the uninteresting prayers are rattled off ("O come, let us worship, and fall down:  and kneel before the Lord, our Maker"); a sermon, mostly of the debts of the concern, of the customs of the ancients, or of the rites and ceremonies of up-to-date churchism, is delivered, and the play is done, and as I leave the building a great hunger for a little Christianity fills my heart.