‘I waited, of course,’ Sir George consented, ever gallant, ’and the son presented himself, daubed over with dirt of divers colours, and began to hop about.  He was well built, he danced cleverly, he cackled in his finery, and his mother was hugely proud of him.  She might have been an English duchess, introducing a pretty daughter to a first ball.  It was seeing the parent in the child, the most marked form of self-flattery.  Actually, tears of joy ran down those black, wizened cheeks.  I wouldn’t have had it otherwise, and I was glad I stayed for the young buck.’

Wherever Sir George Grey went in Australia, he found the natives living from hand to mouth, on roots and the reward of the chase.  They were equally primitive, in a system of punishment, which stood an offender up as a mark for spears.  But they were sportsmen, for it was prescribed that the quarry must only be chastened in the legs.  The tribes also reached out to civilisation, in that each had its ground marked off, with the accuracy of a European estate.

’I believe’—­Sir George carried this subject wider—­’that the cardinal trouble in the settlement of new countries, has lain in the desire of the white man to possess the lands of the black man.  Perhaps it has been inevitable, but the thing should be done on a proper method, and that has not always obtained.’

Sir John Franklin, at Van Diemen’s Land, was a brother Australian Governor to Sir George Grey, but they never met.  ’I had correspondence with him,’ Sir George observed, ’and from all I heard he was a most interesting personality.  Subsequently, I did meet Lady Franklin, who had much character, allied to womanly gentleness.  Everybody admired her laving persistence to unravel the fate which had overtaken her husband in the Arctic regions.’

It was almost a discovery to Sir George, with his wide knowledge of Australasia, that he had never set foot in Tasmania.  He passed it variously, on board ship, yet had not been ashore.  How was that?  ‘Maybe,’ he replied, ’because all my life I made it a rule, not to let anything turn me aside from what I had immediately in hand.  If you set out for a place, with some definite object in view, your road should be the most direct one.  Don’t branch off, because there is something elsewhere which might gratify your curiosity.’

Sir George disciplined the hours, holding himself accountable for them to his fellow-men and to the Great Accountant.

VIII PICTURES IN BLACK AND WHITE

There had been a reception in London, by Gladstone, following the usual dinners which ministers of the Queen give in honour of her birthday.

To Sir George Grey, who was in the splendid crowd, came the wife of an eminent member of the Government, carrying to an old friend a woman’s eager news of her own dinner.  ‘Oh,’ she whispered in that still small voice which rises a clarion note above a general buzz, ’oh, everything went off admirably, and Bob’s delighted.  But the soup was just a little cold.’