herself, fitted in with me admirably, and what I owed to her in the way of books for about 10 years cannot be put on paper, and in my journalistic work she delighted.  Other friendships, both literary and personal, were formed in the decade which started the elementary schools and the University.  The first Hughes professor of English literature was the Rev. John Davidson of Chalmers Church, married to Harriet, daughter of Hugh Miller, the self-taught ecologist and journalist.

On the day of the inauguration of the University the Davidsons asked Miss Clark and myself to go with them, and there I met Miss Catherine Mackay (now Mrs. Fred Martin), from Mount Gambier.  I at first thought her the daughter of a wealthy squatter of the south-east, but when I found she was a litterateur trying to make a living by her pen, bringing out a serial tale, “Bohemian Born,” and writing occasional articles, I drew to her at once.  So long as the serial tale lasted she could hold her own; but no one can make a living at occasional articles in Australia, and she became a clerk in the Education Office, but still cultivated literature in her leisure hours.  She has published two novels—­“An Australian Girl” and “The Silent Sea”—­which so good a judge as F. W. H. Myers pronounced to be on the highest level ever reached in Australian fiction, and in that opinion I heartily concur.  I take a very humble second place beside her, but in the seventies I wrote “Gathered In,” which I believed to be my best novel—­the novel into which I put the most of myself, the only novel I wrote with tears of emotion.  Mrs. Oliphant says that Jeanie Deans is more real to her than any of her own creations, and probably it is the same with me, except for this one work.  From an old diary of the fifties, when my first novels were written I take this extract:—­“Queer that I who have such a distinct idea of what I approve in flesh-and-blood men should only achieve in pen and ink a set of impossible people, with an absurd muddy expression of gloom, instead of sublime depth as I intended.  Men novelists’ women are as impossible creations as my men, but there is this difference—­their productions satisfy them, mine fail to satisfy me.”  But in my last novel—­still unpublished—­felt quite satisfied that I had at last achieved my ambition to create characters that stood out distinctly and real.  Miss Clark took the Ms. to England, but she could not get either Bentley or Smith Elder, or Macmillan to accept it.

On the death of Mr. John Howard Clark, which took place at this time, Mr. John Harvey Finlayson was left to edit The Register, and I became a regular outside contributor to The Register and The Observer.  He desired to keep up and if possible improve the literary side of the papers, and felt that the loss of Mr. Clark might be in some measure made up if I give myself wholeheartedly to the work.  Leading articles were to be written at my own risk.  If they suited the policy of the paper they would be