There was a roly-poly pudding to make for Dan, baked custard for the Dandy, jam-tarts for Happy Dick, cake and biscuits for all comers, in addition to a dinner and supper waiting to be cooked for fifteen black boys, several lubras, and half-a-dozen hungry white folk.  Cheon had his own peculiar form of welcome for his many favourites, regaling each one of them with delicacies to their particular liking, each and every time they came in.

Happy Dick, also, had his own peculiar form of welcome.  “Good-day!  Real glad to see you!” was his usual greeting.  Sure of his own welcome wherever he went, he never waited to hear it, but hastened to welcome all men into his fellowship.  “Real glad to see you,” he would say, with a ready smile of comradeship; and it always seemed as though he had added:  “I hope you’ll make yourself at home while with me.”  In some mysterious way, Happy Dick was at all times the host giving liberally of the best he had to his fellow-men.

He was one of the pillars of the Line Party.  “Born in it, I think,” he would say.  “Don’t quite remember,” adding with his ever-varying smile, “Remember when it was born, anyway.”

When the “Overland Telegraph” was built across the Australian continent from sea to sea, a clear broad avenue two chains wide, was cut for it through bush and scrub and dense forests, along the backbone of Australia, and in this avenue the line party was “born” and bred—­a party of axemen and mechanics under the orders of a foreman, whose duty it is to keep the “Territory section” of the line in repair, and this avenue free from the scrub and timber that spring up unceasingly in its length.

In unbroken continuity this great avenue runs for hundreds upon hundreds of miles, carpeted with feathery grasses and shooting scrubs, and walled in on either side with dense, towering forest or lighter and more scattered timber.  On and on it stretches in utter loneliness, zigzagging from horizon to horizons beyond, and guarding those two sensitive wires at its centre, as they run along their single line of slender galvanised posts, from the great bush that never ceases in its efforts to close in on them and engulf them.  A great broad highway, waiting in its loneliness for the generations to come, with somewhere in its length the line party camp, and here and there within its thousand miles, a chance traveller or two here and there a horseman with pack-horse ambling and grazing along behind him; here and there a trudging speck with a swag across its shoulders, and between them one, two, or three hundred miles of solitude, here and there a horseman riding, and here and there a footman trudging on, each unconscious of the others.