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Library / Literature & Fiction

Over the Sliprails

by Henry Lawson

Pages
about 160
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
2.9 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 1.6 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

Of the stories in this volume many have already appeared in the columns of [various periodicals], while several now appear in print for the first time.

The Shanty-Keeper's Wife A Gentleman Sharper and Steelman Sharper An Incident at Stiffner's The Hero of Redclay The Darling River A Case for the Oracle A Daughter of Maoriland New Year's Night Black Joe They Wait on the Wharf in Black Seeing the Last of You Two Boys at Grinder Brothers' The Selector's Daughter Mitchell on the “Sex” and Other “Problems” The Master's Mistake The Story of the Oracle

There were about a dozen of us jammed into the coach, on the box seat and hanging on to the roof and tailboard as best we could. We were shearers, bagmen, agents, a squatter, a cockatoo, the usual joker--and one or two professional spielers, perhaps. We were tired and stiff and nearly frozen--too cold to talk and too irritable to risk the inevitable argument which an interchange of ideas would have led up to. We had been looking forward for hours, it seemed, to the pub where we were to change horses. For the last hour or two all that our united efforts had been able to get out of the driver was a grunt to the effect that it was “'bout a couple o' miles.” Then he said, or grunted, “'Tain't fur now,” a couple of times, and refused to commit himself any further; he seemed grumpy about having committed himself that far.

He was one of those men who take everything in dead earnest; who regard any expression of ideas outside their own sphere of life as trivial, or, indeed, if addressed directly to them, as offensive; who, in fact, are darkly suspicious of anything in the shape of a joke or laugh on the part of an outsider in their own particular dust-hole.

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