Then away the birds rose. And he saw a seedy, elderly man in black, in a long-skirted black coat like a cast-off Methodist parson, spying at him furtively from behind the bushes on the other side of the creek. This parson-looking weed carried a gun, and was shooting heaven knows what. He thought Richard Lovat a very suspicious bird, and Richard Lovat thought him the last word in human weeds. So our young man turned away to the sands, where the afternoon sea had gone a very dark blue. Another human weed with a very thin neck and a very red face sat on the sand ridge up which the foam-edge swished, his feet wide apart, facing the ocean, and tending a line which he had in some way managed to cast out into the low surf. An urchin, barefoot, was pottering round in silence, like a sandpiper. The elderly one made unintelligible noises as Somers approached. The latter realised it meant he was not to catch with his foot the line, which reached out behind the thin fisherman, covered with sand. So he stepped over it. The brown, barefoot urchin pottered round unheeding. He did not even look up when the elder made more unintelligible sounds to him. “My father is a fisherman, Oh a fisherman! Yes a fisherman! He catches all the fish-e-can.” Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays were the library nights. When you had crossed the iron foot-bridge over the railway, you came to a big wooden building with a corrugated iron roof, standing forlorn at an unmade corner, like the fag-end of the village. But the village was an agglomeration of fag ends. This building might have been a temporary chapel, as you came at it from the back. But in front it was labelled “Pictoria,” so it was the cinema. But there was also a black board with gilt letters, like a chapel notice-board, which said “School of Arts Library.” And the Pictoria had a sort of little wing, all wood, like a little school-room. And in one section of this wing was the School of Arts Library, which the Somers had joined. Four rows of novels: the top now a hundred or more thin books, all Nat Gould or Zane Grey. The young women came for Zane Grey. “Oh, _The Maid of Mudgee_ is a lovely thing, lovely”--a young woman was pronouncing from the top of the broken chair which served as stool to give access to this top row. “Y’aven’ got a new Zaine Greye, have yer?” She spoke in these tones of unmitigated intimacy to the white moustached librarian. One would have thought he was her dear old dad. Then came a young railway man who had heard there was a new Nat Gould. “But,” said Somers, as he and Harriet went off with a Mary E. Mann and a George A. Birmingham, “I don’t wonder they can’t read English books, or only want Nat Gould. All the scruples and the emotions and the regrets in English novels do seem waste of time out here.” “I suppose,” said Harriet, “if you don’t have any inside life of your own it must seem a waste of time. But look at it--look!”