"Live forgotten and die forlorn." TENNYSON. Am I, living in or rather off the land of magnificent distances, entitled to claim as a neighbour a friend one hundred miles away? Sentiments obliterate space. With the lonesome individual who dwelt in an oven-like hut of corrugated iron on rocky, sunburnt Rattlesnake Island, and who lost the habit of living a few years ago, I was on social terms--terms of vague but cosy intimacy. On occasions of our rare meetings we found ideas in common. Peradventure similarities of environment focussed similar thoughts. Perhaps abnormal temperaments gave rise to becoming tenderness and sympathy. Whatsoever and howsoever the mutual sentiment, it is of the past. The history of the Recluse of that undesirable island, a mass of granite and thin, unkindly soil is far removed from the prosaic. His was the third life sacrificed because of the lust of man to own the unromantic spot. He came to be known as "The Recluse of Rattlesnake," but the pain of his life lies in the fact that his seclusion was not voluntary. The earlier history of the "Recluse" embodies nothing very extraordinary. Men have fallen in love as impetuously as he. The prologue of the little drama in which he played the leading part was neither new nor strange. The originality came after, and then only was it understood how completely the divine passion had shattered his soul. This, then, is the record of a part of his life--its dominating theme--its dramatic and pathetic ending. A fine young fellow they were wont to call him--blue-eyed, fair-haired, sharp and shrewd and up to all the moves as becomes a man alert and successful in business. Truly a universal favourite, for he was good-humoured and amiable, full of wit and smart sayings. They say, too, that she who had pledged her troth to him was just as fine a girl as he was man. There came news to him of the death of a relative in Old England, with a summons thither to take his share of a fortune. He tarried no long time, for had he not left his heart behind him? But--and so the story goes, whether true to the letter I do not vouch--when he landed in Australia once again it was to learn that he had been slighted. His love affair hopelessly damned, he at once began to drift. The drift ended pitiably after half a lifetime--to him a lifetime and a half. "God! we living ones--what of our tears When a single day seems as a thousand years?"