"A new teacher had been appointed to the half-time school, which was all the Government could manage for so unimportant and dreary a place. His name was Eagar, and his friends said that he suited the sound of it. Alert of eye, energetic in movement, it may be safely said that in his own person was stored up more motive power than was owned conjointly by the two hundred odd souls who comprised the population of Ninety Mile. "There was room in Ninety Mile for an eager person. In fact, a dozen such would have sufficed long since to have carried it clean off its feet, and to have deposited it in some more likely position. But everyone touched in any way with the fire of life had long since departed from the place, and gone to set their homesteads and stackyards, their shops or other businesses elsewhere. So there were only a few limpets, who clung tenaciously to their spot, assured that all other spots on the globe were already occupied; and a few absolutely resigned persons. There is no clog on the wheel of progress that may be so absolutely depended upon to fulfil its purpose as resignation. "It was to this manner of a village that Eagar came. In a month he had established a cricket club; in two months a football club. The establishment of neither was attended with any great difficulty. In three months he had turned his own box of books into a free circulating library, and many of his leisure hours went in trying to induce the boys to borrow from him, and in seeing to it that, having borrowed, they actually read the books chosen. "But his success with this was doubtful. The boys regarded 'Westward Ho!' as a home-lesson, while the 'Three Musketeers' set fire to none of them. Even 'Treasure Island' left most of them cold; though Eagar, reading it aloud, had tried to persuade himself that little Rattray had breathed a trifle quicker as the blind man's stick came tap tapping along the road. The sea was nothing but a name to the whole number of scholars (eighteen of them, boys and girls all told). Not one of them had pierced past the township that lay ninety miles away to the right of them; indeed, half the number had never journeyed beyond Moonee, where the coach finished its journey. "Eagar got up collections--moths, butterflies, birds' eggs; he tried to describe museums, picture-galleries, and such, to his pupils. At that time he had no greater wish on earth than to have just enough money to take the whole school to Sydney for a week, and see what a suddenly widened horizon would do for them all. Had his salary come at that time in one solid cheque for the whole year, there is no knowing to what heights of recklessness he would have mounted, but the monthly driblets keep the temptation far off. "One morning he had a brilliant notion. In another week or two the yearly 'sweep' fever for far-distant races would attack the place, and the poorest would find enough to take a part at least in a ticket.