During the day it was announced throughout the place that the Reverend gentleman would address the inhabitants in the ‘dance-room’ of the public-house, as being the only one available for such a purpose. Figure to yourself a long, low room, on the earthen floor of which tree stumps still stood. At the far end, behind a sort of bar formed by sheets of galvanised iron, supported on trestles, waits, manuscript in hand, still in a rather unsettled state of mind, the Reverend Spicer. The place is dimly lit by flaring candles and slush lamps, and is crowded by an assembly of as mixed nationalities, customs and creeds, as could be found out of, say, Alexandria or Singapore. A strong smell of stale spirits and tobacco smoke pervades everything. All the men, as our curate sees, are armed with a sheath-knife and revolver; and, as he looks, he trembles and handles the address as gingerly as if it were a parcel of dynamite, and liable to explode at any moment, for it is not one of his own pithless compositions, but the work of the Bishop himself, a powerful and emphatic remonstrance—penned in his quiet study at Bishopstowe—against the sinful and dissolute lives of the Dingo Creekers. But, had the frightened curate only known it, the mob, mixed and uncontrolled as it was, would have as soon thought of ill-treating a grasshopper as himself. And, all roughened and uncivilised as were the best of them, there were still men amongst them in whom the mere sight of a clergyman awoke memories long forgotten and buried under the combats and toils of life—men who had once ‘looked on better days,’ and whom Sabbath-bells had once ‘knoll’d to church,’ and this portion it was who, after awhile, obtained silence, and set the example of doffing their hats and putting away their pipes. Very picturesque was the scene, with the lights flickering—now on the bronzed features of some stalwart European, now on the dark face of a negro, or the yellow expressionless countenance of a Chinaman—as the motley audience stood or squatted silent and attentive, whilst our curate quavered and stammered through the opening sentences of the address. And favourable, beyond all hope, would have seemed the opportunity to a true soldier of the Cross for softening the hearts of the poor heathen of Dingo Creek. But never, perhaps, since the days when William C. Morris, arrayed in black broadcloth, was qualifying as an evangelist, has anyone felt himself more of a square peg in a round hole than did poor Spicer Greenwell, as he droned away, presently, amidst exclamations of disgust and disapproval from his curious congregation.