SOLITUDE

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 78, 1 April 1916, Page 16

SOLITUDE

WHERE ARE ITS CHARMS?

"A man who lives alone," said tho grey Australian manager of a sheep station, "lives in singular danger."

We enquired concerning this aphorism,

"Once on an island off the coast of Victoria," the grey manager explained, "I fell in with the son of a light-keeper who had trained his hair to lie in the form of a birds-nest."

There was some laughter.

"It is perhaps something to laugh at," the grey manager agreed, "but 1 assure you that I did not laugh at the time. 'Young fellow, my lad,' Said I, 'why don't you cut your hair/ s

"'Why should I?' said he. " 'Well, for one thing,'. said I, 'it's peculiar, isn't it?'

" 'Not too peculiar,' said he. 'It'B my own business, anyhow.'

" 'It may be your own business,' said I, 'but I assure you 'pon my honour, that I never before knew a young man to tempt the birds to nest on his own head.'

"By Heaven, that pleased him! " 'Don't you think,' said I, 'that n makes you rather ridiculous?'

"Well," the grey manager declared, "he thought it made him interesting. And do you know"—the grey manager's eyes now being wide with the wonder and horror of the thing—"l could'nt persuade the chap that it was at all out of the way for a young Anglo-Saxon to1 wear his hair in the fashion of a bird'snest.' The more I jeered—and the harder I scolded—the better pleased he was with his invention. He had never been on the main shore. There was no bit' or rein on his notions: life at the lighthouse had given him no standards— nothing to conform to. I fancied, you know, that he was a bit off. I wronged him.' He was quite normal. That lad went to school a pitiable ass, his bird'snest a perfectly sleek arrangement—but came back clipped like a sheep. And that's the point of it, and the pity of it : the crazy directions ar healthy man's ideas will take when he lives too much alone. It's lonely on the sheep stations of. the Australian backblocks, too," the grey manager went on, scowling. "A mob of human oddities there ! Why, my God !"—the manager's voice rose to a queer pitch of nervous alarm—"anything may happen to the man who lives: too much alone. I used to think—back in the early days—sometimes, you know— that I was going . a bit off myself. It frightened me. And I get in a blue funk still—when I.recall those days."— From "Australian Byways," by Mr. Norman Duncan.