their native forest rescued from oblivion and preserved the memories of their lowly dead.

Their loyalty to the priest is marvellous. During the shearing season two young blacks fell sick at a town twenty miles from the camp; they refused to have any other name put on the hospital books than-"Father C.'s blacks."

The pastor told some amusing incidents in connection with his camp ministrations. In the centre is a government school where the picaninnis or children are taught; this is placed at the priest's disposal when he comes to say mass. When he first faced his squatting congregation, he began with an instruction on man's creation. Thinking the catechetical method more suited to their rude understandings, he began with-" Who were our first parents ?" intending, of course, to answer it himself; in this he was spared the trouble. Scarce had he finished the sentence when a dozen sable hands were waving in the air and a dozen fullgrown men excitedly shouting-" Adam and Eve." But this did not end the scene. Each emulous of displaying his proficiency squabbled with his neighbour for supremacy, vociferating "I spoke first," and appealing to his bewildered Reverence who alone seemed conscious of the incongruous mixture of the sacred and grotesque. When, during the course of the sermon, he touched on the Redemption, the whole congregation rose to their feet, clapping their hands and crying—" Christ died for black man and white man alike."

The knowledge that white and black came by creation from a common Father and by generation from a common pair gives them the greatest comfort. That the soul of the black man is equally dear in the eyes of God and that a common heaven awaits all the children of Adam's race is a revelation to console; for the poor wild child of the Bush is extremely sensitive of his colour, his firmest conviction being that the first condition awaiting his glorified body is a transformation into the envied white.

I should like to have taken a few snap-shot sketches, and for a curio album what a wealth of material abounded on every side! But the aboriginal's well-known horror of the art precluded the idea. When he sees his other self on a negative plate, he weeps and becomes inconsolable; as he is under the firm conviction that you have taken away half his being. A camera lens and a rifle barrel are objects of almost equal dread.

Without entering into the question :-Can the race be preserved?-it may be fairly stated that as matters now stand the blackfellow is bound to disappear. He is being actually swept away before the onward march of white civilization.

As it requires no prophetic eye to see future Birminghams and Leeds with their tall chimneys, their busy marts and their thousand looms, springing from the plains where to-day the timid kangaroo seeks the shady thicket or the "wattle" waves in pride her golden tresses; assuredly it is not assuming the rôle of visionary or scarcely trespassing on the domain of fancy to see some future savant taking from the museum repository the antique implements of the extinct race, with their quaint devices and strange carvings; and convincing a half credulous generation that over this land covered with cities and fair dwellings, now throbbing from end to end with the pulse of busy life, once through primitive forest wilds, roamed a guileless dusky race, that went down before the merciless teeth of our iron civilization; that the whirr of the boomerang once sounded through silent woods over the streets now echoing the tramp of the city throngs; that the very area now occupied by sparkling fountains and terraced gardens-the home of elegance and the resort of fashion-was once the camping ground where the wild corrobaree held high revel, and where danced to fantastic measures the aboriginal child of the long vanished Austral forest.

MICHAEL PHELAN, S.J.

WH

THOUGHTS ON READING.

HAT answer shall we who read books give to this query: "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt lose its savour, with what shall it be salted ?"

Books are published incontinently nowadays. The number printed annually almost equals the number of fools in the time of Solomon. Presumably many of them are read and influence their readers for good or evil. For books are not absolutely dead things," we are told, "but do contain a progeny of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." This is conversely true of bad books. They, too, are living things; but the life they contain is diseased, and disease is confessedly more easily caught than health. The slime of the serpent's tail yet smears the tree of knowledge, his hissing may yet be heard in the pleasant rustling of its leaves, while the poison of his fangs is mixed with the odour of its blossoms and the savour of its fruits.

Whether the books read are the best or the worst does not altogether depend on the merit of the book, but on the skill of the advertiser. We are harassed by the monotonous regularity with which, at intervals of about six months, the greatest novel of the age and the greatest scientific or philosophic work of the age present themselves, like literary highwaymen, commanding us to throw up our hands and give them recognition and praise.

In some cases we are told, with apparent seriousness and with no intimation of humour, that no library could be without some new book, when the supply of dust in said library is not sufficient to cover decently the still-born or short-lived children of Minerva which have already succeeded in obtaining a resting place on its shelves. We are told we must read some recent novel, and the reason sometimes given is because everybody is reading it, has read it or will read it-that is, everybody who is anybody. Against an argument of this kind there seems very little defence. We must either read the book or humbly confess that we have reached that age of mature indifference when we are shamelessly content to betake ourselves to the rank of old-fashioned nobodies;

that we have lost step with the march of events and are deplorably inconcerned about the consequences.

Even granting, however, that we resort to such a drastic expedient, we have not secured for ourselves immunity from persecution. We must listen to discussion on the book's merits and the author's talent. We cannot take up our daily newspaper to read the latest news about the coming war in Europe without having a gushing analysis of it obtruded on us in some way or other.

Friends, who would never dream of asking us what we dined on, or when we went to confession last, will not hesitate to catechise us closely about the privacies of our intellectual life. We daily run the risk of being asked, even by ladies, whether we have read some latest novel, which we would read only in a moment of Eve-like curiosity aud frailty, or during some temporary decline of the intellectual powers, and then carefully conceal the fact from acquaintances. We poor slaves of an intelligent age have a hard lot. The conventionalities of life forbid us to indulge in Titanic rage, when, with owl-like gravity, the novelist's paradoxical solutions of momentous social or religious problems are discussed and almost accepted by the sanest of our friends; and we must bear, with some approach to courtesy, rhapsodies over characters which are falsely conceived, or would be carefully shunned in real life.

To escape this even Hamlet's advice to Ophelia is valueless; nothing short of the remedy of St. Arsenius' flight to a hermitage in a lonely desert will bring any relief.

Now what shall we do about it? The popularity of the recent greatest book of the age is manufactured so cleverly that the vast majority of readers, whether they are intelligent or not, no matter how strong their conviction, or how clearly they perceive the inflated character of the reputation, might as confidently hope to escape the snares of the modern advertiser as a spring-time dweller in Boston hopes to escape the east wind, We cannot fly to the desert, either literally or metaphorically; nor are we called upon to do so. Our duty as Catholics is to leaven the social and intellectual life of those we live among with the eternal principles of right-thinking and right-living. Besides the advantage of intelligence and education possessed by them, we possess the incomparable advantage of having fixed, stable and certain Principles to guide us.

Ruskin says that "the chief of all the curses of this unhappy age is the universal gabble of its fools, and of the flocks that follow them, rendering the quiet voices of the wise men inaudible." Knowing this, we shall easily keep ourselves in a judicial frame of mind in presence of the nine days' popularity of some recent piece of scientific or imaginative literature; we shall be able to extract merriment from the folly of the novelists, and yet to bring them severely to task before the tribunal of reason and faith, if, forgetting their proper function of amusing his Majesty, the Public, they put aside their caps and bells and undertake to instruct him with their glib philosophizing.

It requires some independence of public opinion to declare that the latest book of Professor Somebody of the great University of Somewhere on the Ascent of Man would never have been written if the Professor were not so dreadfully serious about it himself, and would never be noticed if the readers would muster for the reading their native sense of humour and refinement.

So, too, in purely literary matters an attempt is made to browbeat us into admiration and praise of what decency and religion declare to be offensive. Literature, it is true, is not so coarsely dogmatic and intolerant as science. There never was probably a

being so absolutely sure of his every opinion-not even that exemplar of self-assurance, the medieval monk-as the average scientific philosopher of the nineteenth century. For the measure of liberty granted us by literature we are grateful, but the chorus of praise chanted over some recent novels tells us that we need have some independence of character to dissent from the great wise majority.

One of our humorous writers tells us in one of his stories of the habit that vulgar little boys have of showing with some pride, to a less fortunate companion, a sore toe or a sore foot. Do not many of our modern litterateurs manifest the same curious pride? Do they not look on themselves as superior beings if they are possessed of some moral or intellectual sore which their more eupeptic neighbours do not possess? Do they not straightway declare said sore a problem, and write a story in which, with minute and elaborate diagnosis, every symptom is exhibited to the public?

Now because this is done in clever, graceful, and even artistic English, with some veiled reserve, and some regard for the