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IN THE MIST OF THE MOUNTAINS




  +----------------------------+
  |                            |
  |    _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_    |
  |                            |
  | (Uniform with this volume) |
  |                            |
  | SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS   |
  | THE FAMILY AT MISRULE      |
  | THE LITTLE LARRIKIN        |
  | MISS BOBBIE                |
  | THE CAMP AT WANDINONG      |
  | THREE LITTLE MAIDS         |
  | THE STORY OF A BABY        |
  | LITTLE MOTHER MEG          |
  | BETTY AND CO.              |
  | MOTHER'S LITTLE GIRL       |
  | THE WHITE-ROOF TREE        |
  | THE STOLEN VOYAGE          |
  |                            |
  +----------------------------+




[Illustration: "'I'm so sorry, chickies,' she said kindly." (Page 19.)]




IN THE MIST OF
THE MOUNTAINS


By
ETHEL TURNER
(Mrs. H. R. Curlewis)

_Author of "Seven Little Australians," "The Little Larrikin,"
"Miss Bobbie," etc., etc._


ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. MACFARLANE


LONDON
WARD LOCK & CO. LIMITED
1908




  TO
  H. R. C.

   "They that have heard the overword
    Know life's a dream worth dreaming."
                               _Henley._




CONTENTS


    CHAP.                                                     PAGE
      I Somewhat Contagious                                      9
     II Treating of Larkin and his Commission                   23
    III Miss Bibby                                              31
     IV The Famous Novelist                                     43
      V Ante-prandial Visitors                                  55
     VI A Grocery Order                                         60
    VII Letters to a Mother                                     72
   VIII Across the Rubicon                                      87
     IX The Interview for the "Evening Mail"                    96
      X Anna enjoys Ill-health                                 112
     XI Miss Bibby's Holiday                                   126
    XII In Black and White                                     135
   XIII An Interview with the Interviewer                      144
    XIV The Literary Microbe                                   156
     XV "Out of the Mouths of Babes"                           170
    XVI Wooing the Muse                                        179
   XVII Literature is Low                                      190
  XVIII An Editing Pencil                                      197
    XIX Max Runs Amuck                                         205
     XX A Lesson in Discipline                                 216
    XXI In Print at last                                       227
   XXII A Master Mind                                          229
  XXIII The Picnic at the Falls                                243
   XXIV At the Second Fall                                     259




CHAPTER I

SOMEWHAT CONTAGIOUS


It is October and the mountains are waking from their short winter
sleep.

It is October, the month of the moving mists.

Come and let us take a walk, not down Fleet Street with Dr. Johnson, but
up a mountain side with Nature,--nay, with God Himself. There is nothing
to see, absolutely nothing at all. You know that there are trees on
either hand of you, and that the undergrowth is bursting into the stars
and delicate bells of its springtime bloom. But your knowledge of this
is merely one of the services your memory does for you, for the mist has
covered it all away from sight.

You look behind you and your world is blotted out.

You look in front of you,--nay, you cannot look in front of you, for the
mist lies as a veil, actually on your face.

"I breathed up a whole cloud this morning," Lynn remarked once.

"I eated one--and it was nasty," said Max.

Still you continue to look in front of you as far as may be.

And the next moment the veil lifts,--clean up over your head perhaps,
and you see it rolling away on the wind to one side of you, yards and
yards of flying white gossamer, its ragged edges catching in the trees.

And now your gaze leaps and lingers, and lingers and leaps for miles in
front of you. You look downward and the ball of the earth has split at
your feet and the huge fissure has widened and widened till a limitless
valley lies there. You look down hundreds of feet and see like sprouting
seedlings the tops of gum trees,--gum trees two hundred feet high.

The far side of the valley shows a rolling mountain chain washed in in
tender shades of purple, paling nearer at hand to blue, the tender
indescribable mountain blue. Great jagged headlands hang perilously over
the deep, and the silver thread of a distant waterfall gleams here and
there down the face of the gorges of whose wonderful beauty the tourist
has heard and comes thousands of miles to see.

A billowy cloud, soft and dazzling as snow, has fallen from the sky or
risen with the mist, you are not sure which, and lies bewilderingly low
and lovely on the purple hills. Then there comes that damp, delicate
sensation on your face and all is mist again.

It is just as if a lovely girl now playfully hid her exquisite face with
the gauzy scarf twined round her head, and now showed it, each fresh
glimpse revealing a newer and tenderer beauty.

Lynn, who, though but eight, is given to quaint and delicate turns of
thought, calls it all "God's kaleidoscope."

Nearer to the station cluster the weatherboard business places of the
little township of Burunda. The butcher does a trade of perhaps two
sheep a week during the winter, but leaps to many a score of them when
"the strangers" begin to come up from the moist city at the first touch
of November's heat. The bakers--there are two of them--fight bitterly
for "the strangers'" custom.

All the winter a few decrepit-looking tarts and buns form the shop
window display of each. But when signs of life begin in the cottages the
battle starts.

"Seven for sixpence," Benson writes in red letters on a card in the
midst of his "drop" cakes.

"Eight for sixpence," Dunks retorts in larger type in the midst of _his_
heap of the popular confectionery.

"Nine for sixpence," is Benson's desperate challenge,--the cakes of
course shrinking somewhat in size.

The baker does not live who can afford to give ten for sixpence.

Benson has now to create new signs. "No second-class flour used in the
cakes of _this_ establishment," is one of his efforts.

Dunks caps it.

"No miserable counting out of currants in cakes baked _here_. Visitors
are invited to sample." And on his counter is a very fruity specimen cut
across. As a result of this competition "the strangers" may count on
quite respectable cakes for their tea.

There are two grocers--brothers, oddly enough, though not connected in
trade; steady, peaceable old men with whom brotherly love continues
despite trade rivalry.

But they possess a live young assistant each, and it is war to the knife
between these lads.

They fall on the startled stranger before he is fairly out of the train
and thrust before him the merits of their respective establishments.

Howie, the boy of Septimus Smith, is lean and lanky and can stretch a
long arm and a trade card for an amazing distance to just beneath your
nose. But Larkin is small and wiry and has a knack of squeezing himself
right into the midst of your mountain of luggage and children and
porters, and earnestly informing you that Octavius Smith keeps the best
bacon in the district, and promising you that if you deal with him, he,
Larkin, will bring your letters with him from the post office every
morning when he calls for orders.

It is said that the loser invariably fights the winner after these
contests unless there falls to his lot another passenger by the same
train. But if it happens that the luck is to neither,--that is, if all
are hotel or boarding-house visitors, or (an unforgivable thing in the
eyes of both) if the newcomers are people who bring their own groceries
from the metropolis, then the two go off almost friends and help each
other up with any boxes the train may have brought for them.

The Lomax children took a keen interest in the warfare, and always asked
Larkin, when he came for orders in the morning, how many of the new
people's custom he had secured.

For it was Larkin's trick of insinuating himself among the portmanteaus
and confused servants and children, and then talking rapidly of bacon
and letters, that had gained him Mrs. Lomax's custom when the family
first came to Burunda. That bewildered lady simply had to consent that
he might call to get him out of the knot of seemingly inextricable
confusion with which she had to deal.

There are two photographers, two shoe-menders, two house agents, two
visiting doctors.

It is conceivable that if a third man of any trade come along the
character of business in Burunda may entirely change. But while there
are but two of each, the chances are that any day the visitors may have
the quiet monotony of the place broken up by a civil war.

Not far from the station stand the hotels and the more modest
boarding-houses.

And then begin the cottages and villas--nearly all of them
weatherboard--of people who like to have a foothold a few thousand feet
in the air when summer's shroud of damp enwraps the Harbour city.

The Lomax children swung disconsolately on the gate of their summer
home. All they could see was the road in front of them, now clear, now
filled with flying mist, and their senses were wearied of it.

Might they go down the gully?

No, they might not go down the gully. Who had time on a busy day like
this, and Miss Bibby writing to New Zealand, to go trapesing down all
those rough places with them?

Couldn't they go alone?

No, they could not go alone. A nice thing it would be for the Judge's
children to be lost down a gully and sleeping out all night.

Well, might they go down to the waterfall? They couldn't get lost on
made paths and with picnickers everywhere.

No, they might not go down to the waterfall. What would the Judge