Riding up to the garden gate, he was announced as “Mr. Stranger” by about twenty dogs, who gave the fullest exercise to their lungs, and would doubtless have gone even further had Jack been on foot. A tall, sun-burned man, in an old shooting-coat, appeared upon the verandah, and, making straight through the excited pack, greeted Redgrave warmly.
“Won’t you get off and come in? I’ll take your horses. [Hold your row, you barking fools!] Oh! it is you, Mr. Redgrave; from Gondaree, I think – met you at Barrabri – very glad to see you; of course you have come to stay? Allow me to take the led horse.”
“I think I promised to look you up some day,” said Jack. “I took advantage of a lull in station-work and – here I am.”
“Very glad indeed you have made your visit out, though I don’t know that I have much to show you. But, as we are neighbours, we ought to become acquainted.”
The horses were led over to a small but tolerably snug stable, where they were regaled with hay previous to being turned out in the paddock, and then Jack was ushered into the house. Mr. Stangrove was a married man; so much was evident from the first; many traces of the “pug-wuggies, or little people,” were apparent; and a girl crossing the yard with a baby in her arms supplied any evidence that might be missing.
“Will you have a glass of grog after your ride?” inquired the host, “or would you like to go to your room?”
Jack preferred the latter, being one of those persons who decline to eat or drink until they are in a comfortable and becoming state of mind and body; holding it to be neither epicurean nor economical to “muddle away appetite” under circumstances which preclude all proper and befitting appreciation.
So Redgrave performed his ablutions, and, having arrayed himself in luxuriously-easy garments and evening shoes, made his way to the sitting-room. He had just concluded “a long, cool drink” when two ladies entered.
“My dear, allow me to introduce Mr. Redgrave – Mrs. Stangrove, Miss Stangrove.”
A lady advanced upon the first mention of names and shook hands with the visitor, in a kindly, unaffected manner. She was young, but a certain worn look told of the early trials of matronhood. Her face bore silent witness to the toils of housekeeping, with indifferent servants or none at all; to want of average female society; to a little loneliness, and a great deal of monotony. Such, with few exceptions, is the life of an Australian lady, whose husband lives in the far interior, in the real bush. Her companion, who contented herself with a searching look and a formal bow, was “in virgin prime and May of womanhood” – and a most fair prime and sweet May it was. Her features were regular, her mouth delicate and refined, with a certain firmness about the chin, and the mutine expression about the upper lip, which savoured of declaration of war upon just pretext. She had that air and expression which at once suggest the idea of interest in unravelling the character. Jack shook hands with himself when he thought of how he had persevered after the traitorous idea had entered his head that after all it was no use going, Mr. Stangrove wouldn’t be glad to see him, or care a rush about the matter.
The evening meal was now announced, which circumstance afforded Jack considerable satisfaction. He had ridden rather more than fifty miles, and, whereas his horses had not done so badly in the long grass of the “bend,” our traveller’s lunch had been limited to a pipe of “Pacific Mixture.” All the same, while the preparations for tea were proceeding he took a careful and accurate survey of his younger feminine neighbour.
Maud Stangrove was somewhat out of the ordinary run of girls in appearance, as she certainly was in character. Her features were regular, with a complexion clear and delicate to a degree unusual in a southern land. Her mouth, perhaps, denoted a shade more firmness than the ideal princess is supposed to require. But it was redeemed by the frank, though not invariable, smile which, disclosing a set of extremely white and regular teeth, gave an expression of softness and humour which was singularly winning. The eyes were darkest hazel, faintly toned with gray. They were remarkable as a feature; and those on whom they had shone – in love or war – rarely forgot their gaze; they were clear and shining; but this is to say little; such are the every-day charms of that beauty which is in woman but another name for youth. Maud’s eyes had the peculiar quality of developing fresh aspects and hidden mysteries of expression as they fell on you – calm, clear, starlike, but fathomless, glowing ever, and with hidden, smouldering fire. She was dressed plainly, but in such taste as betokened reference to a milliner remote from the locality. Rather, but very slightly, above middle height in her figure, there was an absence of angularity which gave promise of eventual roundness of contour – perhaps even too pronounced. But now, in the flower-time of early womanhood, she moved with the unstudied ease of those forest creatures in whom one notices a world of latent force.
Such was the apparition which burst upon the senses of Mr. Redgrave.
“Average neighbours!” said he to himself. “Who ever expected this – a vision of no end of fear and interest? This is a girl fit for any one to make love to or to quarrel with, as the case might be. I think the latter recreation would be the easier. And yet I don’t know.”
“I don’t think you have ever been so far ‘down the river,’ as the people call it, before?” said Mrs. Stangrove.
“I’m afraid I have not been a very good neighbour,” said Jack, beginning to feel contrite at the de haut en bas treatment of the general population of the Warroo, in accordance with which he had devoted himself to unrelieved work at Gondaree, and looked upon social intercourse as completely out of the question. “But the fact is, that I have been very hard at work up to this time. Now the fences are up I hope to have a little leisure.”
Here Jack paused, as if he had borne up, like another Atlas, the weight of the Gondaree world upon those shapely shoulders of his.
Miss Stangrove looked at him with an expression which did not imply total conviction.
“We have heard of all your wonders and miracles, haven’t we, Jane? I don’t know what we should have done in the wilderness here without the Gondaree news.”
“I was not aware that I was so happy as to furnish interesting incidents for the country generally,” answered Jack; “but it would have given me fresh life if I had only thought that Mrs. and Miss Stangrove were sympathetical with my progress.”
“You would have been rather flattered, then,” said Stangrove, who was a downright sort of personage, “if you had heard the lamentations of these ladies over your woolshed – indeed, Maud said that – ”
“Come, Mark,” said Miss Stangrove, eagerly, and with the very becoming improvement of a sudden blush, “we don’t need your clumsy version of all our talk for the last year. Nobody ever does anything upon this antediluvian stream from one century to another, and of course Jane and I felt grieved that a spirited reformer like Mr. Redgrave should meet with so heavy a loss – didn’t we, Jane?”
“Of course we did, my dear,” said that matron, placidly; “and Mark, too, he said the wicked men who did it ought to be hanged, and that Judge Lynch was a very useful institution. He was quite ferocious.”
“Thanks very many; I am sure I feel deeply grateful. I had no idea I had so many well-wishers,” quoth Jack, casting his eyes in the direction of Miss Maud. “It comforts one under affliction and – all that, you know.”
“How you must look down upon us, with our shepherds and old-world ways,” said Maud. “You come from Victoria, do you not, Mr. Redgrave? We Sydney people believe that you are all Yankees down there, and wear bowie-knives and guns, and calculate, and so on.”
“Really, Miss Stangrove,” pleaded Jack, “you are indicting me upon several charges at once; which am I to answer? I don’t look very supercilious, do I? though I admit hailing from Victoria, which is chiefly peopled by persons of British birth, whatever may be the prevailing impression.”
“Well, you will have an opportunity of discussing the matter – the shepherds, I mean – with my brother, who is a strong conservative. I give you leave to convert him, if you can. We have hitherto found it impossible, haven’t we, Mark?”
“Mark has generally good reasons for his opinions,” said the loyal wife, looking approvingly at her lord and master – who, indeed, was very like a man who could hold his own in any species of encounter. “But suppose we have a little music – you might play La Bouquetière.”
“The piano is not so wofully out of tune as might be expected,” asserted Maud, as she sat down comfortably to her work, all things being arranged by Jack, who was passionately fond of music – a good deal of which, as of other abstractions, he had in his soul.
“Far from it,” said he, as the shower of delicate notes which make up this loveliest of airy musical trifles fell on his ear like a melody of le temps perdu.
Jack had all his life been extremely susceptible to the charm of music. He had a good ear, and his taste, naturally correct, had been rather unusually well cultivated. With him the effect of harmony was to bring to the surface, and develop as by a spell, all the best, the noblest, the most exalted portions of his character. Any woman who played or sang with power exercised a species of fascination over him, assuming her personal endowments to be up to his standard. When Miss Stangrove, after passing lightly over capriccias of Chopin and Liszt, after a fashion which showed very unusual execution, commenced in deference to his repeated requests to sing When Sparrows Build, and one or two other special favourites, in such a mezzo-soprano! he was surprised, charmed, subjugated – with astonishing celerity.
However, the evenings of summer, commencing necessarily late, come to an end rather prematurely if we are very pleasantly engaged. So Jack thought when Mr. Stangrove looked at his watch, and opined that Jack after his ride would be glad to retire.
Jack was by no means glad, but of course assented blandly, and the two ladies sailed off.
“Shall we have a pipe in the verandah before we turn in?” asked his host. “You smoke, I suppose? We can open this window and leave the glasses on the table here within easy reach.”
Taking up his position upon a Cingalese cane-chair on the broad verandah, and lighting his pipe simultaneously with his host, Jack leaned back and enjoyed the wondrous beauty of the night.
The cottage, unlike the Mailman’s Arms, fronted the river, towards which a neatly-kept garden sloped, ending in a grassy bank.
“My sister belongs to the advanced party of reform, Mr. Redgrave, as you will have observed,” said his entertainer. “She and I have numerous fights on the subject.”
“I am proud to have such an ally,” said Jack; “but, seriously, I wonder you have not been converted. Surely the profits and advantages of fencing are sufficiently patent.”
“You must bear with me, my dear sir, as a very staunch conservative,” answered his host, smoking serenely, and speaking with his usual calm deliberation. “There is something, I think much, to be said on the other side.”
“I feel really anxious to hear your arguments,” said Jack. “I fancied that beyond what the shepherds always say – that sheep can’t do well or enjoy life without a bad-tempered old man and a barking dog at their tails – the brief against fencing was exhausted.”
“I do not take upon myself to assert,” said Stangrove, “that my reasons ought to govern persons whose circumstances differ from my own. But I find them sufficient for me for the present. I reserve the privilege of altering them upon cause shown. And the reasons are – First of all, that I could not enter into the speculation, for such it would be, of fencing my run without going into debt – a thing I abhor under any circumstances. Secondly, because the seasons in Australia are exceedingly changeable, as I have had good cause to know. And, thirdly, because the prices of stock are as fluctuating and irregular, occasionally, as the seasons.”
“Granted all these, how can there be two opinions about an outlay which is repaid within two years, which is more productive in bad seasons than in good ones, and which dispenses with three-fourths of the labour required for an ordinary sheep-station?”
“I have no reason to doubt what you say,” persisted Stangrove, “but suppose we defer the rest of the argument until we have had a look at the run and stock together. I can explain my meaning more fully on my own beat. I dare say you will sleep tolerably after your ride.”
CHAPTER X
“Absence of occupation is not rest.” —Cowper.
Jack went to bed with a kind of general idea of getting up in the morning early and looking round the establishment. But, like the knight who was to be at the postern gate at dawn, he failed to keep the self-made engagement; and for the same reason he slept so soundly that the sun was tolerably high when he awoke, and he had barely time for a swim in the river, and a complete toilet, before the breakfast-bell rang.
In spite of the baseless superstition that “there is nothing like one’s own bed,” and so on, it is notorious that all men not confirmed valetudinarians sleep far more satisfactorily away from home. For, consider, one is comparatively freed from the dire demon, Responsibility, you doze off tranquilly into the charmed realm of dreamland – with “nothing on your mind.” Perfectly indifferent is it to you, in the house of a congenial friend or affable stranger, whether domestic disorganization of the most frightful nature is smouldering insidiously or hurrying to a climax. The cook may be going next week, the housemaid may have contracted a clandestine marriage. Your host may be sternly revolving plans of retrenchment, and may have determined to abandon light wines, and to limit his consumption to table-beer and alcohol. But nothing of this is revealed to you; nor would it greatly concern you if it was. For the limited term of your visit, the hospitality is free, smooth, and spontaneous. Atra Cura, if she does accidentally drop in by mistake, is a courteous grande dame, rather plainly attired in genteel mourning, but perfect in manner. Not a violent, unreserved shrew as she can be when quite “at home.” A visit is in most instances, therefore, a respite and a truce. The parade, the review, the skirmish are for a time impossible; so the “tired soldier” enjoys the calm, unbroken repose in his own tent so rarely tasted.
The weather was hot, and there did not appear to be any likelihood of a change. Nevertheless, Jack could not but acknowledge that no detail had been omitted to insure the highest amount of comfort attainable in such a climate. The butter was cooled, the coffee perfect, the eggs, the honey, the inevitable chop, excellent of their kind. Everything bore traces of that thorough supervision which is never found in a household under male direction. Jack thought Miss Stangrove, charmingly neat and fresh in her morning attire, would have added piquancy to a much more homely meal.
“Just in time, Mr. Redgrave,” said that young lady; “we were uncertain whether you were not accustomed to be aroused by a gong. Bells are very old-fashioned, we know.”
“I doubt whether anything would have awakened me an hour since. I am a reasonably early riser generally; but the ride and the extreme comfort of my bedroom led to a little laziness. But where’s Stangrove?”
“I blush to say he went off early to count a flock of sheep,” said Miss Stangrove, with assumed regret. “You must accustom yourself to our aboriginal ways for a time. But is it not dreadful to think of? I hope you extracted a total recantation from him last night.”
“We only made a commencement of the game last night,” said Jack. “Your brother advanced a pawn or two, but we agreed to defer the grand attack until after a ride round the run, which I believe takes place to-day.”
“I am afraid you will have a hot ride; but I don’t pity you for that. Anything is better than staying indoors day after day, week after week, as we wretched women have to do. You might tell Mark if he sees my horse to have her brought in. I feel as if I should like a scamper. Oh! here he comes to answer for himself. Well, Mark, how many killed, wounded, and missing?”
“Good morning, Mr. Redgrave,” said Stangrove, smiling rather lugubriously at his sister’s pleasantry. “I am afraid you are just in time to remark on one of the weak points of my management. A shepherd came before daylight to say that his flock had been lost since the day before. I have been hunting for them these five hours.”
“And have you brought any home?” inquired Mrs. Stangrove.
“None at all,” he answered.
“Did you see any?” persisted the lady, who seemed rather of an anxious disposition.
“Yes – ten.”
“And why didn’t you bring them?” pursued the chatelaine, whose earnestness was in strong contrast with her sister’s nonchalance.
“Because they were dead,” replied Stangrove, laconically; “and now, my dear, please to give me some tea. ‘Sufficient for the day’ – and so on.”
“Accidents will happen,” interposed Jack, politely. “It is like more important calamities and crimes, a matter of average.”
“Just so,” said Stangrove, gratefully; “and though I can’t help worrying myself at a small loss, such as this, I know that the annual expense from this cause varies very little.”
“There were wolves in Arcadia, were not there?” demanded the young lady. “They ate a shepherd now and then, I suppose. If the dingoes would look upon it in that light, what a joy it would be, eh?”
“I could cheerfully see them battening upon the carcase of that lazy ruffian Strawler,” he very vengefully made answer.
“My love!” said Mrs. Stangrove, mildly, “the children will be in directly – would you mind reading prayers directly you finish?”
“Well – ahem,” said the bereaved proprietor, rather doubtfully; “perhaps you might as well read this morning, Mr. Redgrave and I have a long way to go – what are you laughing at, Maud, you naughty girl?”
“Don’t forget to have old Mameluke got in for me, Mark, and to-morrow I will go sheep-hunting with you myself, if little Bopeep continues unsuccessful, and in an unchristian state of mind, unable to say his prayers. I didn’t think the fencing question involved so high a moral gain before.”
Breakfast over, two fresh hacks were brought up (Stangrove was a great horse-breeder, and Jack’s eye had been offended as he rode up with troops of mares and foals), and forth they fared for a day on the run, and a contingent search for the lost flock.
Stangrove’s run was about the same size as Gondaree, but, save the cottages and buildings of the homestead, there were no “improvements” of any kind other than the shepherds’ huts. For stock, he had seventeen or eighteen thousand sheep, a herd of cattle, and two or three hundred horses. These last were within their boundaries in a general way, but were occasionally outside of these merely moral frontiers. So also the neighbouring stock wandered at will inside of the said imaginary subdivisions.
“You see,” commenced Stangrove, in explanation, when they were fairly out on the plain, “that I came into possession here some ten years past, just after I had left school. My poor old governor, who was rather a scientific literary character, lived at one of those small comfortable estates near town, where a man can spend lots of money, but can’t by any possibility make a shilling. Decent people, in those days, would as soon have gone out to spend a few years with Livingstone as have come to live permanently on the Warroo. We had a surly old overseer, of the old sort, who managed a little and robbed a great deal. When I came here, after the poor old governor died, you never saw such a place as it was.”
“I can partly imagine,” Jack said.
“Well, I worked hard, and lived like a black fellow for a few years, got the property out of debt, improved the stock, and here we are. I get a reasonable price for my wool, I sell a draft of cattle now and then, and some horses, and am increasing the stock slowly, and putting by something every year.”
“No doubt you are,” said Jack; “but here you have to live and keep your wife and family in this out-of-the-way place; and at the present rate of progress it may be years before you can make money or sell out profitably. Why not concentrate all the work and self-denial into three or four years – sell out, and enjoy life?”
“A tempting picture – but consider the risk. Debt always means danger; and why should I incur that danger? At present I don’t owe a shilling, and call no man master. As for happiness, I am not so miserable now (if I could only find those sheep). I have a day’s work to do every day, or to decline, if I see fit; and I would just as soon be here – a place endeared to me by old association – as anywhere else.”
“But your family?” asked Jack, rather insincerely, as he was thinking of Maud chiefly, and the stupendous sacrifice of her life. “But,” he said, “your children are growing up.”
“Yes, but only growing up. By the time they need masters and better schooling I shall be a little better off. Some change will probably take place – stock will rise – or it will rain for two or three years without stopping, as is periodically probable in New South Wales; and then I shall sell, go back to the paternal acres in the county of Cumberland, and grow prize shorthorns and gigantic cucumbers, and practise all the devices by which an idle man cheats himself into the belief that he is happy.”
“By which time you will have lost most of the zest for the choicer pleasures of life.”
“Even so – but I am a great believer in the ‘in that state of life’ portion of the catechism. I was placed and appointed here, and hold myself responsible for the safety and gradual increase of my ‘one talent.’ Maud, too, has a share. I am compelled to be a stern guardian in her interest.”
“Well,” returned Jack (after his companion had opened his mind, as men often do in the bush to a chance acquaintance – so rare ofttimes is the luxury of congeniality), “I am not sure that you are altogether wrong. It squares with your temperament. Mine is altogether opposed to such views. I think twenty years on the Warroo, with the certainty of a plum and a baronetcy at the end, would kill me as surely as sunstroke. Isn’t that sheep?”
As Jack propounded this grammatically doubtful query, he directed Stangrove’s attention to a long light-coloured line at a distance. It was soon evident that it was sheep coming towards them. To Stangrove’s great relief, they proved to be the missing flock, in charge of one of the volunteers sent out in all directions, if only they might perchance manage to drop across them. Upon being counted they were only fifteen short. Ten being accounted for by the domestic declaration of Mr. Stangrove, the other five were left to take their chance, and the flock sent back to a new shepherd, vice Strawler superseded.
Stangrove brightened up considerably after this recovery of his doubtfully-situated property. Byron asserts “a sullen son, a dog ill, a favourite horse fallen lame just as he’s mounted,” to be “trifles in themselves,” but adds, “and yet I’ve rarely seen the man they didn’t vex.” So with lost sheep. You must lose a dozen or twenty – you hardly lose more than fifty, say from ten to five-and-twenty pounds – not a sum to turn the scale of ruin by any means. Yet, from the time that the announcement is made of “sheep away” until they are safely counted and yarded, rarely does the face of the proprietor relax its expression of weighty resolve and grave foreboding.
Jack found by his companion’s avowal that at least one person besides Bertie Tunstall held the same unprogressive but eminently safe opinions. “Here’s a man,” said Jack, “with a worse climate, far less recreation and variety than I had, and see how he sticks to his fight! However, I am differently constituted – there’s no denying it. If Stangrove’s father had not been somewhat of the same kidney, he and I would have had little chance of discussing our theories on the banks of the Warroo.”
“And so you won’t be tempted into fencing?” demanded Jack, returning to the charge.
“Not just at present,” rejoined Stangrove. “I do not say but that if I find myself surrounded by fencing neighbours, willing to share the expense and so on, in a few more years I may give in. But I am a firm believer in the Safe. I am now in a position of absolute security, and I intend to continue in it.”
“But suppose bad seasons come?”
“Let them! I have no bills to meet. I can weather them again as I have done before, when on this very station we had to boil down our meat to a kind of soup; it was too poor to eat otherwise. We outlived that. Please God, we shall do so again.”
“I suppose you had terrible losses?”
“You may say that; if another season came like it, the country would be ‘a valley of dry bones,’ literally. But even if I lost all my increase for a year, and a proportion of my old stock, it would only shake me, not break me. A man who is in debt it cooks altogether – that is the difference.”
“Well, let us hope that such times won’t come again,” said Jack, beginning to be unpleasantly affected by the idea of an interview with Mr. Shrood, in which he should be compelled to inform him that the season had been fatal to his whole crop of lambs, and the greater part of his aged ewes. “Every one says the seasons have changed, and that the climate is more moist than it used to be.”
“I am not so sure of that,” said his host, who was not prone to take much heed of “what everybody said.” “I see no very precise data upon which to found such an assertion. What has been may be again. We shall have another dry season within the next five years, as sure as my name is Mark Stangrove. What do you think of those horses? That is rather a fancy mob. I see Maud’s horse Mameluke among them. We must run them in.”
“How do you reconcile it to your conscience to keep such unprofitable wretches as horses?” inquired Jack, “eating the grass of sheep and cattle, and being totally unsaleable themselves, unfit to eat, and hardly worth boiling down.”
“I am grieved to appear so old-fashioned and ignorant,” said Mark, “but I have a sentiment about these horses, and really they don’t pay so badly. They are the direct descendants, now numbered by hundreds, of an old family stud. They cost nothing in the way of labour; they need no shepherd or stockman: they are simply branded up every year. You couldn’t drive them off the run if you tried. And every now and then there springs up a demand, and I clear a lot of them off. It is all found money, and it tells up.”
“Meanwhile, the grass they eat would feed ten thousand sheep.”
“That is perfectly true; but of course I make no scruple of putting the sheep on their favourite haunts when hard up. Horses, you see, can pick up a living anywhere. Besides, I have always remarked that each of the great divisions of stock has its turn once or twice in a decade, if not oftener. You have only, therefore, to wait, and you get your ‘pull.’ My next ‘pull’ with the stud will be when the Indian horse market has to be supplied by us, as it must some day.”
“You seem a good hand at waiting,” said Jack. “I don’t know but that your philosophy is sound. I can’t put faith in it however.”
“Everything comes to him who waits, as the French adage goes,” said Stangrove. “I have always found it tolerably correct. However here we are at home. So we’ll put this lot into the yard, and I’ll lead up the old horse with a spare rein. We must have a ride out to Murdering Lake tomorrow; it’s our show bit of scenery.”
“Another eventful day over, Mr. Redgrave,” said Maud, as they met at the tea-table. “Yesterday the sheep were lost; to-day the sheep are found. So passes our life on the Warroo.”
“You’re an ungrateful, naughty girl, Maud,” said Mrs. Stangrove. “Think how relieved poor Mark must be after all his hard work and anxiety. Suppose he had lost a hundred.”
“I feel tempted to wish sometimes that every one of the ineffably stupid woolly creatures were lost for good and all, if it would only lead to our going ‘off the run’ and having to live somewhere else. Only I suppose they are our living, besides working up into delaines and merinos – so I ought not to despise them. But it’s the life I despise – shepherd, shearer, stockman – day after day, year after year. These, with rare exceptions (here she made a mock respectful bow to Jack), are the only people we see, or shall ever see, till we are gray.”
“You are rather intolerant of a country life, Miss Stangrove,” said Jack. “I always thought that ladies had domestic duties and – and so on – which filled up the vacuum, with a daily routine of small but necessary employments.”
“Which means that we can sew all day, or mend stockings, weigh out plums, currants, and sugar for the puddings – and that this, with a little nursing sick children, pastry-making, gardening, and very judicious reading, ought to fill up our time, and make us peacefully happy.”
“And why should it not?” inquired Mark, looking earnestly at his sister, as if the subject was an old one of debate between them. “How can a woman be better employed than in the duties you sneer at?”
“Do you really suppose,” said Maud, leaning forward and looking straight into his face with her lustrous eyes, in which the opaline gleam began to glow and sparkle, “that women do not wish, like men, to see the world, of which they have only dreamed – to mix a little change and adventure with the skim-milk of their lives – before they calm down into the stagnation of middle age or matrimony?”
“I won’t say what I suppose about women, Maud,” rejoined her brother. “Some things I know about them, and some things I don’t know. But, believe me, those women do best in the long run who neither thirst nor long for pleasures not afforded to them by the circumstances of their lives. If what they desire should come, well and good. If not, they act a more womanly and Christian part in waiting with humility till the alteration arrives.”