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If you have no skewer, then lay the red, luscious-looking flesh upon the coals themselves, and listen to it singing and fizzing, as if it were impatiently crying out to you to take it up and eat it! When I returned, the sunrays were piercing through the gum-trees and dissipating a thin mist which hung about the green, winding fringe of she-oaks bordering the creek.
They smoked and listened in silence all through to the end. It was very still. The full moon was high. The long white slender branches of a box-tree stirred gently overhead; the she-oaks in the creek sighed as they are always sighing, and the southern peak seemed ever so far away. That has made me thine for ever! Bonny Mary of Argyle. "Blarst my pipe!" exclaimed Mitchell, suddenly.
As they swung through the gates, the crowd cheered as Charteris gave the word, and the whole party went off at a sharp canter down the long, winding street. The night wind was soughing mournfully through the dark line of she-oaks fringing the banks of a small, swiftly-running creek, when Sheila was awakened by some one calling to her from outside the little tent in which she was sleeping.
Compared with the dark, spindly foliage of the she-oaks, the ti-trees' waxy flowers stood out like orange-blossoms against firs. On damp or marshy ground wattles were aflame: great quivering masses of softest gold.
Stealing cautiously down through the fringe of she-oaks, I came to a fine broad pool, in the centre of which was a small sandbank, whereon stood a black duck with a brood of seven half-fledged ducklings around her, dabbling merrily amongst the weed and débris of the margin.
Her meditations on chinny Australians lasted till they reached the Fairy Dell, the sight of which chased every other thought from her head. Surrounded by she-oaks and native cherry trees a smoothly curved hollow lay at the foot of a rocky declivity, its sides clothed with ferns almost startlingly green amidst the dried-up grass which covered most of the country around.
And then simultaneously arose all the choral songs of the wilderness, creatures whose voices are heard at night, the loud whir of the locusts, the musical boom of the bullfrog, the cuckoo note of the morepork, and, mournful amidst all those merrier sounds, the hoot of the owl, through the wizard she-oaks and the pale green of the gum-trees.
Yer can't go home like this! Yer'll git yer death o' cold. I've even seen her, in the terrible drought, climbing she-oaks and apple-trees by a makeshift ladder, and awkwardly lopping off boughs to feed the starving cattle. 'Jist tryin' ter keep the milkers alive till the rain comes.
Bush all round bush with no horizon, for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance. The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple-trees. No undergrowth. Nothing to relieve the eye save the darker green of a few she-oaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek. Nineteen miles to the nearest sign of civilization a shanty on the main road.
We had broken a new pair of shears digging out those grubs from under the bark of the she-oaks, and had each taken a blade as his own especial property, which we thought was the best thing to do under the circumstances. Uncle wanted those shears badly, so he received us with the buggy whip and he didn't draw the colour line either. All that night and next day I wished he had.
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