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"You might as well proclaim yourself a forger outright, as to force your father to declare this to be his signature," he observed. "I know it," said Frederick. "Yet you will run that risk?" "If you oblige me." Wattles shrugged his shoulders. He was a magnificent-looking man and towered in that old colonial hall like a youthful giant. "I bear you no ill will," said he.
From the landing-place rather more up towards the north-east cusp than the exact middle of the crescent bay extends a flat of black sand on which grows a dense bush of wattles, cockatoo apple-trees, pandanus palms, Moreton Bay ash and other eucalypts, and the shapely melaleuca.
We passed through several villages, as I suppose I may term them, of low huts, the walls formed of rough stones without mortar, the roof of flags laid over wattles and wicker-work; they seemed to be inhabited solely by women and children; the latter were naked, the former, in general, blear-eyed beldames, who sat beside the doors on low stools, spinning.
Suddenly my lady turned round and said something to him, and he returned to the carriage with a half-pleased, half-puzzled air. My lady went on to a cluster of rude mud houses at the higher end of the Common; cottages built, as they were occasionally at that day, of wattles and clay, and thatched with sods.
Thus did I, who had been vowed to the anchorite order of St. Augustine, enter upon my life as an unordained anchorite. I dragged out the wattles upon which my blessed predecessor had breathed his last, and having swept the place clean with a bundle of hazel-switches which I cut for the purpose, I went to gather fresh boughs and rushes by the swollen torrent, and with these I made myself a bed.
The wind sighed through the branches of the wattles, and made their golden blossoms tremble in the moonlight, while hand in hand the lovers strolled down the path or over the short dry grass. Far away in the distance they heard a woman singing, and the high sweet voice floated softly towards them through the clear air.
Then the head and the wabbling red wattles would dart forth with a sudden peck, and the shriek that ensued proved that nothing could be much amiss with the Kittredge lungs. One fine day he sat thus in the red November sunset.
I like to imagine that the wattle is just prisoned sunlight; that one early morning the sun's rays came stealing over the hill to kiss the wattle-trees while they seemed to sleep; but the trees were really quite wide-awake, and stretched out their pretty arms and caught the sunbeams and would never let them go; and now through the winter the wattles hide the sun rays away in their roots, cuddling them softly; but in spring they let them come out on the branches and play wild games in the breeze, but will never let them escape.
Thence the sound passes on through the wattles and bloodwoods to the narrow tea-tree swamp lined with dwarf bamboos and dies in echoes in the distance.
At this spring the thorny vegetation of the desert grew alongside the more agreeable water-plants at the water's edge, so that fertility and sterility stood side by side. Mr. Young planted some seeds of numerous vegetables, plants, and trees, and among others some of the giant bamboo, Dendrocalamus striatus, also Tasmanian blue gum and wattles.
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