rt of a dream. But her face soon lost its
bewildered look. She became interested in her surroundings, although
there was no suggestion here of savage freedom or romantic adventure.

Leuraville showed low and hot and ugly. A red sun near its dropping,
drew up the miasmic vapours from the mangrove-fringed reaches
stretching on either side of the wharf. Some light crafts were moored
about. A schooner was loading up with cattle--wretched diseased beasts.
Bridget watched them with shuddering repulsion--being hoisted up and
slung aboard with ropes. The men at their task swore so abominably that
the police-magistrate stepped up to them and remonstrated on the plea
of a lady's presence. Bridget had never heard such swear-words. She was
used to the ordinary 'damn,' but these oaths were so horribly coarse.
Colin, who was asking local questions of the other men appeared to take
it all as a matter of course. The men stopped their work to stare at
Lady Bridget. They wore dirty corduroys hitched up with a strap over
flannel shirts that were open at the neck and left their brawny breasts
exposed. There were other loafers in flannel shirts, hitched up
trousers and greasy felt or cabbage-tree hats, and there were two or
three blacks of the demoralised type seen in coast townships. Now, one
of the bullocks got loose and rushed blindly down the wharf, and
Bridget shrieked and clung wildly to her husband's arm until it was
headed back again.

Colin laughed at her terror.

'It's all right, Biddy. But how's that for a Bushman's wife. You'll see
lots of cattle up at Moongarr.'

Moongarr was the name off his station which was to be her future home.

'I hate cows. Once I was charged by a wild cow and I've been afraid of
them ever since.'

'That isn't a cow. It's Mickey Field's poley-tailed bullock being
shunted off to the Boiling-Down Works on Shark Island,' said a local
man.

The police-magistrate found his opportunity.

'You wouldn't be afraid, Lady Bridget, if you realised that cow as an
expression of the Divine mind.'

Bridget laughed. Her sense of the queerness of it all was almost
hysterical. She had the Irish wit to make the men grin at her prompt
answer, which when it became bruited up and down the Leura, earned her
the reputation of being sharp at repartee.

'But do you think,' said she confidingly, 'that the cow would be after
realising ME as an expression of the Divine Mind?'

'Eh, you needn't think you're going to knoc