he
shallows--black fish and grayling--leaping and flashing in the sun.

There is no pleasure that I have ever experienced like a child's
midsummer holiday,--the time, I mean, when two or three of us used to go
away up the brook, and take our dinners with us, and come home at night
tired, dirty, happy, scratched beyond recognition, with a great nosegay,
three little trout, and one shoe, the other having been used for a boat
till it had gone down with all hands out of soundings. How poor our
Derby days, our Greenwich dinners, our evening parties, where there are
plenty of nice girls, are, after that! Depend on it, a man never
experiences such pleasure or grief after fourteen as he does
before,--unless in some cases in his first love-making, when the
sensation is new to him.

But meanwhile there sat our child, bare-legged, watching the forbidden
ground beyond the river. A fresh breeze was moving the trees and making
the whole a dazzling mass of shifting light and shadow. He sat so still
that a glorious violet and red kingfisher perched quite close, and,
dashing into the water, came forth with a fish, and fled like a ray of
light along the winding of the river. A colony of little shell parrots,
too, crowded on a bough, and twittered and ran to and fro quite busily,
as though they said to him, "We don't mind you, my dear; you are quite
one of us."

Never was the river so low. He stepped in; it scarcely reached his ankle.
Now surely he might get across. He stripped himself, and, carrying his
clothes, waded through, the water never reaching his middle, all across
the long, yellow, gravelly shallow. And there he stood, naked and free,
on the forbidden ground.

He quickly dressed himself, and began examining his new kingdom, rich
beyond his utmost hopes. Such quantongs, such raspberries, surpassing
imagination; and when tired of them, such fern boughs, six or eight feet
long! He would penetrate this region, and see how far it extended.

What tales he would have for his father to-night! He would bring him
here, and show him all the wonders, and perhaps he would build a new hut
over here, and come and live in it? Perhaps the pretty young lady, with
the feathers in her hat, lived somewhere here, too?

There! There is one of those children he has seen before across the
river. Ah! ah! it is not a child at all, but a pretty gray beast with
big ears. A kangaroo, my lad; he won't play with you, but skips away
slowly, and leaves y