sobered by the sight of his father's
trembling, choking passion, "do you call yourself an Englishman?"

"Yes!" yelled Wall, furiously. "What the hell do you call yourself?"

"If it comes to that I'm an Australian," said Billy, and he turned away
and went to catch his horse. He went up-country and knocked about in the
north-west for a year or two.

II

ROMEO AND JULIET

Mary Wall was twenty-five. She was an Australian bush girl, every inch
of her five-foot-nine; she had a pink-and-white complexion, dark blue
eyes, blue-black hair, and "the finest figure in the district,"
on horseback or afoot. She was the best girlrider too (saddle or
bare-back), and they say that when she was a tomboy she used to tuck
her petticoats under her and gallop man-fashion through the scrub after
horses or cattle. She said she was going to be an old maid.

There came a jackaroo on a visit to the station. He was related to the
bank with which Wall had relations. He was a dude, with an expensive
education and no brains. He was very vain of his education and
prospects. He regarded Mary with undisguised admiration, and her
father had secret hopes. One evening the jackaroo was down by the
homestead-gate when Mary came cantering home on her tall chestnut. The
gate was six feet or more, and the jackaroo raised his hat and hastened
to open it, but Mary reined her horse back a few yards and the "dood"
had barely time to jump aside when there was a scuffle of hoofs on the
road, a "Ha-ha-ha!" in mid-air, a landing thud, and the girl was away up
the home-track in a cloud of dust.

A few days later the jackaroo happened to be at Kelly's, a wayside
shanty, watching a fight between two bushmen, when Mary rode up. She
knew the men. She whipped her horse in between them and struck at first
one and then the other with her riding-whip.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" she said; "and both married
men, too!"

It evidently struck them that way, for after a bit they shook hands and
went home.

"And I wouldn't have married that girl for a thousand pounds," said the
jackaroo, relating the incidents to some friends in Sydney.

Mary said she wanted a man, if she could get one.

There was no life at home nowadays, so Mary went to all the bush dances
in the district. She thought nothing of riding twenty or thirty miles to
a dance, dancing all night, and riding home again next morning. At one
of these dances she met young Robert Ross, a clean-lim