father had perched him on his shoulder for
a bed-time romp. When he had been taken tenderly for an "airing" by the
trimmest of nursemaids, and in the daintiest of perambulators. When he
had worn tiny silk frocks and socks and bonnets. When hopes and fears
had arisen over "teething-time." When he had been carried round a
drawing-room, to display to admiring friends, his chubby wrists, his
dimpled fat legs, his quite remarkable length of limb and growth of
bone.

Then Death slipped in unawares, and called the sweet young mother from
that happy home, and little John Brown became a perplexity and a care to
a grief-maddened father.

For a space it was conjectured that the baby, pending the arrival of a
step-mother, would be handed over to the cook, a rotund motherly person
who was fond of asserting that she had buried thirteen children and
reared one.

But conjectures have a way of falling beside the mark.

One morning an old schoolmate of poor little Mrs. Brown's arrived from
"out back," packed up the baby's things with her own quick brown hands
and returned "out back" the same evening.

The perambulator, the cradle, the cot, the dainty baby basket and a
multitude of other things were sold the next week along with the tables
and chairs and other "household effects," and Mr. John Brown, senior, a
cabin box and a portmanteau, left by a mail steamer for Japan.

And the small suburban house became "to let." Thenceforward the pattern
of little John Brown's existence became altered. He was one of three
other children, and not even the baby, although scarcely one year old.

His elegant lace-trimmed silken and muslin garments were "laid by." He
wore dark laundry-saving dresses and neither boots nor socks. He was
never carried around for admiration, for the very good reason that
visitors were few and far between--and there was (except to doting
parents, perhaps) very little to admire about him. He lost his
chubbiness and his pink prettiness and became thin and wiry, brown faced
and brown limbed.

He was always abnormally tall and abnormally strong, so that he became
almost a jest on the station. He learned to fight at three, to swim at
four, shoot at seven, ride, yard cattle, milk, chop wood, make bush
fires and put them out again, ring bark trees all before he was eleven.
In short, to do, and to do remarkably well, the hundred and one things
that make up a man's and boy's existence on an Australian station.

At thirteen