nty of quantongs over there, eh, mother, and raspberries?
Why mayn't I get across and play there?"

"The river is too deep, child, and the Bunyip lives in the water under
the stones."

"Who are the children that play across there?"

"Black children, likely."

"No white children?"

"Pixies; don't go near 'em child; they'll lure you on, Lord knows
where. Don't get trying to cross the river, now, or you'll be drowned."

But next day the passion was stronger on him than ever. Quite early on
the glorious cloudless midsummer day he was down by the river side,
sitting on a rock, with his shoes and stockings off, paddling his feet
in the clear tepid water, and watching the million fish in the 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 one 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 come cases in his first love-making, when the
sensation is new to him.

But, meanwhile, there sits our child, barelegged, 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 king-fisher 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
ancle. 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 in the forbidden ground.

He quickly dressed himself, and began examining his new kingdom, rich
beyond