idents seemed to have
escaped the old king's memory.

Joe could build bigger woodheaps with less wood than any black or white
tramp or loafer round there. He was a born architect. He took a world
of pains with his wood-heaps--he built them hollow, in the shape of a
break-wind, with the convex side towards the house for the benefit of
his employers. Joe was easy-going; he had inherited a love of peace and
quietness from his father. Uncle generally came home after dark, and Joe
would have little fires lit at safe distances all round the house,
in order to convey an impression that the burning off was proceeding
satisfactorily.

When the warm weather came, Joe and I got into trouble with an old hag
for bathing in a waterhole in the creek in front of her shanty, and she
impounded portions of our wardrobe. We shouldn't have lost much if she
had taken it all; but our sense of injury was deep, especially as she
used very bad grammar towards us.

Joe addressed her from the safe side of the water. He said, "Look here!
Old leather-face, sugar-eye, plar-bag marmy, I call it you."

"Plar-bag marmy" meant "Mother Flour-bag", and ration sugar was
decidedly muddy in appearance.

She came round the waterhole with a clothes prop, and made good time,
too; but we got across and away with our clothes.

That little incident might have changed the whole course of my
existence. Plar-bag Marmy made a formal complaint to uncle, who happened
to pass there on horseback about an hour later; and the same evening
Joe's latest and most carefully planned wood heap collapsed while aunt
was pulling a stick out of it in the dark, and it gave her a bad scare,
the results of which might have been serious.

So uncle gave us a thrashing, without the slightest regard for racial
distinctions, and sent us to bed without our suppers.

We sought Jimmie's camp, but Joe got neither sympathy nor damper from
his father, and I was sent home with a fatherly lecture "for going
alonga that fella," meaning Joe.

Joe and I discussed existence at a waterhole down the creek next
afternoon, over a billy of crawfish which we had boiled and a piece of
gritty damper, and decided to retire beyond the settled districts--some
five hundred miles or so--to a place that Joe said he knew of, where
there were lagoons and billabongs ten miles wide, alive with ducks and
fish, and black cockatoos and kangaroos and wombats, that only waited to
be knocked over with a stick.

I t