te of their sadness the bush nights are lovely, when the
landscapes are glorified by the magic of the moon. Even the gum leaves
are transmuted into silver as the moonlight laves them, making the
blacks say the leaves laugh, and the shimmer is like a smile.

No wonder trees have such a place in the old religions of the world,
and wirreenuns, even as do Buddhists, love to linger beneath their
branches--the one holding converse with his spirit friends, the other
cultivating the perfect peace.

There would not be much perfect peace about a wirreenun's communing
with the spirits if it happened to be in mosquito time. The blacks say
a little grey-speckled bird rules the mosquitoes, and calls them from
their swamp-homes to attack us. In the mythological days this bird--a
woman--was badly treated by a man who translated her sons to the sky;
having revenged herself on him, she vowed vengeance on all men, and in
the form of the mosquito bird wreaks that vengeance. Her mosquito
slaves have just the same spots on their wings as she has.

I dare say little with an air of finality about black people; I have
lived too much with them for that. To be positive, you should never
spend more than six months in their neighbourhood; in fact, if you want
to keep your anthropological ideas quite firm, it is safer to let the
blacks remain in inland Australia while you stay a few thousand miles
away. Otherwise, your preconceived notions are almost sure to totter to
their foundations; and nothing is more annoying than to have
elaborately built-up, delightfully logical theories, played ninepins
with by an old greybeard of a black, who apparently objects to his
beliefs being classified, docketed, and pigeon-holed, until he has had
his say.

After all, when we consider their marriage restrictions, their totems,
and the rest, what becomes of the freedom of the savage? As with us, as
Montague says, 'Our laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived
from Nature, proceed from custom.'

I have often thought the failure of the generality of missionaries lay
in the fact that they began at the wrong end. Not recognising the
tyranny of custom, though themselves victims to it, they ignore, as a
rule, the religion into which the black is born, and by which he lived,
in much closer obedience to its laws than we of this latter-day
Christendom. It seems to me, if we cannot respect the religion of
others we deny our own. If we are powerless to see the the