Grandma Clay,
however, thought them fine, and as the demand for them was not likely
to be greater than the supply, I generously presented her with one,
unfinished and all though it was, and which she "hung on the line"
with Jim Clay; and no doubt it was not so great a caricature of the
beauty of the Noonoon as the "enlargements" were of the comeliness of
their dead original in the days when he had told life's sweetest story
to the dashing damsel who could handle her coaching team of five with
as much complacence as her granddaughter drove her small fat pony in
the little yellow sulky about the execrably rough but level roads of
Noonoon municipality.

This month of real orange blossoms was a time of moonlight, and
regardless of the fact that the river scenes were at their best for
reproduction on canvas, when the sun was high enough above the gorges
to send great quivering shafts of sunlight between the tree-trunks
deep into the heart of the pools, and to cast the shadow of the gum
leaves in lace-like patterns on their surface, we sometimes delayed
our setting out till close upon sundown, and took a billy[2] and
provisions, intent upon having our tea on the rocks under the trees by
Noonoon's banks.

[Footnote 2: A tin pail.]

Ah! glorious summer hours on the happy Noonoon, amid-stream, bright in
the hot afternoon sun, cool by the edges where the lilies and reeds
abounded, and the beetling cliffs and the limitless eucalypti flung
their shade.

There was a joy in going abroad when the sun was nearly on the blue
wall of mountain, and its oblique beams poured a golden mist over the
blossoming orangeries, the milk-white spiraea in Clay's drive, and
intensified the gorgeous red of the regal pomegranate blooms showing
against the heliotrope on the lower limbs of the umbrageous cedars.
Coming down the little pathway gained by the creaking garden gate, we
shot out from among the drooping willows, the steerswoman turning her
face up-stream where, in a southerly direction, the ranges were cut in
a great V-shaped rift that let the waters through. Anxious to escape
from the company and critical observation of the garden species of the
local boater, we went a long way up-stream. Seven or eight miles were
but a bagatelle to the amateur sculling champion of the State that
held the world's championship, and he pulled his freight past the
evidence of husbandmen, past the straight historic stretch where the
Canadian champion had lost