uld fly back rapidly to
tell the news to his mate.

I had almost forgotten her. She was slightly bigger than Robin himself,
and possessed a paler breast. But no one saw them together; and though
they were the most devoted pair, none of the forest folk ever guessed
the fact, but rather treated their tender relationship with a certain
degree of scepticism.

Therefore, these things having been set forth, it was not strange that
the Bush Robin, having eaten a full meal of fat white grubs, should
sit on a bough in the shade of a big _totara_ tree and watch, with
good-natured interest begotten of the knowledge that he had dined, the
movements of the world around him. The broken ground, all banks and
holes and roots, was covered with dead leaves, moss, sticks, and beds
of ferns, and was overgrown with supple-jacks, birch-saplings and
lance-wood. On every side rose immense trees, whose dark boughs,
stretching overhead, shut out the sun from the gloomy shades below.

The Bush Robin, whose sense of hearing was keen and discriminating,
heard a strange sound which was as new as it was interesting to him. He
had heard the roaring of the stags and the screeching of the parrots,
but this new sound was different from either, though somewhat like both.
There it was again. He must go and see what it could mean. In a moment,
he was flitting beneath the trees, threading his way through the leafy
labyrinth, in the direction of the strange noise. As he alighted on a
tall rock, which reared itself abruptly from the hurly-burly of broken
ground, before him he saw two strange objects, the like of which he had
never seen, and of which his friend the wood-hen, who travelled far and
knew everything, had not so much as told him. They must be a new kind of
stag, but they had no horns--yet perhaps those would grow in the spring.
One had fallen down a mossy bank, and the other, who was dangling a
supple-jack to assist his friend in climbing, was making the strange
noise. The creature upon the ground grunted like the wild pigs, from
whose rootings in the earth the Bush Robin was wont to derive immense
profit in the shape of a full diet of worms; but these new animals
walked on two feet, in a manner quite new to the little bird.

Then the strange beings picked up from the ground queer things which the
Bush Robin failed to comprehend, and trudged on through the forest. The
one that led the way struck the trees with a glittering thing, which
left the