n, and his few favourite horses.

But on this occasion Mrs. Macdougal had outdone herself, and had exceeded
all her previous efforts to shine as a generous hostess. Her aim had been
to make Boobyalla the centre of attraction for thirty miles round
throughout the merry Yuletide, and for nearly two weeks Donald had gone
about with an air of lively trepidation, due to an idea that he was being
brought precipitately to ruin by all this wasteful and ridiculous excess.
When Mrs. Macdougal's guests came upon her lord and master laboriously
casting up sums with a stab of carpenter's pencil on bits of waste-paper,
or smooth chips, or even on the walls, they understood perfectly that he
was satisfying himself, with accurate calculations, that the shameful
increase in the household expenses their presence entailed had not
dragged him over the jealously guarded margin between income and
expenditure.

Mrs. Macdougal's guests did not mind Macdougal in the least, however; the
eccentricities of Old Dint-the-Tin were well known to the neighbouring
squatters, and from their point of view, as visitors at Boobyalla on
pleasure bent, he did not count. They bumped against him in the dark
passages of his absurdly disjointed house, and found him on occasions in
the drawing-room and the dining-room, but nothing was done or left undone
out of consideration for his feelings. If they were content to talk about
sheep and cattle, he would converse with them, and he was even capable of
enthusiasm on the subject of horses, but evidently had no interests apart
from these matters. Nobody outside the family circle had known him to
address more than half a dozen words to his wife at one time, and his
average remark contained one monosyllable. He behaved a good deal like a
stranger towards his own children. Occasionally he went so far as to
place a hand on a curly head, with an uncouth show of interest, or to say
a few words of kindness; but it was done diffidently, and a close
observer might have detected in the man a sensitive shrinking from the
idea of bringing his misshapen figure and weird ugliness into contrast
with the peculiar beauty of the youngsters. The only human creature about
Boobyalla in whose company he seemed to be quite at home was Yarra, the
half-caste aboriginal boy, scandalously reputed in the neighbourhood--not
without excellent reason, it must be admitted--to be his own son.

We have seen Donald Macdougal, J.P., as he appeared in Me