ntoxicated
that night, and determined to have a party all by himself.

Now it may seem very annoying, and I confess I find it so myself; but,
having got so far, I don't see my way to tell the rest, even if Annie
Colborn told me the story herself. For after her father's death she
married a man who had a small sheep-station and a hotel not forty miles
from Carabobla, in New South Wales. I stayed there a couple of days when
I was going north to the Murrumbidgee. But though she told me, I cannot
tell it again, at least not in bold, bad print. Still, it will occur
to most that a man of King Billy's sweet and innocent disposition might
very likely create a sensation, when his natural discretion was drowned
in bad whisky, if he ended his solitary corroboree in the moonlight by
going up to Colborn's house in order to deliver a speech of gratitude
through the French windows.

So Colborn and the king had a corroboree all to themselves in the open
space before the house, while the gold commissioner's guests roared with
laughter to find out where the missing dress-coat was. Next day King
Billy resumed the split frock-coat.

THY HEART'S DESIRE, By Netta Syrett

The tents were pitched in the little plain surrounded by hills. Right
and left there were stretches of tender, vivid green where the young
corn was springing; farther still, on either hand, the plain was yellow
with mustard-flower; but in the immediate foreground it was bare and
stony. A few thorny bushes pushed their straggling way through the dry
soil, ineffectively as far as the grace of the landscape was concerned,
for they merely served to emphasise the barren aridness of the land that
stretched before the tents, sloping gradually to the distant hills.

The hills were uninteresting enough in themselves; they had no grandeur
of outline, no picturesqueness even, though at morning and evening the
sun, like a great magician, clothed them with beauty at a touch.

They had begun to change, to soften, to blush rose red in the evening
light, when a woman came to the entrance of the largest of the tents and
looked toward them. She leaned against the support on one side of the
canvas flap, and, putting back her head, rested that, too, against it,
while her eyes wandered over the plain and over the distant hills.

She was bareheaded, for the covering of the tent projected a few feet to
form an awning overhead. The gentle breeze which had risen with sundown
stirred th