at runs in your
veins, and you'll come to earn the wages of sin some day. It's a strange
thing,' he used to say, as if he was talking to himself, 'that the girls
are so good, while the boys are delivered over to the Evil One, except a
case here and there. Look at Mary Darcy and Jane Lammerby, and my
little pet Aileen here. I defy any village in Britain to turn out such
girls--plenty of rosy-cheeked gigglers--but the natural refinement and
intelligence of these little damsels astonishes me.'

Well, the old man died suddenly, as I said, and we were all very sorry,
and the school was broken up. But he had taught us all to write fairly
and to keep accounts, to read and spell decently, and to know a little
geography. It wasn't a great deal, but what we knew we knew well, and
I often think of what he said, now it's too late, we ought to have made
better use of it. After school broke up father said Jim and I knew quite
as much as was likely to be any good to us, and we must work for our
living like other people. We'd always done a pretty fair share of that,
and our hands were hard with using the axe and the spade, let alone
holding the plough at odd times and harrowing, helping father to kill
and brand, and a lot of other things, besides getting up while the stars
were in the sky so as to get the cows milked early, before it was time
to go to school.

All this time we had lived in a free kind of way--we wanted for nothing.
We had plenty of good beef, and a calf now and then. About this time I
began to wonder how it was that so many cattle and horses passed through
father's hands, and what became of them.

I hadn't lived all my life on Rocky Creek, and among some of the
smartest hands in that line that old New South Wales ever bred, without
knowing what 'clearskins' and 'cross' beasts meant, and being well aware
that our brand was often put on a calf that no cow of ours ever suckled.
Don't I remember well the first calf I ever helped to put our letters
on? I've often wished I'd defied father, then taken my licking, and
bolted away from home. It's that very calf and the things it led to
that's helped to put me where I am!

Just as I sit here, and these cursed irons rattle whenever I move my
feet, I can see that very evening, and father and the old dog with a
little mob of our crawling cattle and half-a-dozen head of strangers,
cows and calves, and a fat little steer coming through the scrub to the
old stockyard.

It was an