rectly for several days.

"Children," said the master gravely and sadly, "children, this is the
first time I ever had to put 'D' to the name of one of my scholars. Poor
Mary! she was one of my first pupils--came the first morning the school
was opened. Children, I want you to be a little quieter to-day during
play-hour, out of respect for the name of your dead schoolmate whom it
has pleased the Almighty to take in her youth."

"Please, sir," asked the galoot, evidently encouraged by his fancied
success, "please, sir, what does 'D' stand for?"

"Damn you for a hass!" snarled Jim Bullock between his teeth, giving the
galoot a vicious dig in the side with his elbow.

THE SHEARING OF THE COOK'S DOG

The dog was a little conservative mongrel poodle, with long dirty white
hair all over him--longest and most over his eyes, which glistened
through it like black beads. Also he seemed to have a bad liver. He
always looked as if he was suffering from a sense of injury, past or to
come. It did come. He used to follow the shearers up to the shed after
breakfast every morning, but he couldn't have done this for love--there
was none lost between him and the men. He wasn't an affectionate dog;
it wasn't his style. He would sit close against the shed for an hour or
two, and hump himself, and sulk, and look sick, and snarl whenever the
"Sheep-Ho" dog passed, or a man took notice of him. Then he'd go home.
What he wanted at the shed at all was only known to himself; no one
asked him to come. Perhaps he came to collect evidence against us. The
cook called him "my darg," and the men called the cook "Curry and Rice,"
with "old" before it mostly.

Rice was a little, dumpy, fat man, with a round, smooth, good-humoured
face, a bald head, feet wide apart, and a big blue cotton apron. He had
been a ship's cook. He didn't look so much out of place in the hut as
the hut did round him. To a man with a vivid imagination, if he regarded
the cook dreamily for a while, the floor might seem to roll gently like
the deck of a ship, and mast, rigging, and cuddy rise mistily in the
background. Curry might have dreamed of the cook's galley at times, but
he never mentioned it. He ought to have been at sea, or comfortably dead
and stowed away under ground, instead of cooking for a mob of unredeemed
rouseabouts in an uncivilized shed in the scrub, six hundred miles from
the ocean.

They chyacked the cook occasionally, and grumbled--or pretended