The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dot and the Kangaroo, by Ethel C. Pedley

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Title: Dot and the Kangaroo

Author: Ethel C. Pedley

Posting Date: June 20, 2009 [EBook #3703]
Release Date: February, 2003
First Posted: July 26, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOT AND THE KANGAROO ***

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DOT AND THE KANGAROO

by

Ethel C. Pedley

To the
children of Australia
in the hope of enlisting their sympathies
for the many
beautiful, amiable, and frolicsome creatures
of their fair land,
whose extinction, through ruthless destruction,
is being surely accomplished

CHAPTER I.

Little Dot had lost her way in the bush. She knew it, and was very
frightened. She was too frightened in fact to cry, but stood in the
middle of a little dry, bare space, looking around her at the scraggy
growths of prickly shrubs that had torn her little dress to rags,
scratched her bare legs and feet till they bled, and pricked her hands
and arms as she had pushed madly through the bushes, for hours, seeking
her home. Sometimes she looked up to the sky. But little of it could
be seen because of the great tall trees that seemed to her to be trying
to reach heaven with their far-off crooked branches. She could see
little patches of blue sky between the tangled tufts of her way in the
and was very drooping leaves, and, as the dazzling sunlight had faded,
she began to think it was getting late, and that very soon it would be
night.

The thought of being lost and alone in the wild bush at night, took her
breath away with fear, and made her tired little legs tremble under
her. She gave up all hope of finding her home, and sat down at the foot
of the biggest blackbutt tree, with her face buried in her hands and
knees, and thought of all that had happened, and what might happen yet.

It seemed such a long, long time since her mother had told her that she
might gather some bush flowers while she cooked the dinner, and Dot
recollected how she was bid not to go out of sight of the cottage. How
she wished now she had remembered this