im and
herself--just the same as if we were in town--and make me get up on one
end and put on a collar and take her and Jim for a walk along the creek.
She said she wanted to keep me civilised. She tried to make a gentleman
of me for years, but gave it up gradually.

Well. It was the first morning on the creek: I was greasing the
waggon-wheels, and James out after the horse, and Mary hanging out
clothes, in an old print dress and a big ugly white hood, when I heard
her being hailed as 'Hi, missus!' from the front slip-rails.

It was a boy on horseback. He was a light-haired, very much freckled boy
of fourteen or fifteen, with a small head, but with limbs, especially
his bare sun-blotched shanks, that might have belonged to a grown
man. He had a good face and frank grey eyes. An old, nearly black
cabbage-tree hat rested on the butts of his ears, turning them out at
right angles from his head, and rather dirty sprouts they were. He wore
a dirty torn Crimean shirt; and a pair of man's moleskin trousers rolled
up above the knees, with the wide waistband gathered under a greenhide
belt. I noticed, later on, that, even when he wore trousers short enough
for him, he always rolled 'em up above the knees when on horseback, for
some reason of his own: to suggest leggings, perhaps, for he had them
rolled up in all weathers, and he wouldn't have bothered to save them
from the sweat of the horse, even if that horse ever sweated.

He was seated astride a three-bushel bag thrown across the ridge-pole of
a big grey horse, with a coffin-shaped head, and built astern something
after the style of a roughly put up hip-roofed box-bark humpy.* His
colour was like old box-bark, too, a dirty bluish-grey; and, one time,
when I saw his rump looming out of the scrub, I really thought it was
some old shepherd's hut that I hadn't noticed there before. When he
cantered it was like the humpy starting off on its corner-posts.

* 'Humpy', a rough hut.

'Are you Mrs Wilson?' asked the boy.

'Yes,' said Mary.

'Well, mother told me to ride acrost and see if you wanted anythink. We
killed lars' night, and I've fetched a piece er cow.'

'Piece of WHAT?' asked Mary.

He grinned, and handed a sugar-bag across the rail with something heavy
in the bottom of it, that nearly jerked Mary's arm out when she took
it. It was a piece of beef, that looked as if it had been cut off with a
wood-axe, but it was fresh and clean.

'Oh, I'm so glad!' cried