is
inspection--thirty-seven dissolute-looking ducks, ninety-three degraded
and anaemic female fowls, thirteen spirit-broken roosters, and eleven
apathetic geese. Denison caught one of the ducks, which immediately
endeavoured to swallow his fore-finger, under the impression it was food
of some sort.

'Jacky,' he said to the leading coloured gentleman, 'my brother told me
that there were five hundred ducks here. Where are they?'

Jacky said that the ducks _would_ go on the river and that 'plenty
feller big alligator eat 'em up.'

'Then where are the seven hundred and fifty laying hens?'

Jacky scratched his woolly head and grinned. 'Goanner' eat some, snake
eat some, some die, some run away in bush, hawk eat some. By ------,
this feller duck and fowl altogether dam fool.' "

During the following week Denison found that Jacky had not deviated from
the truth--the alligators did eat the ducks, the tiger and carpet-snakes
and iguanas did crawl about the place at night-time and seize any
luckless fowl not strong enough to fly up to roost in the branch of a
tree, the hawks did prefer live poultry to long-deceased bullock, and
those hens physically capable of laying eggs laid them on an ironstone
ridge about a mile away from the house. He went there one day, found
nine eggs, and saw five death adders and a large and placid carpet
snake. Then he wrote to his brother, and said that he thought the place
would pay when the drought broke up, but he did not feel justified in
taking L3, 10s. a week from the bank under the present circumstances,
and would like to resign his berth, as he was afraid he was about to get
an attack of fever.

A few days later he received an official letter from the bank, signed
'C. Aubrey Denison, Manager,' expressing surprise at his desire to
give up the control of a concern that was 'bound to pay,' and for
the management of which the bank had rejected twenty-three other
applications in his favour, and suggesting that, as the poultry were
not thriving, he might skin the carcases of such cattle as died in the
future, and send the hides to Cooktown--'for every hide the bank
will allow you 2s. 6d. nett.' With the official letter was a private
communication from the Elder Brother telling him not to be disheartened
so quickly--the place was sure to pay as soon as the drought broke up;
also that as the river water was bad, and tea made from it was not
good for anyone with fever, he was sending up a dozen o