take me some day, and
if we were careful we could knock over two or three people easily; they
were a bad lot these 'man-a-bush' (bush-men).

At ten o'clock I turned in, and Bobaran, after an animated conversation
with his family, lay down at my door with a Snider rifle and his
horse-pistol by his side.

And for many long, weary months, in the beautiful but fever-ridden
Kabaira Bay, he was the only person to whom I could talk; and in time I
began to take a liking to him, for I found him, as Parker had told me,
'a thunderin' old cut-throat, but as straight as a die to a white man
who acts straight to him.'

SEA FISHING IN AUSTRALIA

'Hi, mister, turn out, please, if you're a-comin' with us,' a gruff
voice called out to me one frosty morning in May, and then a hairy,
good-humoured-looking face flattened itself against my window pane as
the owner sought to peer into the room.

I jumped out of bed, opened the window, and shivered in my pyjamas as
the keen morning air rushed in to the warm room. Slaney, the coxswain
of the Port Macquarie pilot boat,{*} was standing below me on the grassy
side walk, muffled up in his great coat, and carrying a shin of beef in
his hand.

* Port Macquarie is a quaint 'old' seaport on the northern
coast of New South Wales.

'How does it look outside, Slaney?' I asked.

'Smooth as glass. Hurry up, please. I've just come from the butcher's,
couldn't get any fish bait last night, so bespoke a shin of beef.'

Five minuses later I had dressed, and was running up the hill to the
pilot station with my fishing tackle, together with some sandwiches,
some bottles of beer, and a tin pannikin, slung in a corn sack over my
shoulder--not a very elegant turn-out, but the correct thing for such
rough and tumble work as schnapper fishing. At the top of the hill I
stopped to give myself breath a minute. An impatient 'Hallo there, _do_
hurry,' ascended to me from beneath, where the smart pilot boat lay
rocking on the waters of a little cove, cut out of the solid rock by the
labour of convicts seventy years before, her crew of six men standing up
to their knees in the water, and holding her steady. Tumbling down the
grassy hill at the risk of breaking my neck, I waded out and clambered
over the side, and in another minute the crew were bending to their oars
and the boat sweeping round a clump of conical rocks that sheltered
the boat harbour from the long roll of the Pacific billows. Oh, wh