r patch
again, and to take his ease beside the gunyah.

He had recently struck up a more than bowing acquaintance with the
koala that he had once dragged through a quarter of a mile of scrub
to the gunyah, and was now in the habit of meeting this quaint
little bear nearly every day. For his part, Koala never presumed to
make the slightest advance in Finn's direction, but he had come to
realize that the great Wolfhound wished him no harm, and, though
his conversation seldom went beyond plaintive complainings and
lugubrious assertions of his own complete in offensiveness, Finn
liked to sit near the little beast occasionally, and watch his
fubsy antics and listen to his plaint. Koala was rather like the
Mad Hatter that Alice met in Wonderland; he was "a very poor man,"
by his way of it; and, though in reality rather a contented
creature, seemed generally to be upon the extreme verge of shedding
tears.

Another of the wild folk that Finn met for the first time in his
life during these nine days, and continued to meet on a friendly
footing, was a large native porcupine, or echidna. Finn was
sniffing one afternoon at what he took to be the opening to a
rabbit's burrow, when, greatly to his surprise, Echidna showed up,
some three or four yards away, from one of the exits of the same
earth. The creature's shock of fretful quills was not inviting, and
Finn discovered no inclination to risk touching it with his nose;
but, having jumped forward in such a way as to shut Echidna off
from his home, they were left perforce face to face for a few
moments. During those moments, Finn decided that he had no wish to
slay the ant-eating porcupine, and Echidna, for his part, made up
his exceedingly rudimentary little mind that Finn was a fairly
harmless person. So they sat up looking at one another, and Finn
marvelled that the world should contain so curious a creature as
his new acquaintance; while Echidna doubtless wondered, in his
primitive, prickly fashion, how much larger dogs were likely to
grow in that part of the country. Then the flying tail of a
bandicoot caught Finn's attention, and the passing that way of an
unusually fat bull-dog ant drew Echidna from reflection to
business, and the oddly ill-matched couple parted after their first
meeting. After this, they frequently exchanged civil greeting when
their paths happened to cross in the bush.

But, unlike the large majority of Australia's wild folk, Finn was
exclusively a car