ked a deep hole beneath her body,
just as a common hen scrapes and sways and ruffles her feathers in the
dry dust of the farmyard. In less than five minutes the huge bird was
encompassed in a cloud of flying sand, and working her long neck, great
thick legs, and outspread toes exactly as an ordinary fowl. Then, having
thoroughly covered herself with sand from beak to tail, she rose,
shook herself violently, and stalked away up the bank again, where her
companion soon followed her, and I lost sight of the pair as they strode
through the thick green of the she-oak trees.

As darkness fell I built up a larger fire and spread my blanket beside
it to sleep under the open sky instead of in the deserted house, for
the night was soft, warm, and windless. Overhead was a firmament of
cloudless blue, with here and there a shining star beginning to
show; but away to the south-west a dark line of cloud was rising and
spreading, and I felt cheered at the sight, for it was a sign of rain.
As I watched it steadily increasing the first voices of the night began
to call--a 'possum squealed from the branches of a blue gum in the
creek, and was answered by another somewhere near; and then the long,
long mournful wail of a curlew cried out from the sunbaked plain beyond.
Oh, the unutterable sense of loneliness that at times the long-drawn,
penetrating cry of the curlew, resounding through the silence of the
night amid the solitude of vast Australian plains, causes the solitary
bushman or traveller to feel! I well remember on one occasion camping
on the banks of the Lower Burdekin River, and having my broken
slumbers--for I was ill with fever--disturbed by a brace of curlews,
which were uttering their depressing cries within a few hundred yards
of me, and how I at last became so wrought up and almost frenzied by
the persistency of their doleful notes, that I followed them up with a
Winchester rifle, mile after mile, wasting my cartridges and exhausting
mind and body in the vain attempt to shoot them in the dark. There is to
my knowledge nothing so mournful as the call of the curlew, unless it
be the moaning cry of a penguin out upon the ocean, when a sea-fog
encompasses the ship that lies becalmed. There is something so intensely
human about it--as if some lost soul were wailing for mercy and
forgiveness.

But on this night the cry of the curlew was pleasing to my ear, for as
I lay and watched the rising bank of cloud, I heard others callin