d from whom we got lollies
(those hard old red-and-white "fish lollies" that grocers sent home with
parcels of groceries and receipted bills). Now one washing day, they
being as glad to get rid of us at home as we were to get out, we went
over to the good house and found no one at home except the grown-up
daughter, who used to sing for us, and read "Robinson Crusoe" of nights,
"out loud", and give us more lollies than any of the rest--and with
whom we were passionately in love, notwithstanding the fact that she was
engaged to a "grown-up man"--(we reckoned he'd be dead and out of the
way by the time we were old enough to marry her). She was washing.
She had carried the stool and tub over against the stick fence which
separated her house from the bad house; and, to our astonishment and
dismay, the bad girl had brought HER tub over against her side of the
fence. They stood and worked with their shoulders to the fence between
them, and heads bent down close to it. The bad girl would sing a few
words, and the good girl after her, over and over again. They sang very
low, we thought. Presently the good grown-up girl turned her head and
caught sight of us. She jumped, and her face went flaming red; she laid
hold of the stool and carried it, tub and all, away from that fence in
a hurry. And the bad grown-up girl took her tub back to her house. The
good grown-up girl made us promise never to tell what we saw--that she'd
been talking to a bad girl--else she would never, never marry us.

She told me, in after years, when she'd grown up to be a grandmother,
that the bad girl was surreptitiously teaching her to sing "Madeline"
that day.

I remember a dreadful story of a digger who went and shot himself
one night after hearing that bad girl sing. We thought then what a
frightfully bad woman she must be. The incident terrified us; and
thereafter we kept carefully and fearfully out of reach of her voice,
lest we should go and do what the digger did.

. . . . .

I have a dreamy recollection of a circus on Gulgong in the roaring days,
more than twenty years ago, and a woman (to my child-fancy a being from
another world) standing in the middle of the ring, singing:

Out in the cold world--out in the street--
Asking a penny from each one I meet;
Cheerless I wander about all the day,
Wearing my young life in sorrow away!

That last line haunted me for many years. I remember being frightened by
women sobbi