rney up. We were going through the
bunya-bunya country not far from our station, when out of the Bush
there came a black gin with two half-caste girls, she ran up and
stopped the buggy and implored my mother's protection for her girls
because the Blacks wanted to kill and eat them.'

'O ... oh!' Biddy made a shuddering exclamation.

'Didn't I say the Blacks hadn't everything on their side--I ought to
explain though that in our district were large forests of a kind of
pine--there's one in this garden,' and he pointed to a pyramidal fir
tree with spreading branches of small pointed leaves spiked at the
ends, and with a cone of nuts about the size of a big man's head,
hanging from one of the branches.

'That's the bunya-bunya, and the nuts are splendid roasted in the
ashes--if ever that one gets properly ripe--it has to be yellow, you
know--I'll ask Joan Gildea to let me roast it for you. Only it wouldn't
be the same thing at all as when it's done in a fire of gum logs, the
nuts covered with red ashes, and then peeled and washed down with
quartpot tea....'

'Quartpot tea! What a lot you'll have to show me if--if I ever come to
your station in the Back-Blocks.'

'Different from your London Life, eh? ... Your balls and dinners and
big shows and coaching meets in Hyde Park, and all the rest of the
flummery! Different, too, from your kid-glove fox-hunts over grass
fields and trimmed hedges and puddles of ditches--the sort of thing
you've been accustomed to, Lady Bridget, when you've gone out from your
castle for a sporting spree!'

'A sporting spree!' She laughed with a child's merriment, and he joined
in the laugh, 'It's clear to me, Mr McKeith, that you've never hunted
in Ireland. And how did you know, by the way, that I'd lived in a
castle?'

'I was led to believe that a good many of your kind owned historic
castles which your forefathers had won and defended with the sword,' he
answered, a little embarrassed.

'That's true enough.... But if you could see Castle Gaverick! My old
Aunt is always talking of restoring it, but she never will, and if my
cousin Chris Gaverick ever does come into it, he'd rather spend his
money in doing something else.... But never mind that.... I want to
hear about the black gin and the half-caste girls, and if your mother
saved them from the cannibals ... and why the blacks wanted to eat
their own kind. Dog doesn't eat dog--at least, so they tell one.'

'It's this way. Our blacks were