yond the fire. They
tramped down and tore up the wheat where it ran between the stumps--the
fire was hissing and crackling round and through it, and just as it ran
past them in one place there was a shout, a clatter of horses' hoofs on
the stones, and Mary saw her father riding up the track with a dozen men
behind him. She gave a shriek and ran straight down, through the middle
of the wheat, towards the hut.

Wall and his men jumped to the ground, wrenched green boughs from
the saplings, and, after twenty minutes' hard fighting, the crop was
saved--save for a patchy acre or so. When it was all over Ross sat down
on a log and rested his head on his hands, and his shoulders shook.
Presently he felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up, and saw Wall.

"Shake hands, Ross," he said.

And it was Christmas Day.

But in after years they used to nearly chaff the life out of Mary. "You
were in a great hurry to put on the breeches, weren't you, Mary?" "Bob's
best Sunday-go-meetin's, too, wasn't they, Mary?" "Rather tight fit,
wasn't they, Mary?" "Couldn't get 'em on now, could you, Mary?"

"But," reflected old Peter apart to some cronies, "it ain't every young
chap as gits an idea of the shape of his wife afore he marries her--is
it? An' that's sayin' somethin'."

And old Peter was set down as being an innercent sort of ole cove.

THE HOUSE THAT WAS NEVER BUILT

There had been heavy rain and landslips all along the branch railway
which left the Great Western Line from Sydney just beyond the Blue
Mountains, and ran through thick bush and scrubby ridgy country and
along great alluvial sidings--were the hills on the opposite side of the
wide valleys (misty in depths) faded from deep blue into the pale azure
of the sky--and over the ends of western spurs to the little farming,
mining and pastoral town of Solong, situated in a circle of blue hills
on the banks of the willow-fringed Cudgegong River.

The line was hopelessly blocked, and some publicans at Solong had put
on the old coach-road a couple of buggies, a wagonette, and an old mail
coach--relic of the days of Cobb & Co., which had been resurrected from
some backyard and tinkered up--to bring the train passengers on from the
first break in the line over the remaining distance of forty miles or
so. Capertee Station (old time, "Capertee Camp"--a teamster's camp) was
the last station before the first washout, and there the railway line
and the old road parted compan