ed no
more; instead, the birds sang in the sun, and he asked himself, 'Is it
all a dream?'

'Why,' declared one of his men, helping him towards the camp, 'should you
worry yourself over having shot that black fellow? If you hadn't, where
should we all have been? and anyhow there are plenty more like him in the
country.' This comforter was himself to need comfort, by and by, on a
less sombre subject. He dashed in upon Sir George, crying, 'Sir, I have
seen the Old Gentleman,' and with his frame shaking as if he had. It was
the Australian bat on midnight circuit, a strange serenade to the
European. Another of nature's creatures was to figure amid circumstances
which did hold cause for terror.

'It's curious,' Sir George mused, 'how we remember trifles of the long
ago with preciseness, when often bigger events are blurred. I recollect,
very well, a slight incident of the scene on the island of Dorre, off the
north-west coast of Australia, when a storm caught us. In turn, I caught
an old cormorant by the neck, and the bird was all we had for breakfast
next morning. A most sedate character he was, trying hard to maintain a
dignified attitude in face of a very tempest of wind. He wished to fly,
but could not, the violence of the gale pinning him to the ground. That
was his death, which we all regretted; and I'm sorry to add that we were
grudging enough to call him tough in the eating.'

This gale was preface to the great adventure of the second stage of Sir
George Grey's Australian explorations. He was to have plenty of
opportunity for the study of the Australian Aborigine, who, by and by,
received him in better wise than at the point of a spear. Somewhere, an
old crone felt inspired to hug and kiss him, in the belief that he was
her own dead son, spun white, and back on earth. Having recruited from
his earlier sufferings, he had gone by Perth, up the coast to Shark's Bay
in an American whaler. He arranged to make a depot of Bernier Island, in
the region of Shark's Bay, and there, on a lovely day, he landed his
stores, burying them for safety in the soil. Up blew this storm, three
nights later, when the explorers laid hands upon the solitary cormorant
of Dorre. Had they been on Bernier, instead, the spoil might have been a
kangaroo, for it owned a special breed of that family.

But to Bernier Island, the larder, Sir George returned, having completed
a section of exploration. He had a dread lest the gale might have
ravished