fa. But soon he
took a turn. He sank quickly, and in a few moments he was dead. In a
few moments more nearly everyone had gone.

"While you are here," Dad said to the clergyman, in a soft voice, "I'll
open the swag." He commenced to unroll it--it was a big blanket--and
when he got to the end there were his own trousers--the lost ones,
nothing more. Dad's eyes met Mother's; Dave's met Sal's; none of them
spoke. But the clergyman drew his own conclusions; and on the
following Sunday, at Nobby-Nobby, he preached a stirring sermon on that
touching bequest of the man with the bear-skin cap.

Chapter XXVI.

One Christmas.

Three days to Christmas; and how pleased we were! For months we had
looked forward to it. Kate and Sandy, whom we had only seen once since
they went on their selection, were to be home. Dave, who was away
shearing for the first time, was coming home too. Norah, who had been
away for a year teaching school, was home already. Mother said she
looked quite the lady, and Sal envied the fashionable cut of her
dresses.

Things were in a fair way at Shingle Hut; rain had fallen and
everything looked its best. The grass along the headlands was almost
as tall as the corn; the Bathurst-burr, the Scotch-thistles, and the
"stinking Roger" were taller. Grow! Dad never saw the like. Why, the
cultivation was n't large enough to hold the melon and pumpkin
vines--they travelled into the horse-paddock and climbed up trees and
over logs and stumps, and they would have fastened on the horses only
the horses were fat and fresh and often galloped about. And the stock!
Blest if the old cows did n't carry udders like camp-ovens, and had so
much milk that one could track them everywhere they went--they leaked
so. The old plough-horses, too--only a few months before dug out of
the dam with a spade, and slung up between heaven and earth for a week,
and fed and prayed for regularly by Dad--actually bolted one day with
the dray because Joe rattled a dish of corn behind them. Even the pet
kangaroo was nearly jumping out of its skin; and it took the big black
"goanna" that used to come after eggs all its time to beat Dad from the
barn to the nearest tree, so fat was it. And such a season for
butterflies and grasshoppers, and grubs and snakes, and native bears!
Given an ass, an elephant, and an empty wine-bottle or two, and one
might have thought Noah's ark had been emptied at our selection.

Two days to C