Project Gutenberg's Seven Little Australians, by Ethel Sybil Turner

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Title: Seven Little Australians

Author: Ethel Sybil Turner

Posting Date: December 7, 2009 [EBook #4731]
Release Date: December, 2003
First Posted: March 6, 2002
Last Updated: September 11, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS ***

Produced by Geoffrey Cowling. HTML version by Al Haines.

Seven Little Australians

by

Ethel Turner

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I Chiefly Descriptive
II Fowl for Dinner
III Virtue Not Always Rewarded
IV The General Sees Active Service
V "Next Monday Morning"
VI The Sweetness of Sweet Sixteen
VII "What Say You to Falling in Love?"
VIII A Catapult and a Catastrophe
IX Consequences
X Bunty in the Light of a Hero
XI The Truant
XII Swish, Swish!
XIII Uninvited Guests
XIV The Squatter's Invitation
XV Three Hundred Miles in the Train
XVI Yarrahappini
XVII Cattle-Drafting at Yarrahappini
XVIII The Picnic at Krangi-Bahtoo
XIX A Pale-Blue Hair Ribbon
XX Little Judy
XXI When the Sun Went Down
XXII And Last

To
MY MOTHER

CHAPTER I

Chiefly Descriptive

Before you fairly start this story I should like to give you just a
word of warning.

If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with
perhaps; a naughtily inclined one to point a moral, you had better lay
down the book immediately and betake yourself to 'Sandford and Merton'
or similar standard juvenile works. Not one of the seven is really
good, for the very excellent reason that Australian children never are.

In England, and America, and Africa, and Asia, the little folks may
be paragons of virtue, I know little about them.

But in Australia a model child is--I say it not without
thankfulness--an unknown quantity.

It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in the
sunny brilliancy, of our atmosphere. It may be that the land and
the people are young-hearted together, and the children's spirits not
crushed and saddened by the shadow of long years' sor