graph"
lying on the chair, where the owner had laid it down.

A study in brown the stockman was, brown, dull eyes; brown,
dusty-looking hair; brown skin, sundried and shrivelled; brown,
unkempt beard; brown trousers of corduroy, and brown coat.

His pipe was black, however--a clay, that looked as if it had
been smoked for twenty years.

"Wouldn't you like to be nearer the homestead?" Meg asked. "Isn't
it lonely?"

"Not ter mention," the brown man said to his pipe or his beard.

"What do you do with yourself when you're, not outside?" asked
Pip.

"Smoke," said the man.

"But on Sundays, and all through the evenings?"

"Smoke," he said.

"On Cwismas day," Baby said, pressing to see this strange man;
"zen what does you do?"

"Smoke" he said.

Judy wanted to know how long he'd lived in the little place, and
everyone was stricken dumb to hear he had been there most of the time
for seven years.

"Don't you ever forget how to talk?" she said, in an awestruck
voice.

But he answered laconically to his beard that there was the cat.

Baby had found it already under the kerosene tin that did duty
for a bucket, and it had scratched her in three places: brown,
like its master, it was evil-eyed, fiercely whiskered, thin
as a rail; still, there was the affection of years between the two.

Mr. Gillet told him of the squatter's wish that he should go with the
other men and help with the tree. He pulled a brown hat over his brow
and moved away towards the bullock-dray, which had crept up the
winding road by now, to the hill-top.

"Water in tub, nearer than creek," he muttered to his pipe before he
went, and they found his tub-tank and gladly filled the billy ready
for lunch.

Mrs. Hassal's roast fowls and duck tasted well; even though they
frizzled on the plates as if the sun were trying to finish their
cooking. And the apple tarts and apricot turnovers vanished speedily;
and of the fruit salad that came forth from two screw-top
bottles, not a teaspoonful remained to tell a tale.

Mr. Gillet had brought materials for a damper, by special request,
and after lunch prepared to make it, so they might have it for
afternoon tea.

"Pheough!" said Judy. "Is THAT how you make it? You need not give
ME any."

It certainly was manufactured with surprising celerity.

Mr. Gillet merely tossed some flour from a bag out upon a plate,
added a pinch of salt and some water; then he shaped it into a cake
of dough, and la