g building,
all on a floor, with a roof stretching from the ridge-pole down to the
rones of the verandah, bungalow fashion. It stood some feet above the
ground on a number of tarred and tin-capped piles, a necessary
precaution in the land of the white ant. Some distance away from the
station-house the outbuildings stood--the store, the men's quarters, and
the like--for Barellan was worth having when fully stocked and properly
worked. But now it was languishing for want of an energetic head.

Rumours floated about among the drifting comers and goers who formed
the working staff from time to time; rumours which told of the thriving
condition in which once it had been--when the lady who now reigned over
it in sad and sightless solitude had been in the heyday of her youth and
beauty. But that was nearly thirty years ago, and thirty years back
reaches into the dark mists of the prehistoric age in many parts of
Australia. The tales of that period were necessarily so vague, or
hopelessly contradictory, as various travelling swagsmen tried to
embellish them for the benefit of the listeners in the men's hut, that
scant courtesy was paid to them. More recent stories were evasive enough
as far as substantiation was concerned; all save one, and that was a
gruesome tale--a tale of a fallen tree stretching out long, jagged
branches, sharp at the ends and pointing up a by-track used by the
station hands, years ago, as a short cut to the branding yards. A high
wind had brought that tree down one night, and a new bend had been made
in the track so as to avoid it where it lay with its jagged branches
reaching out like the hungry prongs of a bundle of gigantic
toasting-forks. Years afterwards a stranger, making for the men's hut at
sunset, had passed that way, and, with a ghastly face and quaking limbs,
had dashed into the hut as the men sat at supper, and had told a tale
which was scoffed at, till later, one by one, the men learned to ride
five miles round rather than pass that by-track alone at night.

Another tale there was of a coach stuck up on the old main road beyond
the boundary fence, when the mail was burned, and one of the
passengers, being shot, fell with his head in the fire, and lay there
till the Lady of Barellan, riding down the road in the morning, found
him, and the remainder of the company bound to the trees and gagged. She
had ridden back for help, and had fallen on the verandah of the
station-house as she gave her ne