on the back of his head,
And the string of it under his nose.

Poor bullocky Bill! In the circles select
Of the scholars he hasn't a place;
But he walks like a _man_, with his forehead erect,
And he looks at God's day in the face.

For, rough as he seems, he would shudder to wrong
A dog with the loss of a hair;
And the angels of shine and superlative song
See his heart and the deity there.

Few know him, indeed; but the beauty that glows
In the forest is loveliness still;
And Providence helping the life of the rose
Is a Friend and a Father to Bill.

Cooranbean

Years fifty, and seven to boot, have smitten the children of men
Since sound of a voice or a foot came out of the head of that glen.
The brand of black devil is there--an evil wind moaneth around--
There is doom, there is death in the air: a curse groweth up from the ground!
No noise of the axe or the saw in that hollow unholy is heard,
No fall of the hoof or the paw, no whirr of the wing of the bird;
But a grey mother down by the sea, as wan as the foam on the strait,
Has counted the beads on her knee these forty-nine winters and eight.

Whenever an elder is asked--a white-headed man of the woods--
Of the terrible mystery masked where the dark everlastingly broods,
Be sure he will turn to the bay, with his back to the glen in the range,
And glide like a phantom away, with a countenance pallid with change.
From the line of dead timber that lies supine at the foot of the glade,
The fierce-featured eaglehawk flies--afraid as a dove is afraid;
But back in that wilderness dread are a fall and the forks of a ford--
_Ah! pray and uncover your head, and lean like a child on the Lord._

A sinister fog at the wane--at the change of the moon cometh forth
Like an ominous ghost in the train of a bitter, black storm of the north!
At the head of the gully unknown it hangs like a spirit of bale.
And the noise of a shriek and a groan strikes up in the gusts of the gale.
In the throat of a feculent pit is the beard of a bloody-red sedge;
And a foam like the foam of a fit sweats out of the lips of the ledge.
But down in the water of death, in the livid, dead pool at the base--
_Bow low, with inaudible breath, beseech with the hands to the face!_

A furlong of fetid, black fen, with gelid, green patches of pond,
Lies dumb by the horns of