an!

White people were an immense joke to Nimmaylee. She conformed to their
rules as one playing a new game. She has a little brother as black as
herself. She has a substantial pair of legs, but his are so thin and
his little body so round that he looks like a little black spider.

Nimmaylee is quite an authority on corroborees, knowing ever so many
different steps, from the serpentile trail of the codfish to the mimic
fight. The songs she knows too. She used, when she lived in the camp,
to marshal in a little crowd of camp children, and put them through a
varied performance for my benefit.

These performances were of daily occurrence when the fruit was ripe,
for Nimmaylee's capacity for water-melon was practically unlimited.

Nimmaylee was a wonderful little fisherwoman; she delighted in a
fishing expedition with me. Off we used to go with our lines, worms or
frogs for bait, or perhaps shrimps or mussels if we were after cod. If
we were successful, Nimmaylee would string the fish on a stick in a
most professional manner, and carry them with an air of pride to the
cook. She attributes her fishing successes to a charm having been sung
over her to that end as a baby.

Accompanied by some reliable old 'gins' and ever so many piccaninnies,
I used to take long walks through the 'bush.'

How interesting those blacks made my bush walks for me! Every ridge,
plain, and bend had its name and probably legend; each bird a past,
every excrescence of nature a reason for its being.

Those walks certainly at least modified my conceit. I was always the
dunce of the party--the smallest child knew more of woodcraft than I
did, and had something to tell of everything. Seeing Oogahnahbayah, a
small eagle-hawk, flying over, they would say, 'He eats the emu eggs.'
He flies over where the emu is sitting on her eggs and makes a noise
hoping to frighten the bird off; having done so, he will drop a stone
on the eggs. If the emu is not startled off the nest, the hawk will fly
on, alight at some distance, and walk up like a black fellow, still
with the stone in his beak, to the nest; off the emu will go, then the
hawk bangs the eggs with the stone until he breaks them. He throws the
stone on one side, has a feed of emu eggs, and goes off, leaving poor
Moorunglely, the sitting emu, to come back and find her eggs all
destroyed. As the narrative ended, the little {aborigines} would look
quite sad, and say 'Nurragah!' 'Poor thing!' at the though