The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lost Child, by Henry Kingsley

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Title: The Lost Child

Author: Henry Kingsley

Release Date: May 9, 2008 [EBook #25404]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE LOST CHILD.

BY

HENRY KINGSLEY.

[Illustration: "_And there he stood, naked and free, on the
forbidden ground._"]

_ILLUSTRATED BY L. FROLICH._

London and New York:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1871.

[Illustration: "_Looking eagerly across the water._" FRONT.]

PREFACE.

It is only natural that an author should say a few words about a
republication of this kind. The story in its separate form has the
advantage of being illustrated by an eminent artist, whose special
qualifications are widely known and acknowledged; and it seemed to all
concerned best that it should be left entirely untouched. The first two
paragraphs and the last short one are simply added: no other liberty has
been taken with it.

To avoid the trouble of those great plagues of literature, foot-notes,
the author asks the reader to submit to a few very trifling
explanations:

"Quantongs" are a bush fruit, of about the same quality as green
gooseberries, but, like the last-named fruit, very much sought after by
the native youth.

The Bunyip is the native river devil, or kelpie, evidently the crocodile
of the Northern Australian rivers, whose recognition by the Southern
natives in their legends shows, if nothing else did, that the centre of
dispersion in Australia was from the North, as Doctor Laing told us
years ago.

With regard to the habit which lost children have of aimless climbing,
the author knew a child who, being lost by his father while out shooting
on one of the flats bordering on the Eastern Pyrenees in Port Phillip on
Sunday afternoon, was found the next Wednesday dead, at an elevation
above the Avoca township of between two and three thousa