ligion of any sort or kind; as entire a little savage, in fact, as you
could find in the worst den in your city, morally speaking, and yet
beautiful to look on; as active as a roe, and, with regard to natural
objects, as fearless as a lion.

As yet unfit to begin labour; all the long summer he would wander about
the river bank, up and down the beautiful rock-walled paradise where he
was confined, sometimes looking eagerly across the water at the waving
forest boughs, and fancying he could see other children far up the
vistas beckoning to him to cross and play in that merry land of shifting
lights and shadows.

It grew quite into a passion with the poor little man to get across and
play there; and one day when his mother was shifting the hurdles, and he
was handing her the strips of green hide which bound them together, he
said to her,--

"Mother, what country is that across the river?"

"The forest, child."

"There's plenty of quantongs over there, eh, mother, and raspberries?
Why mayn't I get across and play there?"

"The river is too deep, child, and the Bunyip lives in the water under
the stones."

[Illustration: "_Mother, what country is that across the river?_"]

"Who are the children that play across there?"

"Black children, likely."

"No white children?"

"Pixies; don't go near 'em, child; they'll lure you on, Lord knows
where. Don't get trying to cross the river, now, or you'll be drowned."

But next day the passion was stronger on him than ever. Quite early on
the glorious cloudless midsummer day he was down by the river-side,
sitting on a rock, with his shoes and stockings off, paddling his feet
in the clear tepid water, and watching the million fish in the
shallows--black fish and grayling--leaping and flashing in the sun.

There is no pleasure that I have ever experienced like a child's
midsummer holiday,--the time, I mean, when two or three of us used to
go away up the brook, and take our dinners with us, and come home at
night tired, dirty, happy, scratched beyond recognition, with a great
nosegay, three little trout and one shoe, the other having been used for
a boat till it had gone down with all hands out of soundings. How poor
our Derby days, our Greenwich dinners, our evening parties, where there
are plenty of nice girls, are, after that! Depend on it, a man never
experiences such pleasure or grief after fourteen as he does before:
unless in some cases in his first love-making, when t