quite sound when really its whole heart has been eaten out by the
termites. Nowadays the whole area on which a house is to be raised is
covered with cement or with asphalt, and care taken that no timber
joists are allowed to touch the earth and thus give entry to the
termites. Fortunately, these destructive insects cannot burrow through
brick or stone.

In the Northern Territory there are everywhere gigantic mounds raised by
these termites, long, narrow, high, and always pointing due north and
south. You can tell infallibly the points of the compass from the mounds
of this white ant, which has been called the "meridian termite."

Australia has a wild bee of her own (of course, too, there are European
bees introduced by apiarists, distilling splendid honey from the wild
flowers of the continent). The aborigines had an ingenious way of
finding the nests of the wild bee. They would catch a bee, preferably at
some water-hole where the bees went to drink, and fix to its body a
little bit of white down. The bee would be then released, and would fly
straight for home, and the keen-eyed black would be able to follow its
flight and discover the whereabouts of its hive--generally in the hollow
of a tree. The Australian black, having found a hive, would kill the
bees with smoke and then devour the whole nest, bees, honeycomb, and
honey.

Australian birds are very numerous and very beautiful. The famous
bird-of-paradise is found in several varieties in Papua and other
islands along Australia's northern coast. The bird-of-paradise was
threatened with extinction on account of the demand for its plumes for
women's hats. So the Australian Government has recently passed
legislation to protect this most beautiful of all birds, which on the
tiniest of bodies carries such wonderful cascades of plumage, silver
white in some cases, golden brown in others.

[Illustration: A SHEEP DROVER. PAGE 26.]

Some very beautiful parrots flash through the Australian forest. It
would not be possible to tell of all of them. The smallest, which is
known as the grass parrakeet, or "the love-bird," is about the size of a
sparrow. I notice it in England carried around by gipsies and trained to
pick out a card which "tells you your fortune." From that tiny little
green bird the range of parrots runs up to huge fowl with feathers of
all the colours of the rainbow. There are two fine cockatoos also in
Australia--the white with a yellow crest, and the black,