with shingles which he split in spare times. There was no verandah, but
I built one later on. At the end of the house was a big slab-and-bark
shed, bigger than the hut itself, with a kitchen, a skillion for tools,
harness, and horse-feed, and a spare bedroom partitioned off with sheets
of bark and old chaff-bags. The house itself was floored roughly, with
cracks between the boards; there were cracks between the slabs all
round--though he'd nailed strips of tin, from old kerosene-tins, over
some of them; the partitioned-off bedroom was lined with old chaff-bags
with newspapers pasted over them for wall-paper. There was no ceiling,
calico or otherwise, and we could see the round pine rafters and
battens, and the under ends of the shingles. But ceilings make a hut hot
and harbour insects and reptiles--snakes sometimes. There was one
small glass window in the 'dining-room' with three panes and a sheet
of greased paper, and the rest were rough wooden shutters. There was a
pretty good cow-yard and calf-pen, and--that was about all. There was
no dam or tank (I made one later on); there was a water-cask, with the
hoops falling off and the staves gaping, at the corner of the house, and
spouting, made of lengths of bent tin, ran round under the eaves. Water
from a new shingle roof is wine-red for a year or two, and water from
a stringy-bark roof is like tan-water for years. In dry weather the
selector had got his house water from a cask sunk in the gravel at
the bottom of the deepest water-hole in the creek. And the longer the
drought lasted, the farther he had to go down the creek for his water,
with a cask on a cart, and take his cows to drink, if he had any. Four,
five, six, or seven miles--even ten miles to water is nothing in some
places.

James hadn't found himself called upon to do more than milk old 'Spot'
(the grandmother cow of our mob), pen the calf at night, make a fire
in the kitchen, and sweep out the house with a bough. He helped me
unharness and water and feed the horses, and then started to get the
furniture off the waggon and into the house. James wasn't lazy--so
long as one thing didn't last too long; but he was too uncomfortably
practical and matter-of-fact for me. Mary and I had some tea in the
kitchen. The kitchen was permanently furnished with a table of split
slabs, adzed smooth on top, and supported by four stakes driven into the
ground, a three-legged stool and a block of wood, and two long
stools made