foundations again. It must have been
a very poor selection that couldn't afford a better spare horse than
that.

'Reach me that lump er wood, will yer, missus?' said the boy, and he
pointed to one of my 'spreads' (for the team-chains) that lay inside the
fence. 'I'll fling it back agin over the fence when I git this ole cow
started.'

'But wait a minute--I've forgotten your mother's name,' said Mary.

He grabbed at his thatch impatiently. 'Me mother--oh!--the old woman's
name's Mrs Spicer. (Git up, karnt yer!)' He twisted himself round, and
brought the stretcher down on one of the horse's 'points' (and he had
many) with a crack that must have jarred his wrist.

'Do you go to school?' asked Mary. There was a three-days-a-week school
over the ridges at Wall's station.

'No!' he jerked out, keeping his legs going. 'Me--why I'm going on fur
fifteen. The last teacher at Wall's finished me. I'm going to Queensland
next month drovin'.' (Queensland border was over three hundred miles
away.)

'Finished you? How?' asked Mary.

'Me edgercation, of course! How do yer expect me to start this horse
when yer keep talkin'?'

He split the 'spread' over the horse's point, threw the pieces over the
fence, and was off, his elbows and legs flinging wildly, and the old
saw-stool lumbering along the road like an old working bullock trying a
canter. That horse wasn't a trotter.

And next month he DID start for Queensland. He was a younger son and a
surplus boy on a wretched, poverty-stricken selection; and as there was
'northin' doin'' in the district, his father (in a burst of fatherly
kindness, I suppose) made him a present of the old horse and a new
pair of Blucher boots, and I gave him an old saddle and a coat, and he
started for the Never-Never Country.

And I'll bet he got there. But I'm doubtful if the old horse did.

Mary gave the boy five shillings, and I don't think he had anything more
except a clean shirt and an extra pair of white cotton socks.

'Spicer's farm' was a big bark humpy on a patchy clearing in the native
apple-tree scrub. The clearing was fenced in by a light 'dog-legged'
fence (a fence of sapling poles resting on forks and X-shaped uprights),
and the dusty ground round the house was almost entirely covered with
cattle-dung. There was no attempt at cultivation when I came to live on
the creek; but there were old furrow-marks amongst the stumps of another
shapeless patch in the scrub near the hut. There