It was the year we put the bottom paddock under potatoes. Dad was standing contemplating the tops, which were withering for want of rain. He shifted his gaze to the ten acres sown with corn. A dozen stalks or so were looking well; a few more, ten or twelve inches high, were coming in cob; the rest hadn’t made an appearance.

Dad sighed and turned away from the awful prospect. He went and looked into the water-cask. Two butterflies, a frog or two, and some charcoal were at the bottom. No water. He sighed again, took the yoke and two kerosene-tins, and went off to the springs.

About an hour and a half after he returned with two half-tins of muddy, milky-looking water — the balance had been splashed out as he got through the fences — and said to Mother (wiping the sweat off his face with his shirt-sleeve)—

“Don’t know, I’m SURE, what things are going t’ come t’; . . . no use doing anything . . . there’s no rain . . . no si ——” he lifted his foot and with cool exactness took a place-kick at the dog, which was trying to fall into one of the kerosene-tins, head first, and sent it and the water flying. “Oh you ——!” The rest is omitted in the interests of Poetry.

Day after. Fearful heat; not a breath of air; fowl and beast sought the shade; everything silent; the great Bush slept. In the west a stray cloud or two that had been hanging about gathered, thickened, darkened.

The air changed. Fowl and beast left the shade; tree-tops began to stir — to bend — to sway violently. Small branches flew down and rolled before the wind. Presently it thundered afar off. Mother and Sal ran out and gathered the clothes, and fixed the spout, and looked cheerfully up at the sky.

Joe sat in the chimney-corner thumping the ribs of a cattle-pup, and pinching its ears to make it savage. He had been training the pup ever since its arrival that morning.

The plough-horses, yoked to the plough, stood in the middle of the paddock, beating the flies off with their tails and leaning against each other.

Dad stood at the stock-yard — his brown arms and bearded chin resting on a middle-rail — passively watching Dave and Paddy Maloney breaking-in a colt for Callaghan — a weedy, wild, herring-gutted brute that might have been worth fifteen shillings. Dave was to have him to hack about for six months in return for the breaking-in. Dave was acquiring a local reputation for his skill in handling colts.

They had been at “Callaghan”— as they christened the colt — since daylight, pretty well; and had crippled old Moll and lamed Maloney’s Dandy, and knocked up two they borrowed from Anderson — yarding the rubbish; and there wasn’t a fence within miles of the place that he hadn’t tumbled over and smashed. But, when they did get him in, they lost no time commencing to quieten him. They cursed eloquently, and threw the bridle at him, and used up all the missiles and bits of hard mud and sticks about the yard, pelting him because he wouldn’t stand.

Dave essayed to rope him “the first shot,” and nearly poked his eye out with the pole; and Paddy Maloney, in attempting to persuade the affrighted beast to come out of the cow-bail, knocked the cap of its hip down with the milking-block. They caught him then and put the saddle on. Callaghan trembled. When the girths were tightened they put the reins under the leathers, and threw their hats at him, and shouted, and “hooshed” him round the yard, expecting he would buck with the saddle. But Callaghan only trotted into a corner and snorted. Usually, a horse that won’t buck with a saddle is a “snag.” Dave knew it. The chestnut he tackled for Brown did nothing with the saddle. HE was a snag. Dave remembered him and reflected. Callaghan walked boldly up to Dave, with his head high in the air, and snorted at him. He was a sorry-looking animal — cuts and scars all over him; hip down; patches and streaks of skin and hair missing from his head. “No buck in him!” unctuously observed Dad, without lifting his chin off the rail. “Ain’t there?” said Paddy Maloney, grinning cynically. “Just you wait!”

It seemed to take the heart out of Dave, but he said nothing. He hitched his pants and made a brave effort to spit — several efforts. And he turned pale.

Paddy was now holding Callaghan’s head at arms’-length by the bridle and one ear, for Dave to mount.

A sharp crack of thunder went off right overhead. Dave didn’t ............