“I'll punch his head!”
“No! take it easy,” said Robinson; “he is a poet; this is what they call poetical license.”
“Lie without sense, I call it—when here is the man.”
“Ting tong! ting tong tong!—
I slew him—he fell—by the Wurra-Gurra River.
I slew him!—ting tong! he fell—ting tong!
By the Wurra-Gurra River—ting ting tong!”
This line Jacky repeated at least forty times; but he evaded monotony by the following simple contrivance:
“I slew him; he fell by the Wurra-Gurra River—ting tong!
I slew him; he fell, by the Wurra-Gurra River,
I slew him; he fell, by the Wurra-Gurra River,”
with similar changes, and then back again.
One of our own savages saved a great poet from monotony by similar means;* very good of him.
* The elder Sheridan, who used to teach his pupils to tresh
dead Dryden out thus: None but the brave,/None but the
brave,/None but the brave, deserve the fair.
And now the gins took up the tune without the words and the dance began to it. First, two figures ghastly with white paint came bounding like Jacks-in-the-box out of the gloom into the red light, and danced gracefully—then one more popped out—then another, at set intervals of time—then another, all painted differently—and swelled the dance by degrees; and still, as the dance grew in numbers, the musicians sang and drummed louder and faster by well-planned gradations, and the motion rose in intensity, till they all warmed into the terrible savage corroboree jump, legs striding wide, head turned over one shoulder, the eyes glaring with fiendish intensity in one direction, the arms both raised and grasping waddies and boomerangs—till at last they worked up to such a gallop of fierce, buck-like leaps that there was a jump for each beat of the music. Now they were in four lines, and as the figures in the front line jumped to the right, each keeping his distance to a hair, the second line jumped to the left, the third to the right, and the fourth to the left.