The house was a low stone building with a few trees round it. But all the life went on here at the back, here where the pump was, and the various yards and wooden out-buildings. There was a vista of open clearing, and a few huge gum-trees. The sky was already blue, a certain mist lay below the great isolated trees.
In the yard a score of motherless lambs were penned, bleating, their silly faces looking up at Jack confidently, expecting the milk bottle. He walked with his hands in the pockets of his old English tweeds, feeling over-dressed and a bit out of place. Cows were tethered to posts or standing loose about the fenced yard, and the half-caste Tim, and Lennie, the dumb-bell boy, and a girl, were silently milking. The heavy, pure silence of the Australian morning.
Jack stood at a little distance. A cat whisked across the yard and ran up a queer-looking pine-tree, a dissipated old cow moved about at random. "Hey you!" shouted Tom impatiently, "Take hoult of that cart toss nosin' his way inter th' chaff-house, and bring him here. An' see to that grey's ropes: she's chewin' 'em free. Look slippy, make yourself useful."
There was a tone of amiability and intimacy mixed with this bossy shouting. Jack ran to the cart toss. He couldn't help liking Tom and the rest. They were so queer and naive, and they seemed oddly forlorn, like waifs lost in this new country. Jack had always had a leaning towards waifs and lost people. They were the only people whose bossing he didn't mind.
The children at their various tasks were singing in shrill, clear voices, with a sort of street-arab abandon. Lennie, the boy, would break the shrilling of the twin urchins with a sudden musical yell, from the side of the cow he was milking. And they seemed to sing anything, songs, poetry, nonsense, anything that came into their heads, like birds singing variously and at random.
"The blue, the fresh, the ever free
I am where I would ever be
With the blue above, and the blue below—"
Then a yell from Lennie by the cows:
"And wherever thus in childhood's our—"
The twins:
"I never was on the dull tame shore
But I loved the great sea more and more—"