The boys were listening with eager interest to their father's plans. To swing the axe and load the faggot-cart would be jolly work indeed in those lovely woods.
Mr. Hirpington was to ride back on the horse he had lent to Mr. Lee on the preceding evening. When he started, the brothers ran down the valley to get a peep at the rabbiter's camp. Three or four men were lying round their fire eating their supper. The line of silver streamers fluttering in the wind proved to be an innumerable multitude of rabbit-skins hanging up to dry. A party of sea-gulls, which had followed the camp as the rabbiters moved on, were hovering about, crying like cats, until they awakened the sleeping echoes.
The men told Edwin they had been clearing the great sheep-runs between his father's land and the sea-shore, and the birds had followed them all those miles for the sake of the nightly feast they could pick up in their track.
"You can none of you do without us," they said. "We are always at work, moving from place to place, or the little brown Bunny would lord it over you all."
The boys had hardly time to exchange a good-night with the rabbiters, when the daylight suddenly faded, and night came down upon vale and bush without the sweet interlude of twilight. They were groping their way back to the house, when the fire-flies began their nightly dance, and the flowering shrubs poured forth their perfume. The stars shone out in all their southern splendour, and the boys became aware of a moving army in the grass. Poor Bunny was mustering his myriads.
CHAPTER V.
POSTING A LETTER.
Mr. Lee and his boys found so much to do in their new home, days sped away like hours. The bright autumn weather which had welcomed them to Wairoa (to give their habitation its Maori name) had changed suddenly for rain—a long, deluging rain, lasting more than a week.
The prop which Mr. Hirpington had recommended was necessarily left for the return of fine weather. But within doors comfort was growing rapidly. One end of the large room was screened off for a workshop, and shelves and pegs multiplied in convenient corners. They were yet a good way off from that happy condition of a place for everything, and everything in its place. It was still picnic under a roof, as Audrey said; but they were on the highroad to comfort and better things. When darkness fell they gathered round the blazing wood-fire. Mr. Lee wrote the first letters for England, while Edwin studied "Extinct Volcanoes." Audrey added her quota to the packet preparing for Edwin's old friend, "the perambulating letter-box," and Effie and Cuthbert played interminable games of draughts, until Edwin shut up his book and evolved from his own brains a new and enlarged edition of Maori folk-lore which sent them "creepy" to bed.
It seemed a contradiction of terms to say May-day was bringing winter; but winter might come upon them in haste, and the letters must be posted before the road to the ford was changed to a muddy rivulet.