Cameron and Bartie and Hermie went eagerly off to the agent's again. Cameron held up his cheque, and asked if it would do if they paid that amount down and the rest on terms. And the agent, after a little demur, was agreeable—had he not that morning been visited by Dunks, who said he would take as low as a hundred and fifty to be rid of the place?
Cameron almost handed the cheque over there and then, but then some of the prudence learned from his wife came to him, and he pocketed it instead, and said they would go and look at the place.
Thereupon, the following Saturday, the agent lent his buggy, gave directions for finding, and this was the journeying.
'Yes,' Cameron said, 'this must be it, but there doesn't seem to be a gate. I suppose we had better go through these sliprails. Get down and lift them out, Bart.'
The early summer, in her eagerness and passion for growth and beauty, had been tender even to Dunks' selection. The appearance of the place appalled none of the buggy-load.
Wattle in bloom made a glory of the uncleared spaces, the young gums were very green, the older ones wore masses of soft white upon their soberness.
Farther away there browsed brown sheep, but this was the season for lambs, and a dozen little soft snowballs of things had come close to the cottage and gambolled with the children. There was a bleating calf with a child's pink sash tied round its neck, fluff balls of chickens ran under the feet, downy ducklings were picking everywhere.
And all this young life was so beautiful a sight that the children were wild with rapture, and Cameron's dreamy beauty-loving soul told him here was the home for him.
The cottage shocked him somewhat, it was so very tumbledown, the roof was so low, the windows so broken.
He began to consider whether he had not better take up a selection for himself near at hand and run up his own cottage, these walls were hardly worth the pulling down.