'I got the mail,' Bartie said, and pulled two letters out of his pocket—a thick one from his almost-forgotten mother, and a pale blue with a fanciful C upon the flap from his twin sister; they both bore the postmark of Windsor.
'Suppose they're stopping with the Queen again,' he added laconically.
'Wonder what they have for tea at her house?' sighed Flossie, and her system revolted against the corned beef and ill-made bread that were in prospect for her own meal.
Tramby turned of her own accord at a sudden gap in the gum-trees, and stood alongside while Roly stretched and contorted himself to lift out the sliprail—nothing ever induced him to dismount for this task. Then she stepped daintily over the lower rail, and again waited while the passenger in the rear stretched down and made things safe again.
Their father's selection stretched before them, eighty acres of miserable land, lying grey and dreary under the canopy of a five o'clock coppery sky, summer and drought time.
HOME FROM SCHOOL.
Patches of fertility showed some one laboured at the place. There was a stretch of lucerne, green as any in the district. But this was not saying very much, for Wilgandra's vegetation as a rule copied the neutral tint of the gum-trees, rather than the vivid emerald so pleasant to the eye in country wilds.
There was a small patch under potatoes, there were half a dozen orange-trees, yellow with fruit. At the very door of the house a cow grazed calmly, and everywhere browsed the sheep, brown, ragged, dirty things, fifty or sixty of them, far more than the acreage should have carried, but still in good condition—it seemed as if the mortgage was fattening. The house was a poor weatherboard place, the paint blistered off, the windows rickety, the roof of cruel galvanised iron.
Inside there were chiefly pictures, great canvases on which Thetis was rising from a roughly tossing sea, her infant Achilles laughing in her arms; on which the lofty mountain Pindus towered, the Muses seated about in negligent attitudes; on which delicious twists and turns of the River Thames flowed; on which wet, cool beaches glistened, and shallow waves lapped idly.