“If you want to hunt,” said Castle, “I wish you would kill off the vile beasts that have been making havoc among my lambs. I might have got at one, but I was downright scared with its ugliness.”
“Was it the hyena or the devil?”
“O, the devil, to judge by its looks. It is as big as a middle-sized dog, with the head of an otter, crowded with teeth. It moved very slow, but I could do no better than stare at it.”
“They call it the devil here,” replied the gentleman. “You should dig little pits, and set your dogs upon it when it has fallen in. It will go on worrying your lambs, unless you keep on the watch.”
“Another thing that puts me out,” observed Castle, “is that the beasts are one below another here, as if they were bewitched. In England, we have a horse of one size, and a dog of another, and a rat of another; and none of them is like the rest; but here we have a big kangaroo, and a kangaroo the size of a dog, and another no bigger than a rat; and these last are not real kangaroos. I declare it makes my hair stand up to see a rat leaping like a real kangaroo: just as it would to see a mouse shaking its mane and trotting and cantering like a horse. I have not been used to such freaks, and this is a country I can’t understand.”
“I hope to understand it better,” replied the convict. “I was always fond of roving, and in time I may have explored farther than we can see from these green hills that we both find so dull. What do you mean to do when you get free?”
“They may settle that that got me bound,” replied Castle, testily. Then, struck with a sense of his own ingratitude, he added, “To be sure, if there is no squire’s house, there is no workhouse either; and if I see no acquaintance, there is nobody to taunt me with misfortune; but, on the contrary, they make much of me at home. And there’s——”
“Your daughter.”
“What; my little Susan! Yes, they make a handy little thing of her already, and——”
“I mean the other handy one, Ellen.”