"Mother, what country is that across the river?"
"The forest, child."
"There's plenty of quantongs over there, eh, mother, and raspberries? Why mayn't I get across and play there?"
"The river is too deep, child, and the Bunyip lives in the water under the stones."
"Who are the children that play across there?"
"Black children, likely."
"No white children?"
"Pixies; don't go near 'em child; they'll lure you on, Lord knows where. Don't get trying to cross the river, now, or you'll be drowned."
But next day the passion was stronger on him than ever. Quite early on the glorious cloudless midsummer day he was down by the river side, sitting on a rock, with his shoes and stockings off, paddling his feet in the clear tepid water, and watching the million fish in the shallows black fish and grayling—leaping and flashing in the sun.
There is no pleasure that I have ever experienced like a child's midsummer holiday. The time, I mean, when two or three of us used to go away up the brook, and take our dinners with us, and come home at night tired, dirty, happy, scratched beyond recognition, with a great nosegay, three little trout, and one shoe, the other one having been used for a boat till it had gone down with all hands out of soundings. How poor our Derby days, our Greenwich dinners, our evening parties, where there are plenty of nice girls, are after that! Depend on it, a man never experiences such pleasure or grief after fourteen as he does before, unless in come cases in his first love-making, when the sensation is new to him.