I was surprised to notice that the niggers' hands and feet were not particularly large. The heels, though, are roughened, hardened, and split like battered and blackened pieces of corrugated iron. The soles are apparently made out of rhinoceros hide. "Three cornered jacks" only tickle them—even when they happen to sit down on the spiky abominations.
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One black, an "old hand" at the station, but transported from somewhere afar off, inveighed in good, angular Whitechapel English, pidgin-ised, against the fool blackfeller who sit down alonga here!
Wherefore was it, if he had such a very poor opinion of them, that he remained among them?
He withered me with the contempt that was in his answer.
"No can make it rain!"
In his country—a majestic wave of the hand indicated where that was—if the porter at Heaven's flood-gates went to sleep or forgot to open them within a reasonable time, certain old men jumped up and walked alonga blackfellows' camp, where they called in the aid of eagle-hawk's feathers, paint stripes, many fires and a good deal of fuss. And then—a big thing in corroborees: big one, plenty shout out. After the corroboree the "old men" and the other participators in it shifted their spears and boomerangs to high ground, built mia-mias, and waited. And when they had waited long enough the rain fell. "Sometimes piccaninny rain—one night corroboree. Big fellow corroboree? My word! B-i-g pfeller rain."
Should no rain fall the explanation was not far to seek. "Nudder" (opposition shop) "blackfeller hold it corroboree. Too much big pfeller noise make it, and frighten him away."
What wouldn't some perturbed whitefellers give for so simple a philosophy!
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