As yet unfit to begin labor, all the long summer he would wander about the river-bank, up and down the beautiful rock-walled paradise where he was confined, sometimes looking eagerly across the water at the waving forest boughs, and fancying he could see other children far up the vistas beckoning to him to cross and play in that merry land of shifting lights and shadows.

It grew quite into a passion with the little man to get across and play there; and one day when his mother was shifting the hurdles, and he was handing her the strips of green hide which bound them together, he said to her, “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 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 some cases in his first love-making, when the sensation is new to him.

But meanwhile there sat our child, bare-legged, watching the forbidden ground beyond the river.  A fresh breeze was moving the trees and making the whole a dazzling mass of shifting light and shadow.  He sat so still that a glorious violet and red kingfisher perched quite close, and, dashing into the water, came forth with a fish, and fled like a ray of light along the winding of the river.  A colony of little shell parrots, too, crowded on a bough, and twittered and ran to and fro quite busily, as though they said to him, “We don’t mind you, my dear; you are quite one of us.”

Never was the river so low.  He stepped in; it scarcely reached his ankle.  Now surely he might get across.  He stripped himself, and, carrying his clothes, waded through, the water never reaching his middle, all across the long, yellow, gravelly shallow.  And there he stood, naked and free, on the forbidden ground.