Mrs. Macdougal’s guests did not mind Macdougal in the least, however; the eccentricities of Old Dint-the-Tin were well known to the neighbouring squatters, and from their point of view, as visitors at Boobyalla on pleasure bent, he did not count.  They bumped against him in the dark passages of his absurdly disjointed house, and found him on occasions in the drawing-room and the dining-room, but nothing was done or left undone out of consideration for his feelings.  If they were content to talk about sheep and cattle, he would converse with them, and he was even capable of enthusiasm on the subject of horses, but evidently had no interests apart from these matters.  Nobody outside the family circle had known him to address more than half a dozen words to his wife at one time, and his average remark contained one monosyllable.  He behaved a good deal like a stranger towards his own children.  Occasionally he went so far as to place a hand on a curly head, with an uncouth show of interest, or to say a few words of kindness; but it was done diffidently, and a close observer might have detected in the man a sensitive shrinking from the idea of bringing his misshapen figure and weird ugliness into contrast with the peculiar beauty of the youngsters.  The only human creature about Boobyalla in whose company he seemed to be quite at home was Yarra, the half-caste aboriginal boy, scandalously reputed in the neighbourhood—­not without excellent reason, it must be admitted—­to be his own son.

We have seen Donald Macdougal, J.P., as he appeared in Melbourne, but that was on one of the few very special occasions when he condescended to ‘dress up.’  At home on Boobyalla his usual attire comprised a heavy pair of water-tights, old trousers, much the worse for wear more senses than one, hanging in great folds, a dark gray jumper tucked into the trousers, and a battered felt hat, pulled, after long service, into the shape of a limp cone.  The only concession to ‘company manners’ Mack would make was in drawing on a despised black coat over his collarless jumper.

In addition to the peculiarities already mentioned, Donald Macdougal had an extraordinary trick of chewing his tongue, and a most disconcerting habit of allowing his trousers to drift down, wrinkle after wrinkle, till chance strangers fell into an agony of apprehension, and then suddenly recovering them with a with a convulsion of his body that was entirely instinctive.

And yet nobody with a pinch of brains ever made the mistake of supposing Donald Macdougal to be a fool.  Old Dint-the-Tin was a wealthy man, and had made his fortune out of the land by exercising a shrewdness that was the envy of half the squatters in the colony, and had no apparent desire in life but to go on increasing that fortune in the same way, although there were some who credited him with a great if secret satisfaction in seeing his wife outdo the wives of his neighbours in the social graces, a satisfaction superior to the gratification he derived from adding to his great accumulation in the Bank of New South Wales.