wagons.  For two days Jim had carried his swag through the Australian Bush, and one night he had slept on the brown grass, using his folded blanket for a pillow, the camp-fire flickering palely at a distance, the wide-branching, dreamy gum-trees spreading their limbs above him, the warmth of summer in the scented air Already the instincts of the Bushman were developing in him.  He began to feel a friendship for the towering gums in their flaunting independence; their proud individuality pleased him.  To his mind they reflected the spirit of the people—­it must be the spirit of the land.  Nowhere in their feathery elegance did he find a law of conformity; each tree was a law unto itself, tall and strong and slender, youthful and buoyant, opening fond arms to the blue sky.  The absence of the sap-greens of England conveyed at first an impression of barrenness, but that wore off, and the artistic side of his nature fed upon the soft harmonies of faded grass and subdued green foliage nursing misty purples in its shade.  The ground was his bed and chair and table; never had he been so intimate with Mother Earth.  Here she was uncontaminated, the soil was sweet, and it gave no hint of untold generations of dead fattening the grass upon which he couched as in sweet hay.  From the earth he drew an ardent patriotism.  He was already a more enthusiastic Australian than the loose-limbed native with whom he fraternized.

They camped five miles beyond Miner’s Rest on the second night, preferring the comparative solitude of the Bush to the scant accommodation and some what boisterous company at the shanty lately established to cater for the fortune-hunters streaming to the new rushes.  Mike selected the spot and dropped his swag.

‘We’ve tramped far enough to-day,’ he said.  ’You’ll find water just over that rise there.  I’ll light the fire.’

‘So you’ve been over this part before,’ said Jim, unstrapping the billy from his mate’s swag.

‘No; this is new country to me.’

‘Then, how do you know I shall find water beyond that hillock?’

‘’Pon my soul, I don’t know why I know,’ Mike answered; ’but I’ll wager my share of our first tub it’s there.’

Jim found the water.  There was a water-hole in a small creek at the spot indicated.  His mate’s knowledge of things about him in the Bush, things unseen and unheard, had seemed uncanny at first; he was getting used to it now.  Mike was born in the Bush, and the greater part of his life had been spent in it.  He knew it as thoroughly as its familiar animals did, and much in the same way, without being aware of his knowledge, which was mainly instinctive.  The billy was on the blazing fire, and Done sat watching Mike smartly mixing a damper in the lid.  To Jim this, too, was a wonderful accomplishment.  Water and flour were deftly manipulated until a ball of dough that quite filled the small lid resulted.  It was done with the cleanness and quickness of a conjuring trick.  The dough was divided into two pats, to be cooked under the hot ashes.  Then Mike improvised his wire grid again, and in a few minutes the steak he had carried in a dilly-bag from Miner’s Rest was sizzling and spitting over the embers.