for buttoning, he could not get it to meet across his chest.  He picked up his discarded frock-coat, which was held together by the collar; then he felt the stuff of which the dress-coat was made, and the material pleased him.  “Oh, why,” asked Billy, “had it not been made with front tails?” He saw at last that this coat and his high hat alone were insufficient for civilisation.  For full dress in a corroboree it might do.  Unconsciously, he was so wrought upon by the purpose for which the coat had been built that he determined to reserve it for parties in the seclusion of the bush, where any merriment could be rightly checked by a crack from his waddy.  He planted it carefully in a hollow log, and, having inserted himself with as much care into his discarded rags, he wondered off into the town.  He got very intoxicated that night, and determined to have a party all by himself.

Now it may seem very annoying, and I confess I find it so myself; but, having got so far, I don’t see my way to tell the rest, even if Annie Colborn told me the story herself.  For after her father’s death she married a man who had a small sheep-station and a hotel not forty miles from Carabobla, in New South Wales.  I stayed there a couple of days when I was going north to the Murrumbidgee.  But though she told me, I cannot tell it again, at least not in bold, bad print.  Still, it will occur to most that a man of King Billy’s sweet and innocent disposition might very likely create a sensation, when his natural discretion was drowned in bad whisky, if he ended his solitary corroboree in the moonlight by going up to Colborn’s house in order to deliver a speech of gratitude through the French windows.

So Colborn and the king had a corroboree all to themselves in the open space before the house, while the gold commissioner’s guests roared with laughter to find out where the missing dress-coat was.  Next day King Billy resumed the split frock-coat.

THY HEART’S DESIRE, By Netta Syrett

The tents were pitched in the little plain surrounded by hills.  Right and left there were stretches of tender, vivid green where the young corn was springing; farther still, on either hand, the plain was yellow with mustard-flower; but in the immediate foreground it was bare and stony.  A few thorny bushes pushed their straggling way through the dry soil, ineffectively as far as the grace of the landscape was concerned, for they merely served to emphasise the barren aridness of the land that stretched before the tents, sloping gradually to the distant hills.

The hills were uninteresting enough in themselves; they had no grandeur of outline, no picturesqueness even, though at morning and evening the sun, like a great magician, clothed them with beauty at a touch.

They had begun to change, to soften, to blush rose red in the evening light, when a woman came to the entrance of the largest of the tents and looked toward them.  She leaned against the support on one side of the canvas flap, and, putting back her head, rested that, too, against it, while her eyes wandered over the plain and over the distant hills.