with similar changes, and then back again.

One of our own savages saved a great poet from monotony by similar means;* very good of him.

* The elder Sheridan, who used to teach his pupils to tresh dead Dryden out thus:  None but the brave,/None but the brave,/None but the brave, deserve the fair.

And now the gins took up the tune without the words and the dance began to it.  First, two figures ghastly with white paint came bounding like Jacks-in-the-box out of the gloom into the red light, and danced gracefully—­then one more popped out—­then another, at set intervals of time—­then another, all painted differently—­and swelled the dance by degrees; and still, as the dance grew in numbers, the musicians sang and drummed louder and faster by well-planned gradations, and the motion rose in intensity, till they all warmed into the terrible savage corroboree jump, legs striding wide, head turned over one shoulder, the eyes glaring with fiendish intensity in one direction, the arms both raised and grasping waddies and boomerangs—­till at last they worked up to such a gallop of fierce, buck-like leaps that there was a jump for each beat of the music.  Now they were in four lines, and as the figures in the front line jumped to the right, each keeping his distance to a hair, the second line jumped to the left, the third to the right, and the fourth to the left.

The twinkle and beauty and symmetry of this was admirable, and, strange as it may appear, not only were the savages now wrought up to frenzy at this climax of the dance, but the wonderful magnetic influence these children of Nature have learned to create and launch in the corroboree so stirred the white men’s blood, that they went half mad too, and laughed and shouted and danced, and could hardly help flinging themselves among the mad fiends and jumping and yelling with them; and when the jump was at its fiercest and quickest, and the great frenzy boiling over, these cunning artists brought it to a dead stop sharp upon the climax—­and all was still.

In another minute they were all snoring; but George and Robinson often started in their slumbers, dreaming they saw the horrid figures—­the skeletons, lizards, snakes, tartan shawls, and whitened fiends, the whole lot blazing at the eyes and mouth like white budelights, come bounding one after another out of the black night into the red torchlight, and then go striding and jumping and glaring and raging and bucking and prancing, and scattering battle and song and joy and rage and inspiration and stark-staring frenzy all around.

They awoke at daylight rather cold, and found piles of snow upon their blankets, and the lizards and skeletons and imps and tartan shawls deteriorated.  The snow had melted on their bodies, and the colors had all run—­some of them away. Quid multa? we all know how beauties look when the sun breaks on them after a ball.

They asked for Jacky.  To their great chagrin he was not to be found.  They waited, getting crosser and crosser, till nine o’clock, and then out comes my lord from the wood, walking toward them with his head down on his bosom, the picture of woe—­the milmeridien movement over again.