When we offered him sympathy and a gossamer veil, he accepted the veil gratefully, but waved the sympathy aside, saying it was “all in the good cause.”  Nothing was ever a hardship to the Dandy, excepting dirt.

Johnny being a past-master in his trade, stood on the platform in the upper air, guiding the saw along the marked lines; and as he instructed us all in the fine art of pit-sawing, Dan decided that the building of a house, under some circumstances, could be an education in itself.

“Thought she might manage to learn a thing or two out of it,” he said.  “The building of it is right enough.  It all depends what she uses it for when Johnny’s done with it.”

As the pliant saw coaxed beams, and slabs, and flooring boards out of the forest trees I grew to like beginning at the beginning of things, and realised there was an underlying truth in Dan’s whimsical reiteration, that “the missus was in luck when she struck this place”; for beams and slabs and flooring boards wrested from Nature amid merrymaking and philosophical discourses are not as other beams and slabs and flooring boards.  They are old friends and fellow-adventurers, with many a good tale to tell, recalling comical situations in their reminiscences with a vividness that baffles description.

Perhaps those who live in homes with the beginning of things left behind in forests they have never seen, may think chattering planks a poor compensation for unpapered, rough-boarded walls and unglazed window frames.  Let them try it before they judge; remembering always, that before a house can be built of old friends and memories the friends must be made and the memories lived through.

But other things beside the sawing of timber were in progress, Things were also “humming” in the dog world.  A sturdy fox-terrier, Brown by name, had been given by a passing traveller to the Maluka, given almost of necessity for Brown—­as is the way with fox-terriers at times—­quietly changed masters, and lying down at the Maluka’s feet, had refused to leave him.  The station dogs resented his presence there, and persecuted him as an interloper; and being a peace-loving dog, Brown bore it patiently for two days, hoping, no doubt, the persecution would wear itself out.  On the third day, however, he quietly changed his tactics—­for sometimes the only road to peace is through fighting—­and, accepting their challenge, took on the station dogs one by one in single combat.

Only a full-sized particularly sturdy-looking fox-terrier against expert cattle dogs; and yet no dog could stand against him.  One by one he closed with them, and one by one they went before him; and at the end of a week he was “cock of the walk,” and lay down to enjoy his well-earned peace.  His death-stroke was a flashing lunge, from a grip of a foreleg to a sharp, grinding grip of the enemy’s tongue.  How he managed it was a puzzle, but sooner or later he got his grip in, to let go at the piercing