was seventeen. You see before that my father had scraped together his
little bit of money and we'd been living in West Kensington waiting
while he made out what we were all going to do. He wasn't any great
shakes, my father, in the way of birth, and fortune. I daresay, you
guessed that, Lady Bridget?'

She tossed her head back impatiently. 'Oh what DOES that matter! Go on,
please.'

'He'd been a farmer, Glasgow way'--McKeith still pronounced it
'Glesca,' 'and my mother was a minister's daughter, as good a woman and
as true a lady as ever breathed. But that's neither here nor there in
what turned out a bad business. Well, we all emigrated out here, and,
after a while, my old dad bought a station on the Lower Leura--taken
in he was, of course, over the deal, and not realising that it was
unsettled country in those days. So the whole family of us started up
from the coast to it. . . . He drove my mother and my two sisters just
grown up, and a woman servant--Marty--in a double buggy, and Jerry
the bullock driver and me in the dray with him and taught me to drive
bullocks. There were stock-boys, two of them riding along side.

'It took us three and a half weeks, to reach the station, averaging
about thirty miles a day and camping out each night.

'I'd like you to camp out in the Bush sometime, Lady Bridget, right
away from everything--it'ud be an experience that 'ud live with you
all your life--My word! It's like nothing else--lying straight under
the Southern Cross and watching its pointers, and, one by one, the
stars coming up above the gum trees--and the queer wild smell of the
gums and the loneliness of it all--not a sound until the birds begin