play with you, but skips away slowly, and leaves you alone. There is something like the gleam of water on that rock. A snake! Now a sounding rush through the wood, and a passing shadow. An eagle! He brushes so close to the child, that he strikes at the bird with a stick, and then watches him as he shoots up like a rocket, and, measuring the fields of air in ever-widening circles, hangs like a motionless speck upon the sky; though, measure his wings across, and you will find he is nearer fifteen feet than fourteen. A Here is is a prize, though! wee little native bear, barely a foot long,—a little grey beast, comical beyond expression, with broad flapped ears, sits on a tree within reach. makes no resistance, but cuddles into He the child's bosom, and eats a leaf as they go along; while his mother sits aloft, and grunts indignant at the abstraction of her offspring, but, on the whole, takes it pretty comfortably, and goes on with her dinner of peppermint leaves. What a short day it has been! Here is the sun getting low, and the magpies and jackasses beginning to tune up before roosting. He would turn and go back to the river. Alas! which way? He He was lost in the bush. turned back and went, as he thought, the way he had come, but soon arrived at a tall, precipitous cliff, which, by some infernal magic, seemed to have got between him and the river. Then he broke down, and that strange madness came on him which comes even |