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 on to the tail of the hindmost cow. A lively scene followed.

“I wonder how long it will be before he has all those poor beasts ruined!” Millicent said severely to herself as she walked on. Yet she smiled a little, too. It was very often hard to keep from smiling at irresponsible, irrepressible Ken; though very often still harder to keep from hurling maledictions at him, together with anything else that stood handy.

In the paddock on her left, she soon came abreast of a group of pine-trees, that made a bouquet of grateful duskiness amid all the surrounding tawny-green; and in this duskiness there sat a little cottage of unpainted timber, grey with weather and age. It had a long, narrow garden sloping down towards the road; and this was full of the most gaily coloured chrysanthemums, flame-colour, gold and crimson, pale canary, deep maroon. The frost had not hurt them at all, and they made a splendid show of colour. There was also a line of newly washed garments, pink and white and blue, hanging out already thus early beside them, and fluttering in a little draught of air that had sprung up. They only looked like a row of bigger, more summery blossoms.

Beyond this cottage Millicent found herself between wide, bare paddocks, simply divided off from the road by fences of barbed wire. Just as far as ever she could see, the land between her and that mountain distance still beckoning ahead was all one huge ocean of naked grass country, running up into lumpy ridges, traversed by sharp-lipped gullies, and everywhere, alas! strewn with the unsightly remains of burnt Bush. Here and there,