Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/361

 'Did she think the mountains fine?'

'Oh yes. They were very well, but she wished they wouldn't rise just out of their back-door like.'

We said farewell to the kindly, simple dame and her sturdy brood of Anglo-Saxons—blue-eyed and rosy-faced as if they had come out of Kent or Devonshire—true types of a race which claims the waste places of the earth for a heritage and which creates thereof New Englands and Greater Britains.

We wander slowly on with our sauntering, grazing herd, this rarely mild, calm winter day. We look back as the cottage grows dim in the distance—the little garden, the water-wheel, the patient wife listening ever for the hoof-tramps of her husband's horse, fade in the darkening eve. But we do not forget the little home picture, this floweret of tender bloom beneath the melancholy alp.

'We'll have to look out pretty sharp to-morrow, Mr. Jones,' says Monaro Jim. 'We've got rather bad country before us.'

'Bad country? Why, what do you call this?' hastily returns that gentleman.

'We're only just a-comin' to it,' calmly explains the saturnine stock-rider. 'You'll see what the sidelings is like; why, this here's a plain to it—cattle slipping and perhaps killing theirselves, big rocks falling fit to knock yer brains out; there ain't hardly a yard fit for a horse to carry you. Them boots of your'n won't look very fresh to-morrow night.' Here Jim took a soothing draw at his pipe, and glanced pityingly at Mr. Jones' neat elastic-sided boots, apparently absorbed in pleasing thoughts of evil which the morrow night will bring forth.

'Is there much more "sideling," as you call it?' inquired Mr. Jones, rather overcome by this terrific description, and almost prepared to arrive in Gippsland like a bare-footed friar, if indeed he ever reached that far and, as he is beginning to believe, fabulous country.

'Not more'n a week of the wust of it,' answered the hard-hearted Jim. 'I wish we was well over it. I've known a-many accidents in the sidelings in my time.'

The dawn is still grey as we ascend a green peak, at the summit of which commences the first of the dreaded sidelings. The peculiarity of the track here is, that while on the upper side the mountains through which the Snowy River cleaves