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436 few demonstrations they retired, and our host told us it was a part of our entertainment, to show how a night attack was made by the aboriginals.

"The mimic attack was quite sufficient for our purposes, and we were quite willing not to pass through the experience of a real one. We were told that had the attack been actual, the first warning of it would have been the hurling of spears. Very often it happens that a camping party of white men has no knowledge that natives are within many miles of them until the spears begin dropping in their midst. Our host was once in a party of this sort; they were eight in all; five of them were killed or wounded by the spears; but the remaining three with their rifles and revolvers beat back the assailants, and thus saved their lives."

Our friends returned to the station without further adventure, and a few days later were once more in Sydney, preparing to leave for Melbourne. Up to the last moment of their stay they were busily occupied with the attentions of the numerous acquaintances they had made, so much so that they had barely time to write up their journals and preserve a record of what they had seen and heard.

But there was one attention which was as unexpected as it was interesting, though it could hardly be said to have been bestowed by an inhabitant of the city. It was a visit from a "brickfielder," and is thus described by Fred:

"Mention has been made already of the tendency of an Australian to speak exultingly of the climate of his own city or section, and to disparage that of other localities. All parts of the country suffer from the hot winds of the interior, but the inhabitants of each place declare that it is worse anywhere else than with them. Be that as it may, our first experience of the hot wind here in Sydney is quite bad enough, and if Melbourne or Adelaide can surpass it we pity them.

"They call this wind a 'brickfielder,' probably because it brings a vast quantity of dust such as might be blown from a field where bricks are made or brick-dust has been thickly strewn; and this was what we saw and felt:

"There was a period of calm and ominous silence, and we observed that the sky was changing from blue to a sort of fiery tinge. Puffs of heated air came now and then, like blasts from a furnace; they grew in force and frequency, and in an hour or so became a steady wind with increasing force. It was hot and dry and scorching, and we seemed to be withering under its effects. 'It's a brickfielder, sure enough,' said a