Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/184

174 Along the valley for miles rolled the flowing sea of green—sorghum and maize, broom-corn and wheat. In the meadow, the well-watered lucern half hides the cattle that have strayed into it, while orangery, orchard, and vineyard streak with diagonals of green the red soil of the sloping hill-sides.

"I could not believe it was the same world," exclaimed a bronzed, unbarbered selector, as he leaned over the boundary-wire beside the topmost channel.

Twelve miles he had driven his jaded beast, to the music of the rattling, empty barrel and staggering, spoke-shrunken wheels. One who had never seen that plain of his before, could not imagine it as it had been in spring-time, knee-deep with prairie-growth of grass. Now, the very stalks of the last blade are blown away, the north wind finding but driven sand to sweep in its spiral sirocco-course; this, heaped high in the kangaroo grass—alone of all green things remaining—suggests the "desert" once supposed to spread from coast range to centre of continent. All, for hundreds and thousands of miles, fertile and smiling all the year round, if only water be conserved.

"Just you go and stand in that maize," suggests a settler, cutting watercress beneath the willows. "Creep in that there row and hold up your whip, and you ben't able to top the corn, I'll lay you."

No more he could. Burly Starveling with bushy beard disappears into the ocean of green, and only the rustling and laughing of the yellow beards far above his head indicate the position of the dusty man of the plains.

"Blowed if it ain't like a hot-house!" he exclaimed, as he emerged from the jungle. "It's clammy as cow's breath in th' mornin'. No wonder the stuff grows."

"It's all the water as does it," replied Smith, the