Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/40

30 "She's as much a lady as ever," he would muse with pride as the good wife with skirts tucked around, her husband's brown cabbage-tree hat on her comely, well-set head, goloshes on her dainty feet, went the round of her fowl-yard, fed the butting calf and leggy lamb, and appeared shortly in the parlour as neat and trim as ever.

"Why should life's plainest, simplest duties be considered menial," he would say, "and the best of its work be delegated to menials?"

"You had better come in," said Mrs. Dowling, appearing at the open French window. "You cannot see any more of your beloved valley to-night, Richard."

"But I can scent its fragrance. Isn't the perfume of the wattle and acacia, borne on the moist airs of night, sweet? And I can hear the music of the vale. Hark to that wailing crescendo of the curlew! The one thing here that evidently has a history—and a pathetic one too. Or does it mourn that the land should lie desolate? Now that 'More Pork,' or cuckoo as we ought to call him, is lonely too, but he is jolly as a sand-boy about it."

"The laughing jackass is my favourite," suggested Eva. "The last one has just giggled itself to sleep. Always so delighted with himself and the day's doings, as it chuckles over the thought of how vainly the six-foot snake tried to bite as he whisked it hundreds of feet in the air, and how green the centipede got in the face when he ferreted it out from our fire-wood stack and gobbled it, and so he croons himself to sleep to dream of children not bitten owing to its protecting care."

"The magpie I claim," said the mother; "all day long as we work it whistles so gleefully, as if to cheer us on our way, while the locust tribe keep up the running accompaniment."

"And the frogs in the lagoon-—" began Eva.