Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/85

 consists of hot roast meat, hot baked potatoes, hot cabbage, hot pumpkin, hot peas, and burning-hot plum-pudding. The family drinks on an average four cups of tea each per meal. The wife takes her place at the head of the table with a broom to keep the fowls out, and at short intervals she interrupts the conversation with such exclamations as 'Shoo! shoo!' 'Tommy, can't you see that fowl? Drive it out!' The fowls evidently pass a lot of their time in the house. They mark the circle described by the broom, and take care to keep two or three inches beyond it. Every now and then you see a fowl on the dresser amongst the crockery, and there is great concern to get it out before it breaks something. While dinner is in progress two steers get into the wheat through a broken rail which has been spliced with stringy bark, and a calf or two break into the vineyard. And yet this careless Australian selector, who is too shiftless to put up a decent fence, or build a decent house and who knows little or nothing about farming, would seem by his conversation to have read up all the great social and political questions of the day. Here are some fragments of conversation caught at the dinner-table. Present―the Selector, the Missus, the neighbour, Corney George―nicknamed 'Henry George'―Tommy, Jackey, and the younger children. The spaces represent interruptions by the fowls and children:―

Corney George (continuing conversation): 'But Henry George says, in 'Progress and Poverty,' he says'

Missus (to the fowls): 'Shoo! Shoo!'