class="pfirst">They were walking from the school to the paddock where the children's horses, thirty or forty nondescript animals, grazed all day long.

'Sh' think,' said Peter Small, son of the butcher who fed Wilgandra,—'Sh' think you could have afforded one sprat at least for teacher's present!'

'Afforded!' quoth Bartie Cameron. 'I could have afforded a thousand pounds!'

'Then why d'ye 'ave 'oles in your stockings, and bursted boots?' asked Peter.

''Cause it's much nicer than having darns and patches,' returned Bartie, looking disparagingly upon his companion's neater garments.

'My old man's got a mortgage on your sheep,' said Peter, baffled on the patches.

'We like mortgages,' said Bartie airily; 'they make the sheep grow.'

'We've got a new red carpet comin' for our livin'-room,' shouted Peter.

Bartie looked him over contemptuously.

'I've got a sister in London, and she makes fifty pounds a night by her playing.'

'You're a lie!' said Peter, who was new to the school, and did not know the Camerons.

'Take this, then!' said Bartie, and put his strong young fist in the face of his friend.

A big girl, saddling her horse, came and pulled them apart, after they had had a round or two.

'Haven't I got a sister who makes fifty pounds a concert?' demanded Bartie breathlessly.

'Ain't he a lie?' demanded the son of the slaughterer.

The big girl arbitrated instantly. Certainly Bartie had a sister who made hundreds and hundreds—more shame to her. Peter had better go home and read the papers, if he did not believe it.

Peter said he did read the papers; he had never seen anything in them about no sisters.

'What papers?' said the girl.

'P'lice Budget and War Cry, of course,' answered the boy.

'That's the sort of paper your sister would be in,' Bartie said; 'mine is always in the cables.' He turned off from both girl and boy, and made his way to where a half-clipped horse nibbled at the exhausted pasturage.

A small girl of eight had, with incredible exertion, put the huge saddle on its back; Bartie had nothing to do but fasten the girths in place and put on the bridle. He flung himself up, and moved the animal close to a stump; Floss, the small girl, climbed to a place behind him, and a nine-year-old boy, playing marbles near, rose up at the sight of the moving horse, pocketed his marbles, swung his bag of books round his neck, and clambered up to the third place on the steed's broad neck.

All the paddock was a-move. There was a general race down to the sliprails, a gentle thunder of horses' hoofs and boys' shouts, broken by the shriller cries and 'Good-byes' of the girls.

Then up and down, left and right, away along the branching roads rode the country school children, tea and home before them, behind, one more day of the quarter's tedium dropped away for ever.

The Cameron horse jogged along; as a rule she had only Roly and Floss to carry, Bartie having a rough pony to journey on; but to-day the pony had wandered too far to be caught before school-time, so Tramby had an extra burden, and walked sedately.

Floss had a tiny red palm to show.

'Why, that's three times this week you've had the cane! You must be going it, Floss,' said Roly.

'It was sewing,' sighed Floss; 'how would you like to sew? I know you'd go and hide behind the shed.'

The front horseman turned his head. 'It's time you did learn, Floss,' he said; 'look at my stockings, I'm sick of having holes in them. Look at my trousers.'

'I heard Miss Browne telling you to leave them for her to mend,' said Floss.

'No, thanks,' said Bart; 'I know her mending too jolly well. She'd patch it with stuff that 'ud show a mile off.'

'Yes, look at my elbows,' Roly said; and though the positions forbade this, a mental picture of the clumsy mending with stuff worlds too new rose up before the eyes of his brother and sister.

Floss was dressed with curious inequality; she wore heavy country shoes and stockings, like the rest of the children at that public school, and her bonnet was of calico and most primitive manufacture, but her frock was exquisite—a little Paris-made garment of fine cashmere, beautifully embroidered.

'I wish some more of Challis's frocks would come,' she sighed; 'this one's so hot. I wish mamma would make her always wear thin things.'

'Why, she'd be shivering,' said Roly.

'Think how cold it is in Paris and those places!'

'Think how hot it is here!' sighed Floss and mopped at her streaming little face with her disengaged hand.

'I got the mail,' Bartie said, and pulled two letters out of his pocket—a thick one from his almost-forgotten mother, and a pale blue with a fanciful C upon the flap from his twin sister; they both bore the postmark of Windsor.

'Suppose they're stopping with the Queen again,' he added laconically.

'Wonder what they have for tea at her house?' sighed Flossie, and her system revolted against the corned beef and ill-made bread that were in prospect for her own meal.

Tramby turned of her own accord at a sudden gap in the gum-trees, and stood alongside while Roly stretched and contorted himself to lift out the sliprail—nothing ever induced him to dismount for this task. Then she stepped daintily over the lower rail, and again waited while the passenger in the rear stretched down and made things safe again.

Their father's selection stretched before them, eighty acres of miserable land, lying grey and dreary under the canopy of a five o'clock coppery sky, summer and drought time.

HOME FROM SCHOOL.

Patches of fertility showed some one laboured at the place. There was a stretch of lucerne, green as any in the district. But this was not saying very much, for Wilgandra's vegetation as a rule copied the neutral tint of the gum-trees, rather than the vivid emerald so pleasant to the eye in country wilds.

There was a small patch under potatoes, there were half a dozen orange-trees, yellow with fruit. At the very door of the house a cow grazed calmly, and everywhere browsed the sheep, brown, ragged, dirty things, fifty or sixty of them, far more than the acreage should have carried, but still in good condition—it seemed as if the mortgage was fattening. The house was a poor weatherboard place, the paint blistered off, the windows rickety, the roof of cruel