CHAPTER V.
The Night We Watched For Wallabies.
It had been a bleak July day, and as night came on a bitter westerly howled through the trees.

Cold! was n't it cold! The pigs in the sty, hungry and half-fed (we wanted for ourselves the few pumpkins that had survived the drought) fought savagely with each other for shelter, and squealed all the time like--well, like pigs.

The cows and calves left the place to seek shelter away in the mountains; while the draught horses, their hair standing up like barbed-wire, leaned sadly over the fence and gazed up at the green lucerne.

Joe went about shivering in an old coat of Dad's with only one sleeve to it--a calf had fancied the other one day that Dad hung it on a post as a mark to go by while ploughing.
"My! it'll be a stinger to-night," Dad remarked to Mrs.Brown--who sat, cold-looking, on the sofa--as he staggered inside with an immense log for the fire.

A log! Nearer a whole tree! But wood was nothing in Dad's eyes.
Mrs.Brown had been at our place five or six days.