We had been telling each other stories which we had heard or read of bushranging exploits, until we were all as nervous as possible.

Ghosts, or even burglar stories, are nothing to the horror of a true bushranger story, and F---- had made himself particularly ghastly and disagreeable by giving a minute account of an adventure which had been told to him by one of the survivors.
We listened, with the wind howling outside, to F----'s horrid second-hand story, of how one fine day up country, eight or ten men,--station hands,--were "stuck up" by one solitary bushranger, armed to the teeth.

He tied them up one by one, and seated them all on a bench in the sun, and deliberately fired at and wounded the youngest of the party; then, seized with compunction, he unbound one of the captives, and stood over him, revolver in hand, whilst he saddled and mounted a horse, to go for a doctor to set the poor boy's broken leg.

Before the messenger had gone "a league, a league, but barely twa',"-- the freebooter recollected that he might bring somebody else back with him besides the doctor, and flinging himself across his horse, rode after the affrighted man, and coolly shot him dead.

I really don't know how the story ended: I believe everybody perished; but at this juncture I declared it to be impossible to sit up any longer to listen to such tragedies, and went to bed.
Exactly at midnight,--the proper hour for ghosts; burglars, and bushrangers, and such "small deer" to be about, everybody was awakened simultaneously by a loud irregular knocking, which sounded with hollow reverberations all through the wooden house.