so we used to make it a point of drinking our nobbler, and sometimes
treating the others twice, if we had cash.

There was another family that lived a couple of miles off,
higher up the creek, and we had always been good friends with them,
though they never came to our house, and only we boys went to theirs.
They were the parents of the little girl that went to school with us,
and a boy who was a year older than me.

Their father had been a gardener at home, and he married a native girl
who was born somewhere about the Hawkesbury, near Windsor.
Her father had been a farmer, and many a time she told us how sorry she was
to go away from the old place, and what fine corn and pumpkins they grew;
and how they had a church at Windsor, and used to take
their hay and fruit and potatoes to Sydney, and what a grand place Sydney was,
with stone buildings called markets for people to sell
fruit and vegetables and poultry in; and how you could walk down
into Lower George Street and see Sydney Harbour, a great shining
salt-water plain, a thousand times as big as the biggest waterhole,
with ships and boats and sailors, and every kind of strange thing upon it.

Mrs. Storefield was pretty fond of talking, and she was always fond of me,
because once when she was out after the cows, and her man was away,
and she had left Grace at home, the little thing crawled down to the waterhole
and tumbled in. I happened to be riding up with a message for mother,
to borrow some soap, when I heard a little cry like a lamb's, and there was
poor little Gracey struggling in the water like a drowning kitten,
with her face under. Another minute or two would have finished her,
but I was off the old pony and into the water like a teal flapper.
I had her out in a second or two, and she gasped and cried a bit,