and here father held up his hand.

`Let 'em ring a bit; some of their tongues are out. These young things
is generally soft. Come here, Dick.' I rode up, and he told me
to follow him.

We walked our horses up to the edge of the mountain and looked over.
It was like the end of the world. Far down there was a dark, dreadful drop
into a sort of deep valley below. You couldn't see the bottom of it.
The trees on the mountain side looked like bushes, and they were
big ironbarks and messmates too. On three sides of us was this awful,
desolate-looking precipice -- a dreary, gloomy, God-forsaken kind of spot.
The sky got cloudy, and the breeze turned cold and began to murmur and whistle
in an odd, unnatural kind of way, while father, seeing how scared and puzzled
I was, began to laugh. I shuddered. A thought crossed my mind
that it might be the Enemy of Souls, in his shape, going to carry us off
for doing such a piece of wickedness.

`Looks queer, doesn't it?' says father, going to the brink and kicking down
a boulder, that rolled and crashed down the steep mountain side,
tearing its way through scrub and heath till it settled down
in the glen below. `It won't do for a man's horse to slip, will it, boy?
And yet there's a track here into a fine large paddock, open and clear, too,
where I'm going to put these cattle into.'

I stared at him, without speaking, thinking was he mad.

`No! the old man isn't mad, youngster,' he said; `not yet, at least.
I'm going to show you a trick that none of you native boys are up to,
smart as you think yourselves.' Here he got off the old mare,