Presently the two men drag themselves away from the fence, fill their
pipes, and go to have a look at some rows of forked sticks, apparently
stuck in the ground for some purpose. The selector calls these sticks
fruit-trees, and he calls the place "the orchard." They fool round
these wretched sticks until dinnertime, when the neighbour says he
must be getting home. "Stay and have some dinner! Man alive! Stay
and have some dinner!" says the selector; and so the friend stays.

It is a broiling hot day in summer, and the dinner consists of hot
roast meat, hot baked potatoes, hot cabbage, hot pumpkin, hot peas, and
burning-hot plum-pudding. The family drinks on an average four cups of
tea each per meal. The wife takes her place at the head of the table
with a broom to keep the fowls out, and at short intervals she
interrupts the conversation with such exclamations as "Shoo! shoo!"
"Tommy, can't you see that fowl? Drive it out!" The fowls evidently
pass a lot of their time in the house. They mark the circle described
by the broom, and take care to keep two or three inches beyond it.
Every now and then you see a fowl on the dresser amongst the crockery,
and there is great concern to get it out before it breaks something.
While dinner is in progress two steers get into the wheat through a
broken rail which has been spliced with stringy-bark, and a calf or two
break into the vineyard. And yet this careless Australian selector,
who is too shiftless to put up a decent fence, or build a decent house
and who knows little or nothing about farming, would seem by his
conversation to have read up all the great social and political
questions of the day. Here are some fragments of conversation caught
at the dinner-table. Present--the selector, the missus, the neighbour,
Corney George--nicknamed "Henry George"--Tommy, Jacky, and the younger
children. The spaces represent interruptions by the fowls and