case of accident--or snake-bite, you know--they mostly do in the
bush."

"Medicine! And phwat should we want with medicine? This isn't a
five-guinea private hospital. We're clean, healthy people, I'd have
ye know. There's a bottle of painkiller, if that's what ye want, and
a packet of salts left--maybe they'd do ye some good. An' a bottle of
eye-water, an' something to put in your ear for th' earache--maybe
ye'll want 'em both before ye go much farther."

"But, Mrs Mac--"

"No, no more of it!" she said. "I tell ye that if it's a nip ye're
afther, ye'll have to go on fourteen miles to the pub in the town.
Ye're coffee's gittin' cowld, an' it's eighteenpence each to
passengers I charge on a night like this; Harry Chatswood's the driver
an' welcome, an' Ould Jack's an ould friend." And she flounced round
to clatter her feelings amongst the crockery on the dresser--just as
men make a great show of filling and lighting their pipes in the
middle of a barney. The table, by the way, was set on a brown holland
cloth, with the brightest of tin plates for cold meals, and the
brightest of tin pint-pots for the coffee (the crockery was in reserve
for hot meals and special local occasions) and at one side of the wide
fire-place hung an old-fashioned fountain, while in the other stood a
camp-oven; and billies and a black kerosene-tin hung evermore over the
fire from sooty chains. These, and a big bucket-handled frying-pan
and a few rusty convict-time arms on the slab walls, were mostly to
amuse jackaroos and jackarooesses, and let them think they were
getting into the Australian-dontcherknow at last.