where your tail, eh?" and having seized it and twirled it round rapidly several times, he would bring its head against a limb, and as he watched its struggles, would continue, "Poor fellow, neber mind; me eat you by and by;" and then apparently in a great passion, "What; you no die, eh? (whack—whack—with the tomahawk) You ugly tief, me knock your eye out (whack—whack). Oh! Ah! Dead, I belieb." If it were not so, the fall from such a height sufficed to destroy life, for he would let it drop from an elevation of perhaps seventy or eighty feet, when his wife taking it, would add it to her already extraordinary burden. This she sometimes cast upon the ground, and with a small tomahawk, which she carried, would cut into the root of a honeysuckle or wattle, and by means of a small twig with a hook at the end, extract a large species of grub, from two to three inches in length, after regarding which for a moment, as a gourmand would a particularly tit bit, she would give to the child or eat it herself.
"What a disgusting morsel!!!" says a sensitive reader.
Hast never eaten an oyster, Sir?
About sunset, and after they had left Melbourne some miles behind, Benbo expressed a wish to camp, and pointing to a hut which could be just distinguished through the trees, said some "good white fellows" lived there, who would give them food and shelter for the night. "I think" said Slinger, "we will economise our stores, and will only sleep in the open air when we can't under a roof." "Agreed" said Hugh; and wishing Benbo a good night, they advanced to the hut, and were received by several very fine kangaroo dogs (a breed between the greyhound and bull-dog, noted for fleetness and strength), which ran barking up to them, but were evidently not in a blood-thirsty humour, for on Hugh speaking to one of them, it came up and licked his hand.
