where Donald himself had been the previous year.
I never heard Donald laugh since.
This is where Donald's wife comes in: A rather dominant women with a napoleonic nose, and a look in her hair as if she had been down South a bit trying the "fachons." There was a suspicion of "Titian Red" gone wrong about it, and it looked dusty and dull, with dark patches on the temples and back of the neck, where it was brushed up and put in a "bun." There was also in connection with it, an elaborately curled bunch of uniform colored hair that was given the place of an honored guest in the "front." She wasn't a bad sort though, and usually wore loose wrappers of cotton print, somehow suggesting the ladies one sees standing in the doorways of East Lansdale Street, Melbourne, in the vicinity of the Theatre round the corner, and handy to the "pub" and Parliament House.
But I got interested in the woman, for close to my tent were two little graves, which every evening she used to go and visit with her children. The graves were fenced in from the goats; a few dried-up flowers grew on them, and, under the small mounds in the open, solitary bush, lay all that was left of two little children, who had once been hers.
I used to sit and weave romances round her and the solitary graves—forgetting all about the Titian red of her hair—only seeing the good in the woman, and thinking of the broken-hearted mother.
I asked the "Sub's" wife about it all, and the little thin big-eyed woman got quite pathetic, and told me all the sad story, and I went to my camp and dreamed dreams and wrote a couplet about the dead babies.
"Born in the world—to die,
"They knew no mortal strife.
"Their birth a never-ending death—
"That death, the birth of Life."
