his elbows on the kitchen table, and sucking at a clay pipe as black as the nose of a nigger, stared vacantly at the moths flying about the lamp. "It’s herself what does all that."
"Me! Do you say it’s me what does it all — and to my mistress’s face?" and Mrs. Channing, who had been dropping some salt junk into the pot to soak overnight, flew round and faced her husband.. Gad! I can see her now glaring at him with fight all over her, and only a thin, bony wizard of a woman she was, too. But mother—she fled, shuffling along the gangway to our living room as fast as her slippers would allow her. There was none who understood the married couple as well as mother,
"I'm sure they'll have another row out there," she confided to the Governor, as she closed the doar firmly behind her, to keep the noise out should a row commence.
"Don’t mind them, my dear, don’t mind them," and the Governor quietly raised his eyes from the paper he was reading. "Harry and the missus could never get along together if they were not fighting like cat and dog."
"It does seem like it, but it’s a dreadful pity," mother sighed, seating herself near the open window that looked out on to the home paddock flat. "And Mrs. Channing has worked so hard to-day."
"It's only medicine and recreation to them, my dear," the Governor smiled, "Keeps them from contracting this weird melancholy of the Australian bush, and from forgetting the beautiful side of it; and prevent them from becoming like the flowers
