his perch when he wanted to get quite near the fire. Harriet hated it, and had moments when she even carried the lid to the cliff to throw it in the sea. But she brought it back, because she knew he would be so indignant. She reviled him however.
"Shameful! Hideous! Old tin lids! How you can sit on it. How you can bring yourself to sit on such a thing, and not feel humiliated. Is that your aristocratic principle?"
"I put a cushion on it," he said.
As he squatted on his tub this evening in the fire-corner, she suddenly turned from her book and cried:
"There he is, on his throne! Sitting on his aristocratic principle!" And again she roared with laughter.
He, however, shook some coal out of the little tub on to the fire, replaced the tin lid and the cushion, and resumed his thoughts. The fire was very warm. She lay stretched in front of it on the sofa, covered with an eider-down, and reading a Nat Gould novel, to get the real tang of Australia.
"Of course," he said, "this land always gives me the feeling that it doesn't want to be touched, it doesn't want men to get hold of it."
She looked up from her Nat Gould.
"Yes," she admitted slowly. "And my ideal has always been a farm. But I know now. The farms don't really belong to the land. They only scratch it and irritate it, and are never at one with it."
Whereupon she returned to her Nat Gould, and there was silence save for the hollow of the wind. When she had finished her paper-backed book she said:
"It's just like them—just like they think they are."
"Yes," he said vaguely.
"But, bah!" she added, "they make me sick. So absolutely dull—worse than an 'At Home' in the middle classes."
And after a silence, another shriek of laughter suddenly.
"Like a flying-fish! Like a flying-fish dashing into the waves! Dashing into the waves after his hat—"
He giggled on his tub.
"Fancy, that I'm here in Coo-ee alter my day's outing! I can't believe it. I shall call you the flying-fish. It's hard to believe that one was so many things in one day. Suddenly
