The Wilderness 



that they come right up on to my verandah and sit and sing within a 

 yard of my chair, or the visitors which bring the feeling of distant places 

 with them, and carry my thoughts far, far away. But of one thing 

 I am sure, and that is my gratitude to the man who left this little wild 

 patch in the heart of the houses to be a sanctuary for all wild things. 

 Noisy people passing by may think it is a mere empty patch of trees ; 

 but we who have sat silently on our verandah through the long still 

 summer evenings and listened to the whisperings and stirrings, know 

 that there is a distinct world of living things waking and moving down 

 there in the shadows. 



Long-nosed Bandicoot 



First of all there are the bandicoots, two kinds of them, amusingly 

 named the long-nosed and the fat bandicoot. One stumbles over a 

 few of their holes by day, but no other sign of them is there ; yet at 

 night out they come by the dozen. We hear them rustling through the 



