CHAPTER I. 

 THE BUSH HUT 



THE wattles on Olinda have blossomed many times 

 since the spring of our advent. Three roving 

 naturalists, familiar with the Bush, we had often 

 slept on a bed of bracken, with stars winking at us be- 

 tween gum tree boughs, and wakened at sunrise to hear 

 birds singing and see dew shining on the grass. It 

 is pleasant, now and then, to become a super-sun- 

 downer, to go on the wallaby with swag and billy, 

 careless whither a track leads, and take one's ease at 

 the Inn of Stars. We were Bush ramblers always in 

 holiday time, but we fell in love with Olinda Vale at 

 first sight, and knew that it would long stay our wan- 

 derings: a valley abrim with sunshine, and loud with 

 the songs of birds. 



In those days the settlement, little more than 

 thirty miles from Melbourne, was small, perhaps a 

 score of homes in all; we never made a census of the 

 inhabitants. A gray old road came down hill from 

 the station, turning sharply into the valley below the 

 reservoir; an old road bordered with gum trees, and 

 furrowed by cart wheels, dusty in summer and muddy 

 in winter; a road that led past huts and cottages, and 

 over the creek into undiscovered country. Between 

 the road and the creek lay a broad strip of fertile land 

 on which the villagers lived and toiled. There were 

 bean and potato fields, small orchards, raspberry 

 patches and beds of strawberries. One or two men 

 were beekeepers; some felled trees for a livelihood. 

 But there was never a shop in the Vale, no "business 

 centre," no crowd on "late closing" night ; Olinda was 

 then in the Golden Age. 



