MESSAGE-STICKS 263 



On a certain station a youthful son of the proprietor 

 was accidentally drowned in a creek not far from the home- 

 stead. The grief of the parents was participated in by all 

 engaged on the station, for the boy, full of promise, had 

 been a general favourite. None seemed more sorrowful 

 and gloomy than the blacks camped in the neighbourhood, 

 and when the first shock of sorrow was of the past, they 

 were eager to send the news to distant friends. A letter 

 was laboriously composed. It was a short piece of wood, 

 narrow and flat ; an undulating groove ran from end to end 

 on one side, midway was an intersecting notch. These 

 were the principal characteristics, but there were other 

 small marks and scratches. Bearing this as his credentials, 

 a messenger departed, and in a week or so members of 

 camps hundreds of miles away had seen the letter and 

 were in possession of all the details of the sad event, the 

 messenger in the meantime having returned. The letter 

 was duly credited with having conveyed the particulars. Is 

 it not obvious, however, that the news had been transmitted 

 orally, and that the crude carvings on the stick merely 

 indicated an attempt to give verisimilitude to the intelligence 

 — the wavy line indicating the creek, and the notch the 

 fatal water-hole. If not, then a black's message-stick is a 

 model of literary condensation, their characters marvels of 

 comprehensiveness and exactitude. 



Another letter is before me — one of the best specimens 

 with regard to workmanship I have ever seen. Upon one 

 edge of a piece of brown wood 6 inches long, i inch 

 broad, flat and rounded off" at the edges and ends, there are 

 five notches, and on the opposite edge a single notch. Close 

 to the end is a faint, crude representation of a broad arrow, 

 below which is a confusion of small cuts, in a variety of 

 angles, none quite vertical, some quite horizontal. On the 

 reverse is a single — almost perpendicular — cut, and a bold 

 X, and near the point, two shallow, indistinct diverging 

 cuts. So far no one to whom the letter has been sub- 

 mitted has given a satisfactory reading. Blacks frankly 

 admit that they do not understand it. They examine it 



