Page:The romance of Runnibede (IA romanceofrunnibe00rudd).pdf/70

life, one could never forget. The gins had paid a call to the homestead, in company with their gallant husbands, who were loaded up with offerings of wild honey, and possum skins, and spears and boomerangs, The Governor sat on the store verandah, after accepting the gifts, discoursing with them on the moan and the stars, the kangaroos, and dry water holes, while mother and the governess took charge of the lubras. It was, of course, the first home those simple-minded black gins had ever put foot in—unless their own wretched gunyahs of a couple of sheets of bark propped slantways against each other, could be called a home. And all the covering they had to their bodies were strips of ‘possum tied round their waists, suggesting a girdle. They were very Light on clothes, those gins, and couldn’t have been very costly wives. When they mounted the verandah of the big house, they stood rubbing their flat bare feet over the boards, as if astonished at the smoothness of them. Then in quick, timid, glances, they looked curiously about in at the open door, as if suspecting it was a mysterious sort of cave, or place of captivity. After much coaxing and caution on the part of mother and Mary Rumble the nude, straight-limbed visitors entered slowly on the heels of each other, pausing at every step—and what light, silent, angelic steps they-—to stretch their necks and peer this way and that like emus. Visions of sinewy symmetry they were, yet with eyes and nostrils of wild horses. And then to hear the hosts endeavouring to assure these shy, wild women of the bush, in pigeon English, and by making signs with their hands and their heads,