Page 66 - A Little Bush Maid

WHAT NORAH FOUND

Norah, meanwhile, had been feeling somewhat "out of things." Tt was really

more than human nature could be expected to bear that she should remain
on the log with the three boys, while Jim told amazing yarns about her. Still

it was decidedly lonesome in the jutting root of the old tree, looking fixedly
at the water, in which placidly lay a float that had apparently forgotten that
the first duty of a float is to bob.

Jim’s voice, murmuring along in his lengthy recital, came to her softly, and

she could see from her perch the interested faces of the two others. Tt
mingled drowsily with the dull drone of bees in the ti-tree behind her, and
presently Norah, to her disgust, found that she was growing drowsy too.

"This won’t do!" she reflected, shaking herself. "Tf T go to sleep and tumble

off this old root T’ll startle away all the fish in the creek." She looked
doubtfully at the still water, now and then rippled by the splash of a leaping
fish. "No good when they jump like that," said Norah to herself. "T guess T’ll

go and explore."

She wound up her line quickly, and flung her bait to the lazy inhabitants of
the creek as a parting gift. Then, unnoticed by the boys, she scrambled out
of the tree and climbed up the bank, getting her blue riding-skirt decidedly

muddy--not that Norah’s free and independent soul had ever learned to
tremble at the sight of muddy garments. She hid her fishing tackle in a

stump, and made her way along the bank.

A little farther up she came across black Billy--a very cheerful aboriginal,

seeing that he had managed to induce no less than nine blackfish to leave
their watery bed.

"Oh, T say!" said Norah, round-eyed and envious. "How do you manage it,
Billy? We can’t catch one."