drawers of water. More commonly still, the natives are employed in minding the sheep and lambs, an office for which they are no less fitted by their extraordinary habits of observation than by their quiet gentle manners and their inborn kindness to animals; and when thus employed in the continuous care of a flock these qualities receive recognition in the shape of regular wages, though not in the same proportion as are paid to white men. Sometimes a number of natives will remain many weeks near a homestead, assisting on the farm, and then, as if tired of being any longer in one spot, they will assume the important air of persons whose presence is required at a distance on urgent private affairs, and the whole party will disappear for a longer or shorter period.
It is not to be supposed that people who have neither furniture nor wardrobe to speak of can be much troubled with luggage in flitting, but of such as there is the ladies are compelled to be the porters; and what with bundles of flour and supernumerary fur mantles, one often meets the poor women bent almost double with their burdens, which they always carry on their backs. At all times an opossum-skin wallet between the shoulders, or under one arm, is an indispensable female appendage, where sits the baby if there is one, peeping out of the fur lining. The other children, generally quite naked, run beside the mother; whilst the father of the family, his head thrown slightly back, and a few spears in his hand, paces leisurely along in front of the party with all the dignity of a king. A child is sometimes carried astride on its parent's shoulders. I once saw a youngster sitting thus, who steadied himself by clutching his mother's hair tightly
