Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/111

by his wife, and I was much struck, when they set out, with the different styles of costume which the two had adopted for the journey. Ned was dressed very jauntily in nothing but a shirt drawn tightly to the waist with a belt, whereas the wife's attire might rather have befitted an expedition towards the South pole. She was quite weighed down with a garment of new opossum fur, reaching from her shoulders to her feet, and her spirits seemed as heavy as her clothing. The next day we had a thunderstorm, with pouring rain that lasted till the evening, when just after dark there came a tap at the window, accompanied by a very lamentable voice, which I recognized as belonging to Ned. He and his wife had brought me back an answer to my letter in spite of the bad weather, though she alone had any particular reason to complain of it, and of her, poor thing, one could hardly say that she was wet to the skin, as she had so very little on her excepting her skin to be wetted. Ned had changed clothes with her when the weather changed, by which I do not mean that he had given her his shirt, but rather that he had taken her fur; and I could not help suspecting that his original motive in making her his travelling companion had been that she might act as a clothes-horse. Being invited into the kitchen, they forthwith sat down upon the hearth in front of the fire, and some pepper having accidentally been mixed with the tea which our servant made for them, Ned seized the occasion to raise his wife's spirits by feigning death in consequence. That such an event should be regarded by her with complacency, after his recent behaviour about the fur, was possibly a suggestion of his own con-