by her cousins and her aunt, the latter giving me to understand, with the air of a person who makes a family arrangement, that the girls should leave off coming as soon as her niece had recovered her spirits, or, as the good lady expressed it, "when Binnahan never more mother thinkum." I was glad, however, to find that this period of forgetfulness did not arrive. The child's grief soon exhausted itself, but so far from forgetting her mother, she never seemed better pleased than to be reminded of her.
I could not help laughing at myself the first time that my new charge started for school. Rosa's two little sisters good-naturedly came to act as convoy, but the black cousins, whom I had not invited, appeared also, and fell into the ranks of the escort. Now the whole party was barefoot, and Binnahan's preference for going to school as the crow flies necessitated a short cut over stubble fields, from which the white feet instinctively shrank, but which seemed good smooth walking to the hard little hoofs of the others.
I had heard so much of the invincible attractions of the bush, and the impossibility of preventing a native from running back to it, that my mind misgave me on the point about which I had least for fear, namely, that she would not return at dinner-time but rather take pot-luck with her relations on some chance dolghite or opossum. Whilst I stood watching in our verandah, with the anxiety of a hen looking after a foster-duckling, the party divided, adding thereby much to my uncertainties; but afternoon arrived, and with it came Binnahan, in a more than contented frame of mind, for she seemed extremely pleased with the step that she had ascended on life's ladder.
