It was before we had fairly plunged into our messes and muddles--in the very beginning, when the _couleur de rose_ was over all--when the dilapidations of our country cottage were all repaired, and everything in the most beautiful order--when the fields were rich with spring grass and the scent of wattle-blossom, and the sleek cows had calved, and the hens were clucking about with thriving families of chicks--when the bee boxes were still a-making, and the two first pigs only in their smart new sty--when the children, released from the schoolroom, were scampering everywhere with their father, who was more of a child than any of them, and growing fat and rosy on the sweet air and the pure milk--when we were telling one another all day that we never were so happy and so well off--it was then that the calamity of our lives befell us. A small creek touched the borders of the two paddocks that we called our farm, and, like all creeks, was fringed with wild vegetation, bushes and trees that interposed a romantic screen between its little bed and the world of prosaic agriculture. It so happened that the children--like many thousands of native Australians, far older than they--had never seen the bush. When they had wanted change of air Tom had taken them to sea; and as he had never had holidays himself, and I had never cared to go away from home without him, we were nearly in the same case. That strip of scrub was true bush, as far as it went, and we were delighted in it. We were too busy just then to go thither in daytime, and would not allow the children to ramble there alone, for fear of snakes--although it was much too early and too cool for them; besides which, there were none--but we would take the fascinating walk about sundown in a family party, and sometimes have our tea there, returning after dark with strange treasures of leaf and insect, clear pebbles that we made sure were topazes in the rough, and stones with mica specks in them that we thought were gold. And once we went there in moonlight--the full moon of our first October--when it was mild and balmy, and we could easily imagine ourselves in forests primeval untrodden by a human foot except our own! How well I remember it--as if it were yesterday!--the enormous look of the trees in that beautiful, deceptive light, and how we stood in an ecstatic group under one of them to look up at an oppossum sitting in the fork of a dead branch.