There were flocks of birds on the thin boughs of the eucalypti and the casuarinæ, which gave fine play to their wings. Black, white, and grey cockatoos, parrots and parroquets of all colors, king-birds, birds of paradise, of brilliant green, with a crowd of red, and blue lories, glowing with every prismatic color, flew about with deafening clamors. All at once, a strange volley of discordant sounds seemed to come from the thicket. The colonists heard, one after another, the song of birds, the cries of four-footed beasts, and a sort of clucking sound strangely human. Neb and Herbert rushed towards the thicket, forgetting the most elementary rules of prudence. Happily, there was neither formidable wild beast nor savage native, but merely half-a-dozen of those mocking birds which they recognized as “mountain pheasants.” A few skillfully aimed blows with a stick brought this parody to an end, and gave them excellent game for dinner that evening. Herbert also pointed out superb pigeons with bronze-colored wings, some with a magnificent crest, others clad in green, like their congeners at Port-Macquarie; but like the troops of crows and magpies which flew about, they were beyond reach. A load of small-shot would have killed hosts of them; but the colonists had nothing but stones and sticks, very insufficient weapons. They proved even more inadequate when a troop of quadrupeds leaped away through the underbrush with tremendous bounds thirty feet long, so that they almost seemed to spring from tree to tree, like squirrels. “Kangaroos!” cried Herbert. “Can you eat them?” said Pencroff. “They make a delicious stew,” said the reporter. The words had hardly escaped his lips, when the sailor, with Neb and Herbert at his heels, rushed after the kangaroos. Smith tried in vain to recall them, but equally in vain did they pursue the game, whose elastic leaps left them far behind. After five minutes’ chase, they gave it up, out of breath. “You see, Mr. Smith,” said Pencroff, “that guns are a necessity. Will it be possible to make them?” “Perhaps,” replied the engineer; “but we will begin by making bows and arrows, and you will soon use them as skilfully as the Australian hunters.” “Bows and arrows!” said Pencroff, with a contemptuous look. “They are for children!” “Don’t be so proud, my friend,” said the reporter. “Bows and arrows were sufficient for many centuries for the warfare of mankind. Powder is an invention of yesterday, while war, unhappily, is as old as the race.” “That’s true, Mr. Spilett,” said the sailor. “I always speak before I think. Forgive me.” Meanwhile Herbert, with his Natural History always uppermost in his thoughts, returned to the subject of kangaroos. “Those which escaped us,” he said, “belong to the species most difficult to capture—very large, with long grey hair, but I am sure there are black and red kangaroos, rock-kangaroos, kangaroo-rats—”