The early morning in the coastal belt of New South Wales is rapture made visible and responsive to one's faculties of touch, and smell, and hearing. And yet---no. I believe I have used the wrong word. It would be rapture, belike, in a Devon coomb, or on a Hampshire hill-top. Here it is hardly articulate or sprightly enough for rapture. Rather, I should say, it is the perfection of pellucid serenity. It lacks the full-throated eternal youthfulness of dawn in the English countryside; but, for calmly exquisite serenity, it is matchless. To my mind it is grateful as cold water is to a heated, tired body. It smooths out the creases of the mind, and is wonderfully calming. Yet it has none of the intimate, heart-stirring kindliness of England's rural scenery. No untamed land has that. Nature may be grand, inspiring, bracing, terrifying, what you will. She is never simply kind and loving--whatever the armchair poets may say. A countryside must be humanised, and that through many successive generations, before it can lay hold upon your heart by its loving-kindness, and draw moisture from your eyes. It is not the emotionless power of Nature, but man's long-suffering patient toil in Nature's realm that gives our English country-side this quality. But my rugged, unkempt bush here is nobly serene and splendidly calm in the dawn hours. It makes me feel rather like an ant, but a well-doing and unworried ant. And I enjoy it greatly. As I stride among the drenching scrub, and over ancient logs which, before I was born, stood erect and challenged all the winds that blow, I listen for the sound of his bell, and then call to my friend Punch: 'Choop! Choop! Choop, Punch! Come away, boy! Come away! Choop! Choop!' But not too loudly, and not at all peremptorily. For I do not really want him to come, or, at least, not too hurriedly. That would cut my morning pleasure short. No; I prefer to find Punch half a mile from home, and I think the rascal knows it. For sometimes I catch glimpses of him between the tree-trunks--we have myriads of cabbage-tree palms, tree-ferns, and bangalow palms, among the eucalypti hereabouts--and always, if we are less than a quarter of a mile or so from home, it is his rounded haunches that I see, and he is walking slowly away from me, listening to my call, and doubtless grinning as he chews his cud--a great ruminator is my Punch. At other times, when it chances that dawn has found him a full half mile from home, he does not walk away from me, but stands behind the bole of a great tree, looking round its side, listening, waiting, and studiously refraining from the slightest move in my direction, until I am within twenty paces of him. Then, with a loud whinny, rather like a child's 'Peep-bo!' in intent, I think, he will walk quickly up to me, wishing me the top of the morning, and holding out his head for the halter which I always carry on these occasions.