Just for once the others did not matter to
her; her father, Jim, and Wally, each in his own corner, as they had
travelled so many times in the past, coming back from school. Then she
had had eyes only for them; to-day her soul was hungry for the dear
country she had not seen for so long. It lay bare enough in the early
winter--long stretches of stone-walled paddocks where the red soil
showed through the sparse, native grass; steep, stony hillsides, with
little sheep grazing on them--pygmies, after the great English sheep;
oases of irrigation, with the deep green of lucerne growing rank among
weed-fringed water-channels; and so on and on, past little towns
and tiny settlements, and now and then a stop at some place of more
importance. But Norah did not want the towns; she was homesick for the
open country, for the scent of the gum trees coming drifting in through
the open window, for the long, lonely plains where grazing cattle raised
lazy eyes to look at the roaring engine, or horses flung up nervous
heads and went racing away across the grass--more for the fun of it than
from fear. The gum trees called to her, beckoned to her; she forgot the
smooth perfection of the English landscape as she feasted her eyes on
the dear, untidy trees, whose dangling strips of bark seemed to wave to
her in greeting, telling her she was coming home. They passed a great
team of working bullocks in a wagon loaded with an enormous tree trunk;
twenty-four monsters, roan and red and speckled, with a great pair of
polled Angus in the lead; they plodded along in their own dust, their
driver beside them with his immense whip over his shoulder.
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