It had originally consisted of the two-roomed slab hut,
which had been added to from time to time. Kitchen, outhouses,
bachelors' quarters, saddle-rooms, and store-rooms had been built
on in a kind of straggling quadrangle, with many corners and unexpected
doorways and passages; and it is reported that a swagman once got
his dole of rations at the kitchen, went away, and after turning
two or three corners, got so tangled up that when Fate led him back
to the kitchen he didn't recognise it, and asked for rations over
again, in the firm belief that he was at a different part of the
house.
The original building was still the principal living-room, but
the house had grown till it contained about twenty rooms. The slab
walls had been plastered and whitewashed, and a wide verandah ran
all along the front. Round the house were acres of garden, with
great clumps of willows and acacias, where the magpies sat in the
heat of the day and sang to one another in their sweet, low warble.
The house stood on a spur running from the hills. Looking down
the river from it, one saw level flats waving with long grasses,
in which the solemn cattle waded knee-deep. Here and there clumps
of willows and stately poplars waved in the breeze. In the clear,
dry air all colours were startlingly vivid, and round the nearer
foothills wonderful lights and shadows played and shifted, while
sometimes a white fleece of mist would drift slowly across a distant
hill, like a film of snowy lace on the face of a beautiful woman.
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