Explore "The Call of the South" by Louis Becke on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The bank of the tidal river was very, very quiet as I walked down to it through the tall spear grass and sat down upon the smooth, weather-worn bole of a great blackbutt tree, cast up by the river when in flood long years agone. Before me the water swirled and eddied and bubbled past on its way to mingle with the ocean waves, as they were sweeping in across the wide and shallow bar, two miles away.
The sun had dropped behind the rugged line of purple mountains to the west, and, as I watched by its after glow five black swans floating towards me upon the swiftly-flowing water, a footstep sounded near me, and a man with a gun and a bundle on his shoulder bade me "good-evening," and then asked me if I had come from Port -- -- -- (a little township five miles away).