Australian Tales - Setis

catching a crab, with his heels in the air, and his hobnails glistening in
the sunbeams. After working in that way for an hour, and finding that he
had scarcely gained half a mile, he naturally enough began to feel
discouraged, so he took some more rum to sustain him, and tugged away
again for another hour with all his might. Never before had he felt his
boat pull so heavily, even when he had two tons of potatoes in it.
Something was the matter for certain, for he had not pulled it a quarter of
a mile during the last hour. Her bottom must be dirty, he thought, though
Daub, the boatman, had given it a coat of coal tar only a month before.
Were the tides always stronger on Christmas Day? he wondered, or what
could the matter be? The boat was as hard to move as a brewer's vat.
As he was pushing away at the oars, and pondering over the mysterious
cause of his slow progress, he perchance looked round, when he saw that
Polly and Billy were towing the empty bushel basket behind — by a long
line affixed to the handles — and were enjoying the fun of their mimic
water-logged ship, in childish ignorance of the hard labour they were
inflicting on their perspiring father. Mr. Knipps dropped his oars,
dragged the basket into the boat, and slapped Polly and Billy's heads
until their ears were as red as lobsters' legs. He then lighted his pipe, spat
on his hands, and resumed the oars; but by the time he had done all that,
the boat had drifted back nearly opposite to Bandicoot Brush.
It would make a very long chapter were I to follow that dolorous
Christmas party on their tiresome homeward passage, and describe all
that they said, did, and suffered. Were I to tell how Mr. Knipps pushed
and tugged against wind and tide, and gradually got weary, cross, and
drunk. How he profanely cursed his wife, for persisting in hoisting a
large gingham umbrella, which, he said, stopped the boat's way more
than the bushel basket had done; and, finally, how he threw the umbrella
overboard and the basket too. How Mrs. Knipps thereupon got spiteful,
and nagged at her husband until he grew uproariously wrath, and
threatened to pull the plug out of the boat, and drown them all together.
How a fierce recrimination was kept up after they reached their home,
until it got to fighting pitch; and after beating his wife with his bridle
reins, and receiving in return a stunning knock on the head with the
tongs, Mr. Knipps, in a paroxysm of drunken frenzy, smashed every
portable article in the house, from the Dutch clock in the corner, to his
grandmother's old-fashioned china tea-pot on the mantel-piece.
It would be tedious, too, to record all the minor miseries of Mrs.
Knipps and her children, consequent upon their day's pleasure. How the
poor baby cried all that night (despite every attempt to soothe him, with
rattle and spoon, and every article in the toy way that could be procured),
until Mrs. Knipps, in tracing the cause of such unusual grief, discovered
two Ticks in a tender part of her infant's person; and how she soon
afterwards found two more Ticks on herself. How Polly and Billy's faces