Australian Tales - Setis

had arrived at the conclusion that he might reasonably hope to marry
Phoebe in twelve or fifteen months. How to enter upon the love-making
preliminaries was the next subject of his cogitation, which he had not
decided before he was fast asleep on his little bachelor bed.
Soon after Jonathan left, Phoebe put on her hat, and skipped across the
paddock to Betsy Brown's back gate, and in confidential whispers told
her friend the particulars of Jonathan's visit, and all the encouraging
things her father had said about him, after he had gone. She furthermore
said that “she had made up her mind to take him,” for better or worse, if
he offered himself; for he was the nicest man she had ever seen, except
poor Barney, who had broken his neck on the Homebush Racecourse five
years before.
All the ensuing week, Phoebe Skimmer was constantly in Jonathan's
thoughts, and no matter how or where he was engaged, her pretty image
was ever before his eyes. Day and night he cudgelled his brain to devise
some means for making known his love for her; and to get an
acknowledgment from her that it was reciprocated. But he was an utter
stranger to all conventional forms and phrases. He knew how he felt, but
he lacked the power to explain his feelings. He could ride a kicking colt
without a saddle, and could do many other things requiring nerve and
energy to effect; but he could not even look at Phoebe Skimmer without
feeling shaky. It was not fear, however, that made him shake; he was not
a coward, but it was an unaccountable sensation which came over him,
and which he was powerless to conquer or to control. Many bashful boys
will understand his feelings without any further explanation.
One morning, as he was hilling up some young cauliflowers and
chipping out the couch-grass between the rows, an idea struck him all at
once, and he began to think it out. “Nation hard stuff to get out of the
ground, is this couch-grass,” thought Jonathan. “It's just like love; when
it gets into a fellow's heart, it creeps all over him, with its thousand roots,
and burned if he can get it out any how.” Then he resolved upon using
that familiar figure to convey the state of his mind to Phoebe. She knew
what couch-grass was, he was sure, for he had seen lots of it choking the
marigolds in her little front garden; and he thought she knew what love
was too, so she would readily understand his parabolic addresses. He
would go over to her house next Saturday, and trim her garden beds, and
then tell her that his heart was overgrown with love, and was in danger of
being stifled, like her marigolds, with couch-grass, if she did not promise
to be its keeper for life. Pleased with the happy concoction, Jonathan
composed a few sentences, embodying the idea in his own vernacular,
and rehearsed them as he prosecuted his varied duties day after day, until
he felt assured that he had learnt them off, and could say them to Phoebe,
without a stammer.
Directly after dinner, on the following Saturday, he trimmed himself up