THE BOUNDARY RIDER, OTAGO CENTRAL.

Otago Witness, Issue 2387, 30 November 1899, Page 63

THE BOUNDARY RIDER, OTAGO CENTRAL.

Out in the saddle, alone,

Alone in a desert drear, The wailing bleat of the sheep

Plaintively reaches my car.

Nothing but hills all around,

Sierras with summits of snow, Speargrass, tii3sock, and swamp,

And a barbed-wire fence or so.

A hawk soars far up above,

Below is a blue lagoon, Black clouds keep piling up For the snowstorm, coming soon.

My horse goes ambling along, I'll light up the fragrant weed, Then let it blow warm — or freeze:

A pipeful is bliss indeed!

And I think of the days long past, Of the years and the loves now fled, Of my boyhood's early friends,

Of the living and the dead.

I -think of the smiling south, "With its fields of golden sheaves, Its sombre pines, it 3 fairy ierns, Its flax with graceful leaves. But the snowflakes drifting past Arc tinting the landscape white, Reality sternly chides

From my thoughts all visions bright, Ah ! there is the boundary hut, I don't feel now so chilly — " Come, pile on the scrub, old man, And sling on the old black billy!"

—LITTLE JIMMY. Southland, Novembo- 1899.