The Aloe Read Free

they swung. Lottie arranged the shawl “most beautifully”, and the storeman tucked up their feet in a piece of old blanket.
    “Lift up – Easy does it –” They might have been a couple of young ponies.
    The storeman felt over the cords holding his load, unhooked the brake chain from the wheel, and whistling, he swung up beside them.
    “Keep close to me,” said Lottie, “because otherwise you pull the shawl away from my side, Kezia.”
    But Kezia edged up to the storeman – He towered up, big as a giant, and he smelled of nuts and wooden boxes.

Chapter Two
    I t was the first time that Lottie and Kezia had ever been out so late. Everything looked different – the painted wooden houses much smaller than they did by day, the trees and the gardens far bigger and wilder. Bright stars speckled the sky and the moon hung over the harbour dabbling the waves with gold. They could see the light house shining from Quarantine Island, the green lights fore and aft on the old black coal hulks –
    “There comes the Picton boat,” said the storeman, pointing with his whip to a little steamer all hung with bright beads.
    But when they reached the top of the hill and began to go down the other side, the harbour disappeared and although they were still in the town they were quite lost. Other carts rattled past. Everybody knew the storeman.
    “Night, Fred!”
    “Night-O!” he shouted.
    Kezia liked very much to hear him. Whenever a cart appeared in the distance she looked up and waited for his voice. In fact she liked him altogether; he was an old friend; she and the grandmother had often been to his place to buy grapes. The storeman lived alone in a cottage with a glasshouse that he had built himself leaning against it. All the glasshouse was spanned and arched over with one beautiful vine. He took her brown basket from her, lined it with three large leaves and then he felt in his belt for a little horn knife, reached up and snipped off a big blue cluster and laid it on the leaves as tenderly as you might put a doll to bed. He was a very big man. He wore brown velvet trousers and he had a long brown beard, but he never wore a collar – not even on Sundays. The back of his neck was dark red.
    “Where are we now?” Every few minutes one of the children asked him the question, and he was patient –
    “Why! this is Hawstone Street,” or “Hill Street” or “Charlotte Crescent” –
    “Of course it is.” Lottie pricked up her ears at the last name; she always felt that Charlotte Crescent belonged specially to her. Very few people had streets with the same name as theirs –
    “Look, Kezia! There is Charlotte Crescent. Doesn’t it look different.”
    They reached their last boundary marks – the fire alarm station – a little wooden affair painted red and sheltering a huge bell – and the white gates of the Botanical Gardens, gleaming in the moonlight. Now everything familiar was left behind; now the big dray rattled into unknown country, along the new roads with high clay banks on either side, up the steep, towering hills, down into valleys where the bush drew back on either side just enough to let them past, through a wide shallow river – the horses pulled up to drink – and made a rare scramble at starting again – on and on – further and further. Lottie drooped; her head wagged – she slipped half onto Kezia’s lap and lay there. But Kezia could not open her eyes wide enough. The wind blew on them; she shivered but her cheeks and her ears burned. She looked up at the stars.
    “Do stars ever blow about?” she asked.
    “Well, I never noticed ’em,” said the storeman.
    Came a thin scatter of lights and the shape of a tin Church, rising out of a ring of tombstones.
    “They call this place we’re coming to – ‘The Flats’,” said the storeman.
    “We got a nuncle and a naunt living near here,” said Kezia – “Aunt Doady and Uncle Dick. They’ve got two children, Pip, the eldest is called and