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CHAPTER XXIII.
AN OASIS IN THE DESERT.
The little smiling cottage, warm embowered;
The little smiling cottage, where at eve
He meets his rosy children at the door,
Prattling their welcomes, and his honest wife
With good brown cake and bacon slice, intent
To cheer his hunger after labour hard."—Dyer.
"The heavens were as brass, the earth as iron," desolation reigned beyond the confines of the little land of Goshen, where everything flourished the more as the air became drier and sun hotter. Elsewhere "the seven lean kine," seven months' drought, ate up, as so often is the case, the "seven fat kine" of prosperous years. After every spell of excessive heat, the thunder-storm, threatening all afternoon, broke with much noise and glare, sweeping of dust, and rolling onward of majestic cloud-cumuli, but, though every available tub and bath about each homestead was set to catch them, only a few drops of rain fell. Another day, wild stranger-cloud's, laden with precious water, rolled themselves upward from the Southern Ocean, only to carry the watery store, for which man and beast and land were thirsting, to deluge oft-favoured zones with tropical rainfall.
Again the outlying "Cockie" must harness his emaciated beast to travel ten, fifteen, twenty miles for a barrel
