The Dis-honorable

UPON the shores of Moreton Bay, on the east coast of Australia, is a
point of land stretching seaward in the direction of a Government penal
settlement, on an island known as St. Helena. Other islands are
clustered in close proximity, and with the long hills on Stradbrook and
Moreton islands in the distance the scene is one of striking beauty. In
the summer months this part of the bay forms a favorite rendezvous for
yachting parties from the Queensland capital.

The point of land referred to rises high above the water, with the bay
on one side and the estuary of a small river on the other. The
shore--half mud, half sand--which stretches for a long distance at low
water, is, on the seaward side, thickly fringed with mangroves; while
overlooking them, upon the utmost headland, one tall tree--pushing out
from among its fellows--stands sentinel over the miniature peninsula.

This forest giant, with black, massive trunk, and branches, is an
Australian blood-wood, and presents a singular appearance to the
observant onlooker. Its huge limbs, but sightly clothed with foliage,
are gnarled and crooked into ungainly and fantastic shapes by centuries
of battling with the southeast gales that not unfrequently sweep
fiercely across the bay from the Pacific Ocean. The tree possesses none
of the symmetry common to trees of European or Asiatic growth, except
that in some remarkable way its huge, ungainly trunk has maintained the
perpendicular. Turnings and twistings and contortions notwithstanding,
it preserves its general erectness to the very topmost branch, over a
hundred feet from the ground, where by a strange freak of nature a huge
bole has been developed, out of which a branch, thicker than a man's
body, grows for several feet at a right angle in the direction of the
Bay.

On a Friday afternoon in February, 1893, there might have been discerned
the figure of a man on that dizzy, natural platform, as, grasping a
smaller branch above him for support, he gazed intently across the water
in the direction of the entrance to the River Brisbane.

Since the commencement of the year the weather had been unusually wet,
but that week had beaten all previous records. With brief intervals of a
few hours' duration, in the early part of the week, it had rained
steadily both night and day. Not in warm, genial showers, such as the
poet remembered when he wrote of:

"The useful trouble of the rain,"