e small holders of property in Leichardt's Land and made a trip for that purpose among the free-selectors in her own old district. The TWENTY YEARS AFT

ng life, had been picked up by her father and brought to Bungroopim to learn the work of a cattle-station.... hitherto his experience, such as it was, had been with sheep in the, then, unsettled north. Joan was herself a g

hat he had developed, too, some of the worst as well as the best of those Scotch qualities inherited from his parents, expatriated though they had been, and from the staunch clansmen behind them. He had the Scotch loyalty; likewise, the Scotch tenacity of character which never forgot and very seldom forgave;

her a horse or two, a cow or two, a specially good cattle-dog or two, which last he made the nucleus of a profitable breed. The cows and bullocks he left at Bungroopi

those boyish dreams had left no serious mark upon him. He had gone north to a newly-formed station and had there out-bushed the bushman in his knowledge of the idiosyncras

manage the hundreds of square miles and the thousands of stock from which they derived the best part of their wealth. B

ad owned a station on the Lower Leura-the bank took it in payment of their mortgage after the catastrophe occurred. That station had been the scene of one of the most horrible native outrages in the history of

ead where his new station stood on the boundaries of civilis

ip across the base of the northern peninsula of the colony with the intention, as he phrased it, of 'shaking round a bit.' He 'shook round' to some purpose, penetrated to the Big Bight, and got on the tracks of a famous lost explor

eura and the Big Bight-the particular Premier instigating the mission being a far-sighted politician who realised that

y of India and China. He volunteered, too, for the Boer War, and did a

of Australian Cecil Rhodes. But he was wise enough to real

had set himself the task of opening up the fine country out West, which he knew only needed a system of irrigation by Artesian Bores to defy drought, the squatters cu

public ambitions where a halfpenny would serve his purpose, and he was known to be a man of deep counsels and sparing of speech. Thus, no one knew exactly what was

lf a romance writer, guessed easily. And her intuition told her that a little thin bore had been made in