When Miss Neuchamp found herself installed in a large, cool upper chamber at Morahmee with a glorious view of the harbour, while on her table stood a great rapturous bouquet all freshly gathered, roses intermingled with delicate greenhouse buds, she commenced to wonder whether all her previously formed ideas of Australia were about to be seriously modified.

A good sound reserve of prejudice reassured her, and she bided her time. She had tasted the fullest measure of comfort perceivable in Australian country life at the house of Mr. Middleton, where she had sojourned several weeks. Now she was about to experience whatever best and pleasantest the metropolis could afford.

Mr. Frankston had brought home with him Count von SchÄtterheims and Mr. Jermyn Croker, so that he and Mr. Middleton, having endless semi-stock and station lore to interchange, each of the ladies was provided with a cavalier.

The Count, who had been informed by Paul that Miss Neuchamp was an English heiress of vast wealth, travelling to indulge her eccentric insular taste, paid great attention to that young lady, cutting in from time to time, to the speechless wrath and exasperation of Jermyn Croker, who renewed his former acquaintance with great success.

The fair Augusta was entertained, and not wholly displeased, with their manifest admiration.

As the verandah was voted by far the pleasantest place after dinner, the whole party adjourned to this invaluable retreat, where Paul and his friend were permitted to light their cigars, and all joined in conversation with unaffected freedom impossible in a drawing-room.

‘Sing something, my darling,’ said the old man, ‘and then, perhaps, the Count will give us that new song of his, which I hear all Sydney is raving about.’

As the rich tones of the grand Erard came forth to them, luxuriously softened by the intervening distance, Miss Neuchamp tasted a pleasure from which she had for an age, it would seem, been debarred. She did not herself perform with more than the moderate degree of success which can be attained by those who, without natural talent, have received thoroughly good teaching. But her training, at least, enabled her to appreciate the delicacy of Miss Frankston’s touch, her finished and rare execution, and the true yet deep feeling with which she rendered the most simple melodies as well as the most complicated operatic triumphs.

Somewhat to the discomposure of the Count, who had commenced to believe the opportunity favourable, she rose, and with an expression of delight passed on to Antonia’s side. Miss Neuchamp had seen too many counts to attach importance to that particular grade of continental rank; and this particular specimen of the order she held in fixed distrust, derived from the recollection of comments to which she had listened at Rainbar.

‘La belle Anglaise prefers music to your compliments, Count,’ said Mr. Croker.

‘Chacun À son tour,’ replied the injured diplomatist. ‘Dey are both ver good in dere vay.’

Whatever might be the Count’s shortcomings, a deficiency of self-control could hardly be reckoned among them. He twirled his enormous moustache, condoled with Paul and Mr. Middleton, and explained that his steward in Silesia had written him accounts of an unusually wet season.

‘Ah, dat is de condrey! You should see him, my dear Monsieur Paul: such grops, such pasdures, such vool, so vine as de zilks.’

‘How about labour?’ said Mr. Middleton. ‘I suppose you are not bothered as we are every now and then with a short supply, and half of that bad?’

‘De bauer—vat you call “beasand” in my condrey—he vork for you all de yahres of his live, and pray Gott for your brosperity—it is his brivilech to be receive wid joys and danks. De bauer, oh, de bauer is goot man!‘

‘I wish our fellows received their lot with joy and thanks; half of my Steam Plains shepherds have gone off to these confounded diggings. But don’t your men emigrate to America now and then? I thought half Germany went there.’

‘I vill dell you one dale,’ said the Count earnestly. ‘I had one hauptman, overzeer, grand laboureur, ver goot man—he is of lofdy indelligence, he reat, he dinks mooch, he vill go to Amerika. I consoolt mit my stewart, he say Carl Steiger is ver goot, he is so goot as no oder mans what we have not got. I say, “Ingrease his vages, once, twyei, dree dime—he reach de vonderful som of fivedeen bount per yahr. He go no more. De golten demdadion is doo crade; he abandon his shpirit-dask to leat mankint, he glass my vools now dill his lives is ofer.”‘

‘Ha! he wanted a summer on the wallaby track to open his mind,’ said Mr. Middleton; ‘that would have been a “wanderyahr” with different results, I am afraid. But I really think many of our fellows would do better if they had more of the thrift and steady resolve of your countrymen, Count. I remember when wages were much lower than now in the colony, and when the men really saved something worth while, besides working more cheerfully. Don’t you, Croker’ But Mr. Croker had departed in the midst of the Count’s story, and was charming Miss Neuchamp with such delightful depreciation of the Australias, and all that in them is, that she became rapidly confirmed in her first opinion, formed soon after her arrival, that he was the best style of man she had as yet met in the colony. Mr. Croker, on his side, declared himself to be encouraged and refreshed by thus meeting with a genuine English lady not afraid to speak out her mind with respect to this confounded country, and its ways, means, and inhabitants.

The Count, fearing that the evening would be an unprofitable investment of his talents and graces, particularly in the matter of Miss Neuchamp, by whom he was treated with studied coldness, departed after having sung his song. This effort merely recalled to Augusta some occasion when she had heard it very much better performed in the Grand Opera at Paris. Jermyn Croker, who had never heard it before, openly depreciated the air, the words, the expression, and execution. With more than one household languishing for his presence, this was a state of matters not to be continued, so the Count, with graceful apologies and vows of pressing engagements, took his departure.

‘You and I, Middleton, can go home to the club together, now that the chevalier d’industrie—beg your pardon, Frankston—I mean, of the Order of the Legion of Honour, Kaiser Fritz, and all his other orders, medals, and decorations—— But I daresay the first represents his truest claim.’

‘You are always charitably well informed, we know that, Croker,’ said Mr. Middleton. ‘Mind, I don’t put my trust in princes or counts of his sort. I wonder how he gets along. Still swimmingly?’

‘Don’t think the fellow has a shilling in the world myself—never did,’ replied Croker, with cheerful disbelief. ‘But from what I heard the other day, he will have to make his grand coup soon, now that it’s known his chance of marrying Harriet Folleton is all up.’

‘Is it finally unsettled, then, Mr. Croker?’ said Antonia. ‘Every one said she admired him so much.’

‘She is quite equal to that or any other madness, I believe,’ said the well-informed Jermyn; ‘and, with her mother’s extraordinary folly to back her, there is no limit to the insanity she is capable of. But the old man has a little sense—people who have made a pot of money often have—and he stopped the whole affair last week.’

Mr. Neuchamp was, perhaps, more disturbed in mind than he had ever been since his arrival in Australia when he received the unusually laconic letter referred to from Paul Frankston. Surprise, anger, uncertainty by turns took possession of his soul. A wholly new and strangely mingled sensation arose in his mind. Had he misinterpreted his own emotions as well as those of Antonia? That such was the case as to his own feeling was evidenced by his sudden and unreasonable rage when he thought of Hardy Baldacre in the character of an accepted suitor for the hand of the unconventional, innocent girl whose half-childish, half-womanly expressions of wonder, admiration, dislike, or approval, called forth by incidents in their daily studies, he could now so clearly remember.

Had he, then, won that priceless gem, the unbought love of a pure and loving heart—no fleeting fancy, born of vanity or caprice, but the deeply-rooted, sacred, lifelong devotion of an untarnished virgin-soul, of a cultured and lofty intellect?

This heavenly jewel had been suspended by a crowned angel above his head, and had he not, with sordid indifference, bent earthward, all unheeding, save of hard and anxious travail? He had narrowed his mind to beeves and kine, dry seasons and wet, all the merest workaday vulgarities of short-sighted mortals, resolute only in the pursuit of dross.

Had he, from neglect, heedlessness, absence, however indispensable, chilled the fond ardour of that lonely heart, cast the priceless treasure into careless or unworthy hands? Who was he, that a girl so much courted, so richly dowered in every way, as Antonia Frankston, should wait till youth was over for his deliberate approval? And yet, if she had delayed but for a short while longer—till the rain came, in fact. Ah me! was not all the Australian world waiting with exhausted, upturned eyes for that crowning, long-delayed blessing? Fancy such a reason being proffered in England. Weddings, in that happy land, were occasionally postponed till a semblance of fine weather might be calculated upon, but surely only in this antipodean land of contrast and confusion did any one defer the great question of his life until the departure of fine weather. Antonia was, doubtless, besieged by hosts of suitors, among them this infernal, lying scoundrel of a cad, Hardy Baldacre, besides Jermyn Croker, the Count, Hartley Selmore, and numberless others. Madness was in his thoughts—he would go down, rain or no rain, wet or dry, tempest or zephyr, hurricane or calm. He would hunt for the ruffian Baldacre, and slay him where they met.

Nevertheless he must at once answer Paul’s letter, which he did to the effect that, ‘He wondered that his old friends should believe any mere fabrications, unsupported by testimony, to his prejudice. Not that there was anything discreditable about the report, if true; but this was not true. His cousin, with misplaced heroism, had visited him in his solitude; a refined and highly educated woman, as would be apparent to all, she certainly was. But as a wife he had never thought of her, nor could he, if their existence ran parallel for years.’ Having despatched the letter, Ernest felt easier in mind, more removed from that condition the most irritating and intolerable of all, the accusation of wrong without the power of justification. It was hard to resist an almost uncontrollable desire to rush down to Sydney then and there to set himself right with his friends. But, as he ran over the obstacles to such a course, it seemed, on cooler thought, to be unadvisable in every way. First, there was the extreme difficulty of performing the journey: he had not a horse at Rainbar capable of carrying him across to the mail station. When he got there it was problematical whether the contractor was running a wheel mail or not. It would be undesirable, even ridiculous, to find himself a couple of hundred miles from home, stranded on the endless, dry, hopeless plain. To make a lengthened stay in Sydney, should he get there, was not to be thought of under his present circumstances of debt and anxiety. ‘No,’ he said, as he crushed the feeling back with a self-repression more nearly allied to heroism than mere ostentatious efforts of courage, ‘no, my colours are nailed to the masthead, and there shall they hang till the cry of “victory” is once more heard, or till the fight is lost beyond mortal hope.‘

So, sadly yet steadfastly, Ernest Neuchamp turned himself to the monotonous tasks which, like those of sailors on a desert island, or of the crew of a slowly-sailing ship, were yet carried on with daily, hopeless regularity. Still the ashen-gray pastures became more withered and deathlike. Still the sad, staggering lines of cattle paced in along the well-worn dusty trails to their watering-places, and paced back like bovine processions after witnessing the funeral obsequies of individuals of their race, which experience, in truth, was daily theirs.

Then the diet, once not distasteful to the much-enduring palate of youth, became wellnigh intolerable: the flaccid unfed meat, the daily bread with never a condiment, the milkless tea, the utter absence of all fruit, vegetable, herb, or esculent. Truly, as in those ancient days when a pastoral people record their sorrowful chronicles of the dry and thirsty region where no water is, ‘the famine was sore in the land.’

At this time, so dreary, so endless, so crushing in its isolated, unchanging, helpless misery, Ernest was unutterably thankful for the hope and consolation which his studious habits afforded him. His library, the day’s work done, filled up his lonely evening as could no other employment possible under the circumstances. He ransacked his moderate references for records of similar calamities in all lands which, unlike the ‘happy isles’ of Britain, are from time to time invaded with drought, the chief agent in all the recorded wholesale destruction of animal life. He noted with painstaking and laborious accuracy the duration, the signs, the consequences, the termination of such dread seasons. From old books of Australian exploration he learned, almost by heart, the sad experiences of the pioneers of the land when they stood face to face with what to them were new and terrible foes.

‘It is hard,’ said he to himself, as he paced his room at midnight, after long hours of close application to such studies, ‘it is hard and depressing to me, and to many a wretched colonist who has worked longer and has more on the hazard than I, to see the fruit of our labours slowly, pitilessly absorbed by this remorseless season. But what, after all, is a calamity which can be measured, like this, by a money standard, compared to one which, like this latest famine in Hindostan, counts its human victims by tens of thousands, by millions? See the dry record of a food failure, which comprehends the teeming human herds which cover the soil more thickly than even our poor starving flocks!

‘Can we realise thousands of lowly homes where the mother sits enfeebled and spectral beside her perishing babes, whose eyes ask for the food which she cannot grant; where the frenzied peasant rushes, in the agony of despair, from his cabin that he may not hear the hunger cries, the death groans of his wife and babes; where the dead lie unburied; where the beast of prey alone roams satiated and lordly; where nature mourns like a maniac mother with tears of blood for her murdered offspring?

‘Such is not, may never be, the fate of this wide, rich, peaceful land, vast and wondrous in its capabilities in spite of temporary disasters. Let us take heart. Our losses, our woes, are trifling in comparison with the world’s great miseries. We are, in comparison, but as children who lose their holiday gifts of coin or cakes. Our lives, our health and strength, are all untouched. We have hope still for our unbartered heritage, the stronger for past dangers of storm and tide. The world is yet before us. There are other seas, untried and slumbering oceans, where our bark may yet ride with joyous outspread sail. Let us still labour and endure, until Fate, compelled by our steadfastness, shall be once more propitious.

I hardly expected to be quoting Horace at Rainbar, but the old boy probably had some experience of untoward seasons, sunshiny desolation, like this of ours. I don’t know whether “Impavidum” applies strictly to any one but Levison. I am afraid that the “fractus orbis” pertains to our cosmos of credit, which, shattered to its core, will strike us all soon and put us to the proof of our philosophy.‘

A trifling distraction was created about this time, much to Ernest’s relief, by the arrival of Mr. Cottonbush, who had received instructions from Mr. Levison to muster, brand, and take delivery of the small herd of cattle, the single flock of sheep, and the lot of horses which that far-seeing speculator had purchased from the brothers Freeman. This pastoral plenipotentiary, a wiry, reticent individual, utterly impervious to every wile and stratagem which the art of man in Australia had hitherto evolved from the very complicated industry of stock-raising, first informed the Freemans of his mission, producing a written authority with the awe-striking signature of Abstinens Levison, and then reported himself to Mr. Neuchamp.

‘It is a bad season, sir,’ he said, in answer to that gentleman’s greeting, which of course comprehended the disastrous state of the weather, ‘and many a one wouldn’t bother mustering these three or four hundred crawling cattle. They might be all dead in three months for all we can see. But Mr. Levison isn’t like any one else. He sends me a line to do this, or go there, and I always do it without troubling about the reasons. He finds them for the lot of us, and pretty fair ones they generally are when time brings ’em out.’

‘I think I know why he made this bargain,’ said Ernest, ‘and I must say I wonder more about it every day. But I am so far of your opinion, now that I am becoming what you call an “old hand,” that I shall imitate your example in letting Mr. Levison’s reasons work themselves out in practice.‘

‘That’s the best way, sir,’ assented the colonel of cavalry under this pastoral general of division. ‘I’ve never done anything but report and obey orders since I’ve been with Levison, this many a year. I used to talk and argue a bit with him at first. I never do now, though he’s a man that will always hear what you’ve got to say, in case he might pick something out of it. But I never knew him alter his mind after he’d got all the information he wanted. So it’s lost time talking to him.’

‘And what do you think about this terrible season?’ asked Ernest, anxiously looking at this iron man of the desert, whose experience was to his, he could now in this hour of wreck and ruin realise, as immeasurably superior as the grizzled second mate’s to the cabin boy’s when the tempest cries aloud with voice of death and the hungry caverns of the eternal deep are disclosed.

‘It’s bad enough,’ assented Mr. Cottonbush thoughtfully, ‘bad enough; and there’s many a one will remember it to his dying day. In some places they’ll lose most of their stock before the winter’s on for want of feed, and all the rest, when it does come, from the cold. There were ten thousand fat sheep (or supposed to be fat) of Lateman’s caught in the Peechelbah mallee the other day as they were going a short cut. When I say “caught,” the water had dried up that they reckoned on, and was only found out when they was half way through. The sheep went mad and wouldn’t drive. So did the chap in charge, very nigh. When he got out he had only some four thousand three hundred odd left. That was a smash, wasn’t it?‘

‘Sheep are not so bad as cattle in one way,’ said Mr. Neuchamp; ‘you can travel them and steal grass. A good many people seem unprincipled enough to resort to the meanness of filching from their neighbours and the country generally what no man can spare in this awful time.’

‘Well,’ said Mr. Cottonbush, smiling and wincing slightly, ‘it ain’t quite the clean potato, of course; but if your sheep’s dying at home, what can you do? Every man for himself, you know; and you can’t let ’em stop on the run and die before your eyes. We’ve had to do a bit of it ourselves. But the old man, he bought two or three whacking big bits of country in the Snowy Mountains, Long Plains, the Gulf, Yarrangobilly, and two or three more, enough to feed all the sheep in the country, and started ours for it directly after shearing, while the roads were good. He knew what was coming and provided in time, same as he always does. Blessed if he didn’t lease a lot of the country he could spare to people who were hard pushed and came late, so he got his own share cheap.’

‘And was there abundance of grass and water?’

‘Green grass two feet high, running creeks all the summer, enough to make your mouth water. If we get rain down before the snow comes next month our flocks will come back better than they went, and with half as much wool again as the plains sheep.’

That day Mr. Cottonbush informed the Freeman family that, inasmuch as the Rainbar stockyard was a strong and secure enclosure, and as his employer, Mr. Levison, was a very particular man in having cattle that he bought properly branded up, he didn’t like any to be left over, and they must yard every mother’s son of ‘em.

So, as Mr. Neuchamp had kindly given permission for his yard to be used, the entire Freeman clan, including a swarm of brown-faced, bare-legged urchins, arrived on the following day with the whole of their herd. It was a strange sight, and not without a proportion of dramatic interest. The cattle were so emaciated that they could hardly walk; many of them staggered and fell. In truth, as they moved up in a long woebegone procession, they looked like a ghostly protest against man’s lack of foresight and Heaven’s wrath. The horses were so weak from starvation that they could barely carry their riders. One youngster was fain to jump off his colt, that exhausted animal having come to a dead halt, and drive him forward with the cattle.

Even the men and the boys had a wan and withered look. Not that they had been on short commons, but, dusty, sunburned, and nervously anxious to secure every animal that could walk to the yard, they harmonised very fittingly with their kine.

When they arrived at the yard Mr. Cottonbush counted them carefully in, and then signified to the vendors that, in his opinion, it would be wise of them to go back and make a final ‘scrape,’ as he expressed it, of their pasture-ground, lest there might inadvertently have been any left behind.

‘That sort of thing always leads to trouble, you know,’ said he; ‘there’s a sort of doubt which were branded and which were not. Now, Mr. Levison bought every hoof you own, no milkers reserved and all that; he don’t believe in having any of the best cattle kept back. So you’d better scour up every beast you can raise before we begin to brand. We can tail this mob, now they’re here.’

This supplementary proceeding resulted in the production of about thirty head of cattle, among which there curiously happened to be, by accident, half a dozen cows considerably above the average in point of breeding and value.

This very trifling matter of a ‘cockatoo’s’ muster having been thus concluded, all the horses having been yarded, and the flock of sheep driven up—Mr. Levison having made it a sine qu non that he would have all or none—the fires were lighted and the brands put in.

To the wild astonishment of the Freemans, Mr. Cottonbush, having put the [?]NE brand in the fire, commenced to place that conjoined hieroglyph upon every cow, calf, bullock, and steer, assisted by Mr. Windsor, Charley Banks, and the black boys.

‘Why, “the cove” ain’t bought ‘em, surely?’ said Joe Freeman, with a look of much distrust and disapproval. ‘Where’s he to get the sugar, I want to know; or else it’s a “plant” between him and old Levison.‘

‘When the stock’s counted and branded you’ll get your cheque,’ said the imperturbable manager; ‘that’s all you’ve got to bother your head about. It’s no business of yours, if you’re paid, whether Levison chooses to sell ’em, or boil ’em, or put ’em in a glass case.’

‘Well, I’m blowed,’ said Bill Freeman, ‘if we ain’t regularly sold. If I’d a-known as they was a-comin’ here, I’d have seen Levison in the middle of a mallee scrub with his tongue out for water before I’d have sold him a hoof. One comfort: the cash is all right, and half of these crawlers will die before spring.‘

‘Not if rain comes within a month,’ said Mr. Cottonbush cheerily. ‘You’d be surprised what a fortnight will do for stock in these places, and the grass grows like a hotbed. These cattle are smallish and weak, but not so badly bred. They’ll fill out wonderfully when they get their fill. You’d better wait and see them counted, and then you can have your cheque.’

Jack Windsor and Charley Banks worked with a will, so did the younger members of the yeomanry plantation. The grown cattle were of course pen-branded. By night-fall every one was marked very legibly and counted out. Four hundred and seventy head of cattle over six months old, eighty-four horses, and twelve hundred mixed sheep, principally weaners. These last were fire-branded on the side of the face, provided with a shepherd, and kept near home.

The necessary preliminaries being concluded, Mr. Cottonbush handed a cheque, at the prices arranged, to Abraham Freeman, and turned the horses and cattle out of the yard.

‘You haven’t a horn or a hoof on Rainbar now,’ said he composedly; ‘perhaps you have ’em in a better place, in your breeches pockets; and remember I’ll be up here next November, or else Mr. Levison, to take up your selections as agreed. Then, I suppose, you’ll be fixing yourself down upon some other miserable squatter. You’re bound not to stop here, you know.’

Having thus accomplished his mission clearly and unmistakably, Mr. Cottonbush, whose acquaintance Ernest had first made at Turonia when he took delivery of Mr. Drifter’s cattle, declared his intention of starting at daybreak. Waste of time was never laid to the charge of Mr. Levison’s subordinates. ‘Like master like man’ is a proverb of unquestionable antiquity. There is more in it than appears upon the surface. Whatever might have been the moulding power, it is certain that his managers, agents, and overseers attached great importance to those attributes of punctuality, foresight, temperance, and thrift which were dear to the soul of Abstinens Levison.

‘I’m glad these crawlers of cattle are branded up and done with while it’s dry, likewise the horses. All this kind of work is so much easier and better done in dry weather,’ said the relaxing manager. ‘They’re not a very gay lot to look at now. But I shouldn’t wonder to see you knocking ten pounds a head out of some of those cats of steers before this day two years.’

‘Ten pounds a head!’ echoed Ernest. ‘Why not say twenty, while you’re about it?’

‘You don’t believe it,’ said Mr. Cottonbush calmly, rubbing his tobacco assiduously in his hands preparatory to lighting his pipe. ‘Levison writes that stock are going up in Victoria to astonishing prices, and that what they’ll reach, if the gold keeps up, no man can tell. So your cattle might fetch twenty pounds after all.’

‘What would you advise me to do with the Freemans’ stock, now that I have got them?‘ asked Ernest.

‘If I was in your place,’ said Mr. Cottonbush judicially, ‘I should stick to the cattle, for every one of them, down to the smallest calf, will be good money when the rain comes. The sheep also you may as well keep: they’ll pay their own wages if you put ’em out on a bit of spare back country, and there’s plenty that your cattle never go near. You could bring ’em in to shear them, and they’ll increase and grow into money fast enough. You might have ten thousand sheep on Rainbar and never know it.’

‘I don’t like sheep much,’ said Ernest; ‘but these are very cheap, if they live, and there is plenty of room, as you say. And the horses?’

‘Sell every three-cornered wretch of ’em—a set of upright-shouldered, useless mongrels—directly you get a chance,’ said Mr. Cottonbush with unusual energy of speech. ‘And now you’re able to clear the run of ’em, being your own, which you never could have done if they remained theirs. You’d have had young fellows coming for this colt or that filly till your head was gray.’

‘I hope not,’ said Ernest, laughing; ‘but I am glad to have all the stock and land of Rainbar in my own hands once more.’

Mr. Cottonbush departed at dawn, and once more Ernest was alone in the gray-stricken, accursed waste, wherein nor grass grew nor water ran, nor did any of these everyday miracles of Nature appear likely again to be witnessed by despairing man.

Still passed by the hungry hordes of travelling sheep, still the bony skeletons of the passing cattle herds. No rain, no sign of rain! All pastoral nature, brute and human, appeared to have been struck with the same blight, and to be forlorn and moribund. The station cattle became weaker and less capable of exertion; ‘lower,’ as Charley Banks called it, as the cold autumn nights commenced to exhibit their keenness. The Freemans relinquished all control over their cattle, and chuckled over the weakly state of the Rainbar herd.

The autumn had commenced, a peerless season in all respects save in the vitally indispensable condition of moisture. The mornings were crisp, with a suggestive tinge of frost, the nights absolutely cold, the days, as usual, cloudless, bright, and warm. If there was any variation it was in the direction of a lowering, overcast, cloudy interval, when the bleak winds moaned bodingly, but led to no other effect than to sweep the dead leaves and dry sticks, which had so long passed for earth’s usual covering, into heaps and eddying circular lines. The roughening coats on the feeble frames of the stock, now enduring the slow torture of the cold in the lengthening nights, told a tale of coming collapse, of consummated, unquestioned ruin. Daily did Ernest Neuchamp dread to rise, to pass hours of hopeless despondency among these perishing forms, dying creatures roaming over a dead earth during their brief term of survival! Daily did he almost come to loathe the sight of the unpitying sun, which, like a remorseless enemy, spared not one beam of his burning rays, veiled not one glare of his deadly glance. He had an occasional reminiscence of the steady, reassuring tones, the unwavering purpose of which abode with the very presence of Abstinens Levison. But for these he felt at times as though he could have distrusted the justice of an overruling Power, have cursed the hour of his birth, and delivered himself over to despair and reprobation.

While Mr. Neuchamp was not far removed from this most unusual and decidedly unphilosophical state of mind, it so chanced on a certain afternoon (it was that of Wednesday, the eighteenth day of May, as was long after remembered) that he and Jack Windsor were out together, a few miles from home, upon the ironical but necessary mission of procuring a ‘fat beast.’ This form of speech may be thought to have savoured too much of the wildly improbable. The real quest was, of course, for an animal in such a state of comparative emaciation as should not preclude his carcass for being converted into human food. The meat was not palatable, but it supported life in the hardy Anglo-Saxon frame. It was all they had, and they were constrained to make the best of it.

‘Look at these poor devils of cattle,’ said Jack, pointing to a number of hide-bearing anatomies moving their jaws mechanically over the imperceptible pasture. ‘They have water, but what the deuce they find to eat I can’t see. There’s that white steer, that red cow, and one or two more, with their jaws swelled up. There’s plenty of ’em like that.’

‘From what cause?’ asked Mr. Neuchamp. ‘Cancer is not becoming epidemic, I hope.’

‘It comes from the shortness of the feed, I think,’ returned Jack; ‘you see the poor creatures keep licking and picking every time they see a blade of grass, if it’s only a quarter of an inch long; half their time they miss their aim and rattle their jaws together with nothing between them. That’s what hurts ’em, I expect, and after a bit it makes their heads swell.’

‘I wonder what they would think in England of such an injury, occurring in what we always believed to be a rich pastoral country.’

‘So it is, sir, when the season’s right. I expect in England you have your bad seasons in another way, and get smothered and flooded out with rain; and the crops are half rotten; and the poor man (I suppose he is really a poor man there, no coasting up one side of a river and down the other for six months, with free rations all the time) gets tucked up a bit.’

‘As you say, Jack, there are bad seasons, which mean bad harvests, in England,’ answered Ernest, always inclined to the diversion of philosophical inquiry; ‘and the poor man there, as you say, properly so called, inasmuch as he requires more absolute shelter, more sufficient clothes in the terrible winter of the north, than our friends who pursue the ever-lengthening but not arduous track of the wallaby in Australia. They may in England, and do occasionally, I grieve to say, if unemployed and therefore unfed, actually starve to death. But what are those cattle just drawing in?’

‘Those belong to a lot that keeps pretty well back,’ answered Jack, ‘and they’re different in their way from these cripples we’ve been looking at, as they’ve had something to eat, but they’re pretty well choked for a drink. I don’t know when they’ve had one. That’s how it is, you see, sir; half the cattle’s afraid to go away for the water, and the rest won’t leave what little feed there is till they’re nearly mad with drouth. It’s cruel work either way. I’m blest if that wasn’t a drop of rain!’

This sudden and rare phenomenon caused Ernest to take a cursory examination of the sky, which he had long forborne to regard with hope or fear. It was clouded over. But such had been the appearance of the firmament scores of times during the last six months. The air was still, sultry, and full of the boding calm which precedes a storm. Such signs had been successfully counterfeited, as Ernest bitterly termed it, once a month since the last half-forgotten showery spring. He had observed a halo round the moon on the previous night. There had been dozens of dim circular rings round that planet all the long summer through. The rain was certainly falling now. So had it commenced, on precisely such a day, with the same low banks of clouds, many a time and oft, and stopped abruptly in about twenty minutes, the clouds disappearing, and the old presentment reverting to a staring blue sky, a mocking, unveiled sun therein, with the suddenness of a transformation scene in a pantomime.

‘I think that spotted cow looks as near meat as anything we’re likely to get, sir,’ said Jack Windsor, interrupting the train of distrustful reverie. ‘It begins to look as if it meant it. Lord send we may get well soaked before we get home!’

Mr. Windsor’s pious aspiration was appropriate this time. They reaped the benefit of a genuine and complete saturation before they reached the yard with the small lot of cattle they were compelled to take in for companionship to their ‘fat beast.’ There was no appearance of haste about the rain, no tropical violence, no waterspout business. It trickled down in slow, monotonous, still, and settled drizzle, much as it might have done in North Britain. It only did not stop; that was all. It was hopefully continuous all the evening. And when Mr. Neuchamp opened his casement at midnight he thankfully listened to the soaking, ceaseless downpour, which seemed no nearer a sudden conclusion than during the first hour.

Before dawn Mr. Neuchamp was pacing his verandah, having darted out from his couch the very moment that he awoke. The temperature had sensibly fallen; so had the clouds, which were low and black; and still the rain streamed down more heavily than at first. There was apparently no alteration likely to take place during the day. The water commenced to flow in the small channels. The minor watercourses, the gullies, and creeks were filling. Wonder of wonders—it was a settled, set-in, hopelessly wet day! What a blessed and wonderful change from last week! Ernest had a colloquy with Charley Banks about things in general, and then permitted himself a whole day’s rest—reading a little, ciphering a little, and looking up his correspondence, which had fallen much into arrear. As the day wore on the rain commenced to show determination, heavily, hour after hour, with steady fall, saturating the darkened earth, no longer dusty, desolate, hopelessly barren. The gaping fissures were filled. The long disused ruts and gutters ran full and foaming down to their ultimate destination, the river. That great stream refused to acknowledge any immediate change of level from so inconsiderable a cause as a rainfall so far from its source. But, doubtless, as Charley Banks pointed out, in a week or more it would ‘come down’ in might and majesty, when the freshets at the head waters should have time to gather forces and swell the yellow tide. It was well if there was not then a regular flood, but that would do them no harm; might swamp out the Freemans, perhaps, but as long as Tottie wasn’t drowned, and the old woman, the rest of the family might be swept down to Adelaide for all he, Charley, cared. So let it rain till all was blue. There was no mistake this time. It was a general rain. We should have forty-eight hours of it before it stopped. Every hoof of stock was off the frontage now and away back, where there was good shelter and a trifle of feed. In a fortnight after this there would be good ‘bite’ all over Rainbar run. We should have a little comfort in our lives now. What a pull it was, that old Cottonbush had branded up those last stores before the rain came.

Thus Mr. Charles Banks, jubilantly prophetic, with the elasticity of youth, having thrown off at one effort all the annoyance and privation of the famine year, was fully prepared for an epoch of marvels and general prosperity.

The day ended as it had commenced. There was not a moment’s cessation from the soaking, pouring, saturating, dripping downpour of heaven’s precious rain. ‘As the shower upon the mown grass,’ saith the olden Scripture of the day of David the King. Doubtless the great City of Palaces was erst surrounded by shaven lawns, by irrigated fields and gardens. But on the skirts of the far-stretching yellow deserts, tenanted then as now by the wild tribes, to whom pasture for their camels and asses, and horses and sheep, was as the life-blood of their veins, doubtless there were thousands of leagues all barren, baked sterility, until the long-desired rain set in, when, as if by magic, herbs and waving grains and flowerets fair sprang up, and rejoiced the hearts of the tribe, from the silver-bearded sheik to the laughing child.

So it would be at Rainbar. Ernest knew this from many a conversation which he had had upon the subject with Jack Windsor and Charley Banks. In this warm, dry-soiled country, the growth of pasture under favourable circumstances is well-nigh incredible. Nature adapts herself to the most widely differing conditions of existence with amazing fertility of resource. In more temperate zones the partial heat which withers the flower and the green herb when cut down, slays the plant and destroys germination in the seed for evermore. Here, in the wild waste, when the fierce and burning blast revels over scorched brown prairies, and the whirlwind and the sand column dance together over heated sands, the plant life is well and truly adapted to the strange soil, the stranger clime. The tall grasses grow hard and gray, or faint yellow, under the daily desiccation which spares no tender growth; but they remain nutritive and life-sustaining for an incredible period, if but the necessary cloud water can be supplied at long intervals. Then the hard-pushed pastoral colonist, when he found that his flocks had bared to famine pitch the pastures within reach of the watercourses, which were his sole dependence in the earlier days, was compelled to resort to the most ancient practice of well-digging, of which he might have gained the idea from the familiar records of a hard-set pastoral people in the sandy wastes of Judea. Receding to the wide plains and waterless forests of the vast region which lay cruelly distant from any known stream or fountain, which was in summer regularly abandoned by the aboriginal denizens of the land, he sank, at much expense, wells of great depth—at first with uncertain result; but, though much of the water thus painfully obtained—for from three to five hundred pounds for two to three hundred feet sinking was no uncommon expense in a single well—was brackish, much salt, still progress was made. The stock was enabled in the midst of summer heat or protracted autumn drought to feed upon these previously locked-up pastures, upon the saline herbs and plants, the nutritious, aromatic shrubs peculiar to this land, where no white man had ever before seen stock except in winter.

By degrees it began to be asserted that ‘back country,’ i.e. the lands remote from all visible means of subsistence for flocks and herds, as far as water was concerned, paid the speculative pastoral occupier better than the ‘frontage,’ or land in the neighbourhood of permanent creeks, and of the few well-known rivers. There roamed that unconscionable beast of prey, the all-devouring free selector. He could select the choicest bends, the richest flats, the deepest river reaches, even where the squatter had fenced or enclosed. For were not the waters free to all? He naturally appropriated the best and most tempting conjunctions of ‘land and water.’ These were precisely those which were most profitable, most necessary, occasionally most indispensable to the proprietor of the run.

But it was not so with the back blocks. There capital yet retained much of its ancient supremacy. The wielder of that implement or weapon was enabled to cause his long-silent wilderness to blossom as the rose, by means of dams and wells. He was in a position also to drive off, keep out, and withstand the invading pseudo-grazier, with his sham purchases and his wrongful grass rights.

Thus, by a wise provision of the Land Act, all improvements of a value exceeding forty pounds sterling, when placed by the pastoral tenant upon the Crown lands which he was facetiously supposed to rent, protect the lands upon which they stand, or which, in the case of a well, they underlie; that is to say, a five-hundred-guinea well or a hundred-pound dam cannot be free-selected or taken cool possession of as a conditional purchase by the land marauder of the period. Some people might see a slight flavour of fairness in this provision which has not always in other colonies, Victoria notably, been granted by the democratic wolf to the conservative lamb. However the Government of New South Wales may have erred in other respects, it has in the main so far ruled the outnumbered pastoralists with a courtesy, fairness, and freedom from small greed such as might be expected from one body of gentlemen in responsible dealing with a class of similar social rank.

One successful well or dam, therefore, converted a block of country hitherto useless for nine months out of the twelve into a run capable of carrying ten thousand sheep all the year round. Of course, any portion of the Crown estate the conditional purchaser might ‘take up,’ or, without notice, occupy. But where was he to procure his water from? He had not often five hundred pounds, or if so, did not ‘believe’ in such solemn disbursement for ‘mere improvements.’ Therefore he still haunted, cormorant-like, the rivers and creeks—the ‘permanent water’ of the colonist. To the younger sons of ancient houses, scions of Howards, Somersets, and of the untitled nobility of Britain, he conceded the right to live like hermits in the Thebaid, upon their artificially and expensively watered back blocks.

A special peculiarity of the ocean-like plains of inmost Australia is the miraculous growth of vegetation after the profuse irrigation which invariably succeeds a drought. In the warm dry earth, now converted into a bed of red or black mud, saturated to its lowest inch, and rich for procreation of every green thing, lies a hoard of seeds of wondrous number and variety of species. Broad and green, in a few days, as the vivid growth from the aged, still fruitful bosom of mysterious Nile, along with the ordinary pasture appear the seed leaves of unknown, half-forgotten grasses, reeds, plants, flowers, never noticed except in an abnormally wet season. In cycles of ordinary moisture, the true degree of saturation not having been reached, they lie death-like year after year, until, aroused by Nature’s unerring signal, they arise and burst forth into full vitality. In such a time an astonishing variety of herbs, plants, and flowers is to be seen mingling with gigantic grasses, such as Charley Banks described to Mr. Neuchamp when he prophesied, after forty-eight hours of steady rain had fallen, that on the Back Lake Plains this year he would be able to tie the grass tops together before him, as he sat on horseback. Mr. Neuchamp had never before discovered his lieutenant in a wilful exaggeration; but on this occasion he felt mortified that he should still be supposed a fit subject upon which to foist humorous fabrications.

‘I see you don’t believe me,’ said Charley, rather put out in turn at not being credited. ‘Let’s call Jack. You ask him the height of the tallest grass he ever saw in this part of the country in a real wet season. There he goes. Here, Jack, Mr. Neuchamp wants to ask you a question.’

‘I wish to know,’ said Ernest gravely, ‘to what height you have ever known the grass grow up here in a firstrate season?’

‘Well, I don’t know about measurement,’ said Jack, ‘but I remember at Wardree one year we had to muster up all the old screws on the run to give the shepherds to ride.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Because they couldn’t see their sheep in the long grass; and out on a plain where the grass was over their own heads, it was hard work not to lose themselves. Of course it was an out-and-out year; something like this is going to be, I expect. Why, I’ve tied the grass over my horse’s shoulder in the spring, as I’ve been riding along, many a time and often.’

Charley Banks smiled.

‘That will do, John,’ said Mr. Neuchamp.

‘I apologise fully,’ said Ernest, as soon as they were alone. ‘I promise never to lack that confidence in your statements, my dear fellow, which I must say I have hitherto found in every way deserved. How are the cattle doing? You have been out all day, and must have been soaked through and through.’

‘I didn’t put on anything that water could hurt,’ said Charley, ‘or very much in the way of quantity either. Jack and I only wanted to be sure of the line the cattle took, so as to get after them to-morrow. We could track them as if they had been walking in batter pudding. If they got off the run now we should have no horses to fetch them back with, and if we left them away till they got strong, they’d be broken in to some other man’s run, which would be so much time lost. Luckily they all made for the Back Lake, where there’s some sandy ridges and good bedding ground. Freeman’s cattle are mixed up with the “circle dots,” which is all the better, as they know the run well, and can’t be got off it. Lucky they’re branded.‘

‘And how about the old herd?’

‘We didn’t tire our horses going after them, but, by the main run of the tracks, the nearest of them will stop at the Outer Lake timber; and the head cattle will go slap back to the very outside boundary. We’ve no neighbours at the back, so the farther back they go the fresher the feed will be. They’re right.’

‘I suppose they will begin to improve in a few months?’

‘Improve?’ echoed Mr. Banks; ‘if this weather is followed up, every beast on Rainbar run, down to a three-months-old calf, will be mud fat in three months, and you may begin to take away the first draft of a thousand head of fat cattle that we can send to market—and a rising market, too—before next winter.’

Mr. Neuchamp did not shout aloud, nor cast any part of his clothing into the air, like Jack Windsor: his way of receiving sudden tidings of weal or woe was not demonstrative. But he grasped Charley Banks’s hand, and looked into the face of the pleased youngster with a gleam in his eye and a look of triumph such as the latter had rarely witnessed there.

‘We have had to wait—“to suffer and be strong,”—Charley, my boy,‘ he said, ‘but I think the battle is won now. You shall have your share of the spoils.’

When Mr. Neuchamp sallied forth on the second day after the rain, he could not but consider himself in a somewhat similar position to one of the Noachian family taking an excursion after the flood. True, his flood had been of a temporary and wholly beneficial nature, but not the less had it entirely altered the expression upon the face of Nature. Aqueous effects and results were prominently apparent everywhere. Mud and hardened sandy spaces, already flushed with green, had succeeded to the pale, dusty, monotoned landscape.

Thus, once more, short as had been the time of change, the eye was relieved by the delicate but distinct shade of green which commenced to drape the long-sleeping, spellbound frame of the mighty Mother. Even in the driest seasons, except on river flats, there are minute green spikelets of grass at or just below the surface. Let but one shower of rain fall, softly cherishing, and on the morrow it is marvellous to perceive what an approach to verdure has been made. Then the family of clovers, long dead and buried, but having bequeathed myriads of burr-protected, oleaginous seed vessels to the kind keeping of the baked and powdered soil, reappear in countless hosts of minute leaflets, which grow with incredible rapidity. It is not too much to say that in little more than a week after the ‘drought broke up’ at Rainbar there was grass several inches high over the entire run. The salt bushes commenced to put forth tender and succulent leaves. All nature drew one great sigh of relief, every living creature—from the small fur-covered rodents and marsupials which pattered along their minute but well-beaten paths when the sun was low to the water, from the wild mare that galloped in snorting through the midnight, with her lean, tireless offspring, to sink her head to the very eyes in the river when she reached it, to the thirsty merino flock at the well-trough, or the impoverished herd that struggled in hungered and athirst to muddy creek or treacherous river bank—every living creature did sensibly rejoice and give thanks, audibly or otherwise, for this merciful termination to the long agony of the Great Drought.

That morning of the 18th May was a fateful morn to many a struggling beginner like Ernest Neuchamp; to many a grizzled veteran of pioneer campaigns and long wars of exploration, of peril of body and anguish of mind; to many a burdened sire with boys at school to pay for, and the girls’ governess to consider, whom the next year’s losses, if the rain held off, would compel the family to dispense with.

On the night which preceded that day of deliverance Ernest Neuchamp went to bed utterly ruined and hopelessly insolvent; he arose a rich man, able within six months to pay off double the amount of every debt he owed in the world, and possessed beside of a run and stock the market value of which exceeded at least four-fold what he had paid for it.

This was a change, sudden as an earthquake, swift as a revolution, almost awe-striking in its shower of sudden benefits, dazzling in its abrupt change from the dim light of poverty, self-denial, and anxiety, to an unquestioned position of wealth, reputation, and undreamed-of success.

How differently passed the days now! What variety, what hope, what renewed pleasure in the superintendence of details ever leading upward to profit and satisfaction in a hundred different directions!

Day by day the grass grew and bourgeoned and clothed the flats with a meadow-like growth akin to that of his native country. None of this amazing crop, however, was used except by the flocks of travelling sheep returning strong and well-doing to their long-abandoned homes. These passing hosts made so little impression upon the wonderfully rapid growth that, as Mr. Banks averred, ‘you could not see where they had been.’ The station cattle, and even the small flock of sheep were ‘well out back,’ and, presumably, were content to leave the ‘frontage’ as a reserve for summer needs.

Concurrently with this plenty and profusion, in which every head of the Rainbar stock revelled, from Mr. Levison’s ‘BI,’ whose skin now shone with recovered condition, and who snorted and kicked up his heels as he galloped into the yard with the working horses, to the most dejected weaner of the Freeman ‘crawlers,’ came strangely exciting news of the wondrous discovery of gold in Victoria, and the rapid rise in the price of meat.

Fat stock were higher and higher in each succeeding market, until the previously unknown and, as the democratic newspapers said, unjustifiable and improper price of ten pounds per head for fat cattle was reached, with a corresponding advance for sheep. As this astounding but by no means dismaying intelligence was conveyed to Mr. Neuchamp in the hastily-torn-open newspaper which he was glancing at outside, just as Jack Windsor had directed his attention to the gambols of ‘BI,’ who, with arched neck and perfect outline, fully justified Mr. Levison’s encomium upon his shape, that gentleman’s prophecy as to the enhanced value of Rainbar reaching twenty thousand pounds when ‘BI’ kicked up his heels seemed likely to be fulfilled to the letter.

Mr. Windsor, in his enthusiasm concerning the condition of the horse left in his charge, and that of the stud generally, had for the moment omitted to open an unpretending missive delivered by the same post which lay in his hand. As Ernest turned to walk towards the house he was stopped by the sound of a deep and bitter curse, most infrequent now upon the lips of his much altered follower.