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408 yet, in consequence of the bush people making no pretence to book learning, their want of it never struck me as a painful deficiency. Their days are spent in employments that have been the favourite theme of poets from time immemorial, and no leisure is left them for discussing the doings of the next-door neighbour, even were there any such person within seven miles.

Thus it would seem that Goethe's remedy against the evil of too many books is equally good in the case of having too few. In a pretty little letter of hexameters addressed to an anxious father, who is afraid that his girls' heads will be turned by reading too many works of fiction, Goethe tells him (but I quote from memory only) that he may avert the calamity by giving each daughter her own little sphere of rule within his household. Let him consign to one of the girls the care of "the vineyard and the cellar," to another "the kitchen and the herb garden," "the washhouse and the laundry" to a third, and "novelists," says the poet triumphantly, "may then write what they please, and the ladies be never the worse." Self-evident, however, as this conclusion undoubtedly is, and multifarious as are the female employments on which the poet enlarges, the avocations of a bush lady are still more diversified. He quite omits to mention the care of the dairy and the live-stock, and, much as he loves to picture his ideal cook busying herself in consulting the family tastes, I will wager that he never dreamed of her having to prepare the meals of an orphan foal, still less of that juvenile quadruped coming in at the kitchen door to be fed.

The seeker of health who can enjoy horse exercise will