Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/198

168 mentioned his paper, "Australian Group-Relationships," published in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institute for 1883; another "On the Organisation of Australian Tribes," in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria for 1889; and some papers published in Folk-Lore for the years 1906 and 1907.

In 1889 Mr. Howitt became Secretary for Mines in Victoria, and in 1896 he was appointed Audit Commissioner. Besides these public duties he sat on other Government commissions and boards of enquiry, for which his wide experience, ripe knowledge, and sound judgment pre-eminently fitted him. Yet we cannot but regret that he devoted so much time and energy to business, which others perhaps might have performed as efficiently, to the neglect of scientific researches, for which few were so well qualified as he. However, he continued to give his leisure hours to study, and looked forward to the time when he should be able to dedicate the rest of his life, without distraction, to his favourite pursuits. The longed-for time came, or seemed to come, at last when he retired from the public service of Victoria in 1901. His retirement was unnoticed by the public and his official colleagues, who perhaps were hardly aware of the honour they had enjoyed in being associated with such a man. He now settled down to the quiet life of a student in his picturesque home at Metung, on the shore of the Gippsland Lakes. Gippsland is a pleasant and a beautiful country, with a climate in the lowlands like that of Italy. The orange grows well there; the mountains are high and snow-capped for months together; the rivers wind through deep glens thickly mantled in living green; the gum-trees in the forest are the tallest trees in the world; and the great tree-ferns give to the woods an aspect of tropical luxuriance. It is Australia Felix, the Happy Land of the South. But Mr. Howitt's seclusion in this earthly Paradise was not to be undisturbed. The old serpent, in the guise of public