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 my answer. 'Then set to, and we'll have breakfast afterwards.' That is the way to talk to a boy! I could have died for him; I respect his memory now. At breakfast he told me that the pretty freestone, white-columned house had been built on the model of a Greek temple in the Vale of Tempé. Hence its classical name, which it still retains. The fresh eggs, laid by pure Spanish hens, were the largest I had ever seen. When he showed me some lop-eared rabbits after breakfast and promised me a pair, my heart was almost too full. I rode back the happiest boy in the land, and never forgot the old gentleman's amazing kindness.

It may be that kindly memory, eliding the darker shadows of the past, presents the colonial period which I am recalling, from 1831 to 1840, as almost Arcadian in peaceful simplicity, in steadfast industry, in freedom from atrocious crime, compared with later developments. And yet New South Wales was then to all intents and purposes a convict colony. Ship-loads of prisoners arrived from time to time. Expirees from Tasmania no doubt made their way to a land where wages were comparatively high, and where new country offered a refuge from close official inspection. Whether the old-fashioned rule—strict, vigilant, unrelaxing—was better suited to the natural man, free or bond, than the present mercy-mongering management, may partly be judged by results.

'The bush'—a vast and trackless wilderness—was gradually being occupied and reclaimed by that strange lover of the waste places of the earth, the wilful, wicked, wandering Anglo-Saxon. Tragedies from time to time doubtless occurred. Bushrangers were not unknown, but what were they to the Kellys, the Halls and Gilbert, the Clarks and Morgans? Aboriginal blacks were shot occasionally; more than one cruel murder was brought home to the perpetrators, for which they justly atoned. At the same time a lonely hut-keeper or shepherd was often found prone and motionless, speared or clubbed as the case might be; many a stock-rider's horse came home without him. Yet, in a general way, life and property were far more secure under the modified martial law of the period than they have been known to be under a constitutional Government and quasi-democratic rule. When it is considered that for half a century the worst criminals of the old country, as well as the