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 difficult to obtain, the men generally combining to shield the culprits and outswear the informer.

A few miles rearward is the terminus of this iron road that is stretching so swiftly across the 'lone Chorasmian waste.' Here converge caravans from the inmost deserts. Hence depart waggon-trains bearing merchandise in many different directions. What a medley of all the necessaries, luxuries, and superfluities of that unresting, insatiable toiler, man! They lie strewed upon the platform, or heaped in huge mounds and pyramids under the lofty goods sheds. Tea and sugar, flour and grain, hay and corn, chaff and bran, machines of a dark and doubtful character connected with dam-making and well-sinking; coils of wire, cans of nails, hogsheads of spirits, casks of wine, tar, paint, oil, clothing, books, rope, tools, windlasses, drums of winding gear, waggons, carts, and buggies all new and redolent of paint and varnish; also timber and woolpacks, and, as the auctioneer says, hundreds of articles too numerous to mention. What a good customer Mr. Squatter is, to be sure, while there is even the hope of grass, for to him are most of these miscellaneous values consigned, and by him or through him will they be paid for.

We are now outside of agriculture. The farmer, as such, has no abiding-place here. That broad, dusty trail leads, among other destinations, to the 'Never Never' country, where ploughs are not, and the husbandman is as impossible as the dodo.

Perhaps we are a little hasty in assuming that everything we see at the compendious depot is pastorally requisitioned. That waggon that creaks wailingly as it slowly approaches, with ten horses, heavy laden though apparently empty, proclaims yet another important industry. Look into the bottom and you will see it covered with dark red bricks, a little different in shape from the ordinary article. On a closer view they have a metallic tinge. They are ingots of copper, of which some hundreds of tons come weekly from the three mines which send their output here. As for pastoral products, the line of high-piled, wool-loaded waggons is almost continuous. As they arrive they are swiftly unloaded into trucks, and sent along a special side-line reserved for their use. Flocks of fat sheep and droves of beeves, wildly staring