Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/490

 waggons, who are even now unloosing their teams. There are five waggons, which, with wheels of the adamantine iron-bark eucalyptus, are warranted to carry the heaviest loads procurable; and heavy loads they are. Forty bales of wool in each, or thereabouts. Sixty or seventy horses in the five teams, all 'grade' Clydesdales or Suffolks, and averaging in value from £25 to £35 each. The 200 bales of wool are worth, say at £20 each, £4000; £1500 for the team horses; £300 for the waggons. A not inconsiderable total of values. Stay! In haste we have forgotten the sixty sets of harness and the tarpaulins,—£5000 or £6000 in all. A large property to be in the hands of five young fellows hardly known to the proprietor of the freight. It is fortunate that there are no robber barons at this time of day to demand tribute, or land pirates and buccaneers, except those who collect the inter-colonial protective duties.

The hare which runs across the road in front of us is an introduced, imported animal, like the deer we saw a while back. He is becoming numerous, but, unlike his cousin and comrade, 'Brer Rabbit,' has not been disastrously destructive. The settlers eat him at present. 'Brer Rabbit' in some districts has commenced to reverse the process.

Among the manifold natural beauties of the season we must by no means omit the hedgerows; in beauteous blossom these, and though, perhaps, chiefly too wild and luxuriant, yet affording pleasing contrast to the bare utilitarianism of rail and wire fence, and the monotony of the barked, murdered woods. Various are they, ranging from the dark green of the hawthorn, lovely with sweet souvenir bloom of long-past English springs, to the pink flower-masses of the quince, the crimson showers of the rose-hedges, and the yellow hair of the Acacia armata; while high, towering, thorny, impervious, with brightest glittering greenery, grows the Osage orange—a transatlantic importation, which in some respects is the most effective green wall known, being a species of live barbed wire, with an agreeable appearance of leafage, yet exuding a bitter juice, which prevents its mutilation by live stock. All these, interspersed occasionally with the sweetbriar, the scent and wild-rose flower of which almost atone for its predatory habits, its illegal occupation of Crown Lands. In one instance an economical or patriotic farmer had permitted the fast-growing