Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/408

384 down at twenty thousand dollars. Meantime the run has doubled in value, and the investment is paying handsomely.

This is the bright side of the picture. The dark side contains epidemics of pleuro-pneumonia, which has been the ruin of squatters on more than one occasion; added to this is the danger of a severe drought, in which thousands of cattle die of thirst and the inability to get food in consequence of the drying up of the grass. In some years