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up his voice in angry protestation

against our invasion of a district which he seems to regard as placed under his especial guardianship; but the clamour of his vociferous bark soon dies away in the distance as we leave him and his brown-eyed companion far behind us. In the midst of the generally sombre foliage of the bush on either side of the road, there are some charming bits of wood colour. The leaves of the young saplings, when lit up by the sunshine, are of the lightest and brightest green imaginable, and appear to be as transparent as glass. There are others which have been withered by a bush fire, and these are apparelled in cerise, crimson, and mauve, so that the tints they present resemble those of the American maple "when autumn lays a fiery finger on their leaves." Sometimes we pass a roadside smithy, where the sturdy figure of the blacksmithwho is also a carpenter, wheelwright, painter, paperhanger, house decorator, and undertaker all rolled into oneglows with the ruddy reflection of his forge.

"Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell
When the evening sun is low."

Outside there is a sort of hospital to
which fractured ploughs and broken
drays and dislocated wheelbarrows and
ruptured waggons
are brought for
surgical treatment, and in front of the
cottage there is a trim garden, with an
arch of greenery spanning the central
walk, and a general air of brightness
and pleasantness about the place. All
this has to be taken in at a glance, so
that detailed description is out of the
question; but the place leaves a cheer-
ful impression on the mind, which
accompanies you until fresh objects.
attract and occupy your attention.
The road begins and continues to rise,
and presently you enter a tract of
country where the rich red soil
obtrudes itself upon your notice in
every direction. To this, most as-
suredly, would the words of Douglas
Jerrold apply:"If you tickle it with
a hoe it will laugh with a harvest." It
is a bank of fertility in which Nature

benefit of its fortunate owners, during has been making deposits for the

countless centuries past; and what tons upon tons of wheat, what pipes upon pipes of admirable wine, what countless bushels of luscious fruit, and what rivers of milk and honey lie undeveloped in these magnificent Red Lands!

Presently we reach the summit of a hill, where four roads meet, and where, upon an open space which will one day form the central square or marketplace of a populous town, we find a church, a substantial schoolhouse, and a general store. There we pause for a while, to give the horses breathing time. How fresh and pure the air is! Far and near there is nothing to be seen but a succession of miniature mountains, wooded to the very top, with here and there the white home of a settler gleaming out from its dark environment of trees, or set in the midst of an emerald patch of cultivation-for there is not an acre of land in the district that has not been taken up-and the little community is as prosperous in the present, as it is justly hopeful of the future. One thing is very noticeable about it, and that is that it is no less enamoured of sobriety than of industry. There is not a public-house in the parish of Wanding, nor will its inhabitants tolerate the introduction of anything of the sort. They are sturdy, strenuous folk, who do not shrink from the severest of toil, but are animated by a sincere aversion to the insidious influences of fermented liquors. So, when they send their produce down to Lilydale, none of the proceeds of their labour finds its way into the till of the publican, nor are the strong arms of those who are engaged in felling the giants of the forest unnerved by dissipation. For my own part, I enjoy a glass of wine, but at the same time I respect the conscientious determination of these self-denying people to exclude the publican from their sylvan Arcadia, and I can well believe the assurances which some of them gave me that the moral tone of the district is unexceptionable, and that there is little or no occasion for the services of a policeman. The young people, I learn, marry early and have large families

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households of eight and ten appear to be the rule, and smaller ones the exception. Generously nourished and habitually breathing the pure mountain air, the children grow up full of health and vigour, and become in a few years breadwinners or household helps themselves. Then, again, they are miles away from any doctor or from any chemist's shop, and is it to be wondered at that they are free from ailments of any kind? They reminded me of old John, a hardy Scot, and well known in the last century as the author of "Every Man his own Gardener," who lived to be eighty, and might have reached a hundred had he not accidentally fallen downstairs in the dark. When asked why he was so robust and vigorous at fourscore that he could outwalk many younger men, he gave, as one of the reasons, that he "had never taken any doctors' stuff." It was a disrespectful way of speaking of "the mixture to be taken as before,” but I have no doubt he was quite right.

a

From the halting-place I have imperfectly described, we proceed to ascend by a devious road, where the soil is a deep terra-cotta red, to a still loftier eminence, two or three miles distant, and we draw rein at last at a substantial farmhouse, erected on plateau overlooking a beautiful landscape, full of grand undulating lines, with rich purple distances, and a foreground suggestive of peace and plenty. Close by the gate is the largest mass of blackberry-bramble I have seen in Victoria, with the fruit almost as abundant as the leaves. Inside the spacious barn I hear the thud of the horses' feet upon the floor and the continuous hum of the threshing-machine. A tall and stalwart Northumbrian, but little bowed with the weight of seventy years, offers us a frank and homely welcome, and does the honours of his house and unaffected its surroundings with an cordiality. His habitation, like that of Ariosto at Ferrara, is parva sed apta. It was once full of children, but they have flown from the parent nest, and have founded homes of their own, mostly in the immediate neighbourhood, where children are growing up at their knees, and the lessons of industry,

sobriety, and thrift, which they them selves learned in the old home as boys and girls, are transmitted to their offspring. Mr. Hunter, who is our host, is the owner of 400 acres of such fertile soil that if you were to plant a tenpenny nail over-night, you would almost expect to see it grow up into a steam engine next morning. In front of the house is a grove of oranges and lemons, with here and there a vine trailing its clusters on the ground. On a southerly slope lies the orchard, where the apple, pear, and plum trees are so heavily laden with fruit that some of the branches have to be propped up to prevent them from breaking beneath their burden. A hawthorn-hedge, from ten to twelve feet in height, separates the orchard from the raspberry-plantation. This is what we have come to see. Many of the canes are six and even eight feet high, and they bear profusely. There are ten acres under cultivation for this fruit, and the yield during the present

season

was twenty-five tons, besides about five tons which had perished for want of sufficient hands to pick them. The gross return was £415, or rather more than £40 per acre. But the outlay must be considerable, for the soil has to be kept as clear and free from weeds as a vineyard. Numbers of hands have to be engaged for the picking. The fruit must be packed and sent off at an early hour in the morning to catch the first train from Lilydale to Melbourne, and all that is paid for them at the former place is twopence It is the intermediate per pound. people who reap the lion's share of the profit. The producer is everywhere at a disadvantage. The toil, the risk, and the uncertainty is his. He is at the mercy of the seasons, and where his crop is a perishable one he must sell immediately or not at all. Before it reaches the consumer it is doubled, and even trebled, in price.

Among the ranges in the extensive parish of Wanding there are raspberryplantations in all directions, and the estimated total yield of the last crop was not less than 1500 tons, of the value, in round numbers, of £25,000. But this is only one source of income to the landowners of the district, most

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