athe of the old fatherland.
Go on, and behold the palace of the patriarchs,--it is of wood, I grant
you; but the house we build with our own hands is always a palace. Did
you ever build one when you were a boy? And the lords of that palace are
lords of the land almost as far as you can see, and of those numberless
flocks; and, better still, of a health which an antediluvian might have
envied, and of nerves so seasoned with horse-breaking, cattle-driving,
fighting with wild blacks,--chases from them and after them, for life
and for death,--that if any passion vex the breast of those kings of the
Bushland, fear at least is erased from the list.

See here and there through the landscape rude huts like the masters':
wild spirits and fierce dwell within. But they are tamed into order by
plenty and hope; by the hand open but firm, by the eye keen but just.

Now out from those woods, over those green rolling plains, harum-scarum,
helter-skelter, long hair flying wild, and all bearded as a Turk or a
pard, comes a rider you recognize. The rider dismounts, and another old
acquaintance turns from a shepherd, with whom he has been conversing on
matters that never plagued Thyrsis and Menalcas,--whose sheep seem to
have been innocent of foot-rot and scab,--and accosts the horseman.

Pisistratus.--"My dear Guy, where on earth have you been?"

Guy (producing a book from his pocket, with great triumph).--"There! Dr.
Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets.' I could not get the squatter to let me
have 'Kenilworth,' though I offered him three sheep for it. Dull old
fellow, that Dr. Johnson, I suspect,--so much the better, the book will
last all the longer. And here's a Sydney paper, too, only two months
old!" (Guy takes a short pipe, or dudeen, from his hat, in the band of
which it had been stuck, fills and lights it.)

Pisistratus.--"You must have ridden thirty miles at the least. To think
of your turning book-hunter, Guy!"

Guy Bolding (philosophically).--"Ay, one don't know the worth of a thing
till one has lost it. No sneers at me, old fellow; you, too, declared
that you were bothered out of your life by those books till you found
how long the evenings were without them. Then, the first new book we
got--an old volume of the 'Spectator!'--such fun!"

Pisistratus.--"Very true. The brown cow has calved in your absence. Do
you know, Guy, I think we shall have no scab in the fold this year.
If so, there will be a rare sum to lay by! Things loo