been trying to resuscitate old Rome, and to found
for her a new empire, and have only made Italy another Ireland, with
a starving people and a bankrupt government. 'Nos patriae fines, nos
dulcia linquimus arva'. The Italians are emigrating year after year
to avoid starvation in the Garden of Europe. In every city of the
great empire on which the sun never sets they wander through the
streets, clad in faded garments of olive green--the toga long since
discarded and forgotten--making sweet music from the harp and
violin, their melancholy eyes wandering after the passing crowd,
hoping for the pitiful penny that is so seldom given.

The two shepherds were employed on a station north of Lake Nyalong.
It is a country full of dead volcanoes, whose craters have been
turned into salt lakes, and their rolling floods of lava have been
stiffened into barriers of black rocks; where the ashes belched forth
in fiery blasts from the deep furnaces of a burning world have
covered the hills and plains with perennial fertility.

Baldy had been entrusted with a fattening flock, and Nosey had in his
care a lambing flock. From time to time the sheep were counted, and
it was found that the fattening flock was decreasing in numbers. The
squatter wanted to know what had become of his missing sheep, but
Baldy could give no account of them. His suspicions, however, soon
fell on Nosey. The latter was his nearest neighbour, and although he
had only the same wages--viz., thirty pounds a year and rations--
he seemed to be unaccountably prosperous, and was the owner of a wife
and two horses. He had been transported for larceny when he was only
fifteen years of age, and at twenty-eight he was suspected of being
still a thief. Girls of the same age were sent from Great Britain to
Botany Bay and Van Diemen's Land for stealing one bit of finery,
worth a shilling, and became the consorts of criminals of the deepest
dye. You may read their names in the Indents to this day, together
with their height, age, complexion, birthplace, and other important
particulars.

Baldy went over to Nosey's hut one evening when the blue smoke was
curling over the chimney, and the long shadows of the Wombat Hills
were creeping over the Stoney Rises. Julia was boiling the billy for
tea, and her husband was chopping firewood outside.

"Good evening, Julia," said Baldy; "fine evening."

"Same to you, Baldy. Any news to-day?" asked Julia.

"Well, there is," said