done his time, and married mother, who was a simple emigrant girl
just out from Ireland. Father was a square-built, good-looking chap,
I believe, then; not so tall as I am by three inches, but wonderfully
strong and quick on his pins. They did say as he could hammer any man
in the district before he got old and stiff. I never saw him 'shape' but
once, and then he rolled into a man big enough to eat him, and polished
him off in a way that showed me--though I was a bit of a boy then--that
he'd been at the game before. He didn't ride so bad either, though he
hadn't had much of it where he came from; but he was afraid of nothing,
and had a quiet way with colts. He could make pretty good play in thick
country, and ride a roughish horse, too.

Well, our farm was on a good little flat, with a big mountain in front,
and a scrubby, rangy country at the back for miles. People often asked
him why he chose such a place. 'It suits me,' he used to say, with a
laugh, and talk of something else. We could only raise about enough corn
and potatoes, in a general way, for ourselves from the flat; but there
were other chances and pickings which helped to make the pot boil, and
them we'd have been a deal better without.

First of all, though our cultivation paddock was small, and the good
land seemed squeezed in between the hills, there was a narrow tract up
the creek, and here it widened out into a large well-grassed flat. This
was where our cattle ran, for, of course, we had a team of workers and
a few milkers when we came. No one ever took up a farm in those days
without a dray and a team, a year's rations, a few horses and milkers,
pigs and fowls, and a little furniture. They didn't collar a 40-acre
selection, as they do now--spend all their money in getting the land and
squat down as bare as robins--a man with his wife and children all
under a sheet of bark, nothing on their backs, and very little in their
bellies. However, some of them do pretty well, though they do say they
have to live on 'possums for a time. We didn't do much, in spite of our
grand start.

The flat was well enough, but there were other places in the gullies
beyond that that father had dropped upon when he was out shooting. He
was a tremendous chap for poking about on foot or on horseback, and
though he was an Englishman, he was what you call a born bushman. I
never saw any man almost as was his equal. Wherever he'd been once,
there he could take you to again; and