. Before the
gold discovery he had been a bush shepherd, he told Mahony, and, if he
had called the tune, he would have lived and died one. But the wife had
had ambitions, the children were growing up, and every one knew what it
was when women got a maggot in their heads. There had been no peace for
him till he had chucked his twelve-year-old job and joined the rush to
Mount Alexander. But at heart he had remained a bushman; and he was now
all on the side of the squatters in their tussle with the Crown. He
knew a bit, he'd make bold to say, about the acreage needed in certain
districts per head of sheep; he could tell a tale of the risks and
mischances squatting involved: "If t'aint fire it's flood, an' if the
water passes you by it's the scab or the rot." To his thinking, the
government's attempt to restrict the areas of sheep-runs, and to give
effect to the "fourteen-year-clause" which limited the tenure, were
acts of folly. The gold supply would give out as suddenly as it had
begun; but sheep would graze there till the crack of doom--the land was
fit for nothing else.

Mahony thought this point of view lopsided. No new country could hope
to develop and prosper without a steady influx of the right kind of
population and this the colony would never have, so long as the
authorities, by refusing to sell them land, made it impossible for
immigrants to settle there. Why, America was but three thousand miles
distant from the old country, compared with Australia's thirteen
thousand, and in America land was to be had in plenty at five shillings
per acre. As to Mr. Beamish's idea of the gold giving out, the
geological formation of the goldfields rendered that improbable. He
sympathised with the squatters, who naturally enough believed their
rights to the land inalienable; but a government worthy of the name
must legislate with an eye to the future, not for the present alone.

Their talk was broken by long gaps. In these, the resonant voice of
Mrs. Beamish could be heard rebuking and directing her two handmaidens.

"Now then, Jinny, look alive, an' don't ack like a dyin' duck in a
thunderstorm, or you'll never get back to do YOUR bit o' spoonin'!--
Save them bones, Polly. Never waste an atom, my chuck--remember that,
when you've got an 'ouse of your own! No, girls, I always says, through
their stomachs, that's the shortcut to their 'earts. The rest's on'y
fal-de-lal-ing."--On the verandah, in face of the vasty, star-spangled