al district in Australia after
many years. The railway had reached it, but otherwise things were
drearily, hopelessly, depressingly unchanged. There was the same old
grant, comprising several thousands of acres of the richest land in the
district, lying idle still, except for a few horses allowed to run there
for a shilling a-head per week.

There were the same old selections--about as far off as ever from
becoming freeholds--shoved back among the barren ridges; dusty little
patches in the scrub, full of stones and stumps, and called farms,
deserted every few years, and tackled again by some little dried-up
family, or some old hatter, and then given best once more. There was
the cluster of farms on the flat, and in the foot of the gully, owned by
Australians of Irish or English descent, with the same number of stumps
in the wheat-paddock, the same broken fences and tumble-down huts and
yards, and the same weak, sleepy attempt made every season to scratch up
the ground and raise a crop. And along the creek the German farmers--the
only people there worthy of the name--toiling (men, women, and children)
from daylight till dark, like slaves, just as they always had done; the
elder sons stoop-shouldered old men at thirty.

The row about the boundary fence between the Sweeneys and the Joneses
was unfinished still, and the old feud between the Dunderblitzens
and the Blitzendunders was more deadly than ever--it started three
generations ago over a stray bull. The O'Dunn was still fighting for his
great object in life, which was not to be 'onneighborly', as he put it.
'I DON'T want to be onneighborly,' he said, 'but I'll be aven wid some
of 'em yit. It's almost impossible for a dacent man to live in sich a
neighborhood and not be onneighborly, thry how he will. But I'll be aven
wid some of 'em yit, marruk my wurrud.'

Jones's red steer--it couldn't have been the same red steer--was
continually breaking into Rooney's 'whate an' bringin' ivery head av
the other cattle afther him, and ruinin' him intirely.' The Rooneys and
M'Kenzies were at daggers drawn, even to the youngest child, over the
impounding of a horse belonging to Pat Rooney's brother-in-law, by a
distant relation of the M'Kenzies, which had happened nine years ago.

The same sun-burned, masculine women went past to market twice a-week
in the same old carts and driving much the same quality of carrion. The
string of overloaded spring-carts, buggies, and sweating hors