at time, I can remember how curiously soon the
external traces of the great snow-storm disappeared. For some weeks
after the friendly nor-wester, the air of the whole neighbourhood was
tainted by dead and decaying sheep and lambs; and the wire fences,
stock-yard rails, and every "coign of vantage," had to be made useful
but ghastly by a tapestry of sheep-skins. The only wonder was that a
single sheep had survived a storm severe enough to kill wild pigs. Great
boars, cased in hides an inch thick, had perished through sheer stress
of weather; while thin-skinned animals, with only a few months growth of
fine merino wool on their backs, had endured it all. It was well known
that the actual destruction of sheep was mainly owing to the two days
of heavy rain which succeeded the snow. Out of a flock of 13,000 of all
ages, we lost, on the lowest calculation, 1,000 grown sheep and nearly
3,000 lambs; and yet our loss was small by comparison with that of
our neighbours, whose runs were further back among the hill, and less
sheltered than our own.

Long before midsummer our cloud-shadowed hills were green once more; and
I think I see again their beautiful outlines, their steep sides planted
with semi-tropical palms and grasses, whilst the more distant peaks are
veiled in a sultry haze. During that peculiarly bright and lovely summer
we often ask each other, Could it have been true that no one knew one
mountain from the other, and that hills had been apparently levelled and
vallies filled up by the heaviest snow-fall ever known. But whilst the
words were on our lips, we could see a group of palm-trees, ten feet
high, with their topmost leaves gnawed to the stump by starving sheep,
that must have been standing on at least seven feet of snow to reach
them; and there was scarcely a creek on the run whose banks were not
strewn, for many a long day, by bare and bleaching bones.

Chapter VI: Buying a run.

Like many other people in the world, I have occasionally built castles
in the air, and equally of course they have invariably tumbled down in
due time with a crash This particular castle however, not only attained
to a great elevation in the visionary builder's eyes, but it covered so
vast an area of land, that the story of its rise and fall deserves to
be placed on record, as a warning to aerial architects and also as a
beacon-light to young colonists.

This was exactly the way it all happened. The new year of 186-found us
l