upon as being a great change for the worse, namely, that the loaded teams of wool and sandalwood were now usually put under the charge of ticket-of-leave men or expirees as drivers, whereas in former times each gentleman had been his own wagoner, and had, at the evening halt, joined with his fellow-colonists in the merriment around the one huge camp fire, good feeling being thus promoted between persons whose birth was not always equal, although their occupations were similar. The influx of Government money has produced a rapid increase of wealth in many cases, and those who have been lucky in the general scramble too often look down upon those who have remained poor, thus reducing into narrower compass the already small society.
Hitherto my only ideas of a shepherd's life had been formed on the examples which I had seen at home, where, in our own village, the three that I knew best were men prematurely bent with rheumatism, and frequently compelled, nevertheless, to brave the biting east winds at two o'clock in the March mornings, when the very lambs themselves, born at such early hours, and with the weathercock in that direction, often required to be "brought round" by the judicious administration of small doses of gin. Whether no other species of nursing would have induced the lambs to face an English spring I am too ignorant to say, but for the necessity of some such cordial in the sheep-fold I have the authority of a shepherd's wife in a bleak upland county in England. As to such beings as shepherdesses, I had supposed that they were mere fancy creatures invented by the writers of pastorals. However, I now discovered that beneath the
