ones. Each day's programme had been marked out, and arrangements made in regal style. Some of us had sent on our favourite hacks; side-saddle and other horses were provided by the host in any quantity. Riding parties, picnics to fern gullies, to Mount Juliet, and other places of romantic interest, were successfully carried out. Races were improvised. Shooting parties, fishing excursions, kangaroo and opossum battues—everything which could impress the idea that life was one perpetual round of mirth and revelry—had been provided for.
As we sat at mid-day on the velvet green sward, by fern-fringed streamlets, under giant gums or the towering patriarchs of the mountain ash, while merry jest and sparkling repartee went round, ardent vow and rippling laughter, we might have been taken—apart from the costume—for an acted chapter out of "Boccaccio." When we came dashing in before sunset, the sound of our approach was like that of a cavalry troop, or the rolling hoof-thunder of marauding Apaches. The Germans were musicians of taste; to the "Morgen-blatter" and the "Tausend-und-eine Nachte" valses we danced until the Southern Cross was low in the sky, while as we watched the moon rise, flooding with silver radiance the sombre Alp, and shedding a passing gleam on the rippling river, all might well have passed for an enchanted revel, where mirth, moon, and music would disappear at the waving of a wand.
Years had rolled on since my first visit to the pioneer homestead. The cottage had disappeared, or was relegated to other purposes. In its place
