of us were required for the pastorals,
I think Vivian was the best of us three to entrust with the first,--and
certainly it has succeeded as yet."

Guy.--"Why, yes, Vivian is quite in his element,--always in action, and
always in command. Let him be first in everything, and there is not a
finer fellow, nor a better tempered,--present company excepted. Hark!
the dogs, the crack of the whip; there he is. And now, I suppose, we may
go to dinner."

(Enter Vivian.) His frame has grown more athletic; his eye, more
steadfast and less restless, looks you full in the face. His smile
is more open, but there is a melancholy in his expression almost
approaching to gloom. His dress is the same as that of Pisistratus and
Guy,--white vest and trousers; loose neckcloth, rather gay in color;
broad cabbage-leaf hat; his mustache and beard are trimmed with more
care than ours. He has a large whip in his hand, and a gun slung across
his shoulders. Greetings are exchanged; mutual inquiries as to cattle
and sheep, and the last horses despatched to the Indian market. Guy
shows the "Lives of the Poets," Vivian asks if it is possible to get the
Life of Clive, or Napoleon, or a copy of Plutarch. Guy shakes his head;
says if a Robinson Crusoe will do as well, he has seen one in a very
tattered state, but in too great request to be had a bargain.

The party turn into the hut. Miserable animals are bachelors in all
countries, but most miserable in Bushland. A man does not know what a
helpmate of the soft sex is in the Old World, where women seem a matter
of course. But in the Bush a wife is literally bone of your bone, flesh
of your flesh,--your better half, your ministering angel, your Eve of
the Eden; in short, all that poets have sung, or young orators say at
public dinners when called upon to give the toast of "The Ladies." Alas!
we are three bachelors, but we are better off than bachelors often are
in the Bush; for the wife of the shepherd I took from Cumberland does
me and Bolding the honor to live in our but and make things tidy and
comfortable. She has had a couple of children since we have been in the
Bush; a wing has been added to the but for that increase of family. The
children, I dare say, one might have thought a sad nuisance in England;
but I declare that, surrounded as one is by great bearded men from
sunrise to sunset, there is something humanizing, musical, and
Christian-like in the very squall of the baby. There it goes, bless