us for two or three years, he would never want to live anywhere else.
The climate was delicious, the best in the world; it induced a
feeling of repose, and bliss, and sweet contentment. We had no ice
or snow, or piercing blasts in winter; and the heat of summer was
tempered by the cool breezes of the Pacific Ocean, which gently
lapped our lovely shores. The land, when cleared, was as rich and
fertile as the farmer's heart could wish, yielding abundant pasturage
both in summer and winter. The mountains sent down to us unfailing
supplies of the purest water; we wanted no schemes of irrigation, for

"Green are our fields and fair our flowers,
Our fountains never drumlie."

We had no plagues of locust, no animal or insect pests to destroy our
crops or herbage. Rabbits had been introduced and turned loose at
various times, but, instead of multiplying until they had become as
numerous as the sand on the seashore, as had been the case in other
parts of Australia, in Gippsland they invariably died; and it had
been abundantly proved that rabbits had no more chance of living
there than snakes in Ireland. And with regard to the salubrity of
the climate, the first settlers lived so long that they were
absolutely tired of life. Let him look at the cemetery, if he could
find it. After thirty years of settlement it was almost uninhabited
--neglected and overgrown with tussocks and scrub for want of use.

It will be gathered from this statement of the Principal Inhabitant
that Gippsland had really been discovered and settled about thirty
years before; but mountains and sea divided it from the outside
world, and, on account of the intense drowsiness and inactivity which
the delicious air and even temperature of the climate produced, the
land and its inhabitants had been forgotten and unnoticed until it
had been rediscovered, and its praises sung by the enterprising
Minister of the Crown before mentioned.

Following the example of the cautious cat when introduced into a
strange house, I investigated every corner of the district as far as
the nature of the country would permit; and I found that it contained
three principal corners or villages about three miles apart, at each
of which the police magistrate and clerk had to attend on certain
days, business or no business, generally the latter. It was, of
course, beneath the dignity of a court to walk officially so far
through the scrub; so the police magistrate was allowed sixt