r from
hill to hill; even those miserable brutes, the sheep, frisked in
an ungainly way when anything startled them. At all the little
mountain-farms and holdings young Doyles and Donohoes were catching
their horses, lean after the winter's starvation, and loading the
pack-saddles for their five-months' trip out to the borders of
Queensland, from shearing-shed to shearing-shed, A couple of months
before they started, they would write to the squatters for whom they had
worked on previous shearings--such quaint, ill-spelled letters--asking
that a pen might be kept for them. Great shearers they were, too, for
the mountain air bred hardy men, and while they were at it they worked
feverishly, bending themselves nearly double over the sheep, and making
the shears fly till the sweat ran down their foreheads and dripped on
the ground; and they peeled the yellow wool off sheep after sheep as an
expert cook peels an apple. In the settled districts such as Kuryong,
where the flocks were small, they were made to shear carefully; but away
out on the Queensland side, on a station with two hundred thousand
sheep to get through, they rushed the wool off savagely. He was a poor
specimen of the clan who couldn't shear his hundred and twenty sheep
between bell and bell; and the price was a pound a hundred, with plenty
of stations wanting shearers, so they made good cheques in those days.

One glorious spring morning, Hugh Gordon was sitting in his
office--every squatter and station-manager has an office--waiting with
considerable impatience the coming of the weekly mail. The office looked
like a blend of stationer's shop, tobacconist's store, and saddlery
warehouse. A row of pigeon-holes along the walls was filled with
letters and papers; the rafters were hung with saddles and harness; a
tobacco-cutter and a jar of tobacco stood on the table, side by side
with some formidable-looking knives, used for cutting the sheep's feet
when they became diseased; whips and guns stood in every corner; nails
and saws filled up a lot of boxes on the table, and a few samples
of wool hung from a rope that was stretched across the room. The
mantelpiece was occupied by bottles of horse-medicine and boxes
of cartridges; an elderly white cockatoo, chained by the leg to a
galvanised iron perch, sunned himself by the door, and at intervals gave
an exhibition of his latest accomplishment, in which he imitated the
yowl of a trodden-on cat much better than the cat