ne of the oldest and most
old-fashioned in Australia. Less than three dozen miles per road, and
not many more minutes by train from the greatest city in the Southern
hemisphere, yet many of its native population are more unpolished in
appearance than the bush-whackers from beyond Bourke, the Cooper, and
the far Paroo. It is an agricultural region, and this in some measure
accounts for the slouching appearance of its people. Men cannot wrest
a first-hand living from the soil and at the same time cultivate a
Piccadilly club-land style and air.

It is a valley of small holdings, being divided into farms and
orchards, varying in size from several to two or three hundred acres.
Many grants were apportioned there in the early days. Representatives
of the original families in some instances still hold portions of
them, and the stationary population has drifted into a tiny world of
their own, and for want of new blood have ideas caked down like most
of the ground, and evinced in many little characteristics distinct
from the general run of the people of the State.

Though they were, when I knew them, possessed of the usual human
failings in an average degree, they were for the most part a splendid
class of population--honest, industrious producers, who, in Grandma
Clay's words, "Keep the world going." There was only a small
percentage of idlers and parasites among them, but they did duty with
a very small-minded unprogressive set of ideas.

There is a place in New South Wales named Grabben-Gullen, where the
best potatoes in the world are grown. Great, solid, flowery beauties,
weighing two pounds avoirdupois, are but ordinary specimens in this
locality, and the allegorical bush statement for illustrating their
uncommon size has it that they grow under the fences and trip the
horses as they travel the lanes between the paddocks. Similarly, to
explain the wonderful growth of vegetation in the fertile valley of
Tumut, its inhabitants assure travellers that pumpkin and melon vines
grow so rapidly there that the pumpkins and melons are worn out in
being dragged after them.

Now, as I strolled around the lanes of Noonoon, I felt the old slow
ways, like Grabben-Gullen potatoes, protruding to stifle one's mental
flights; but there was nothing representative of the Tumut pumpkin and
melon vines to wear one out in a rush of progress. The land was rich
and beautiful and in as genial and salubrious a climate as the heart
of the most exa