read the letter which
never failed to make its appearance monthly to one or other of us.

"Our winter fall of snow generally began about the 12th of May, and
from that date till the month of October it was a matter of no small
difficulty to get our letters at the place where we lived, a long nine
miles from Kiandra of a very mountainous track.

"186- was an extraordinary season. May passed, no snow--June the same,
only heavy, I may say, nearly constant showers of rain. 'A glorious
year,' the diggers called it. 'Never such a season for work since the
diggings broke out. Two months' work at a time when there is never any
water. O, what a wash-up there will be in November!'

"Such was the substance of the conversation when any two of the
residents met, varied, perhaps, by remarks as to whether old
So-and-so, who had been twenty years in the district, would be right
in saying there was to be nine feet of snow, or whether So-and-so was
a better judge in saying we were to have none at all?

"I was then living by myself, Wilfred being away in Sydney, and was
looking out for him every day, and hoping he might be back before the
winter fairly set in, when it was scarcely possible to travel. As I
said before, June had passed, and we were getting well into July, when
I heard that our English mail would be in Kiandra on the following
Wednesday. It was now Friday.

"We had got a fine week for work, raining gently all the time, which
is what we diggers like, and no frost, which dries up the water, and
makes us all idle, when on Sunday the weather completely changed, and
very suddenly, too, as, indeed, it always did there. The wind, which
had been from north or east, without any warning chopped right round
to the south-west, and we had a strong frost. Next day was cloudy, but
at night frost was harder than ever, and everything with liquid in it,
even to the tea-pot in a room where there was a fire nearly all night,
was full of solid ice.

"The thermometer was down to 18 deg. below zero in the same place; and in
bed, in the next room, with four pairs of new blankets, I thought I
should have been fairly frozen. We were hard at work all that day,
which was a drizzly, snowy one, everything betokening a fall of snow;
so, when Wednesday dawned, though not so deep as I expected, I was
not surprised to find more than a foot of it all over.

"Down the country the floods had been dreadful; nearly all the bridges
had been washed away, an