of the old man's ingenious hands. There he lived, like a philosopher
of old, with the most sternly plain and scanty materials for comfort--a
mat, a table, and a chair; but surrounded by beautiful artistic figures
and intricate mathematical diagrams traced on his floor and wall, reams
of essays and poems where he had tried to work out his thought;
fragments of machines, the toys of his constructive brain, among which
the travellers found him sitting like a masculine version of Albert
Durer's Melancholia, his laughing jackass adding tones of mockery to
the scene, perched on the bough, looking down, as his master below took
to pieces some squatter's crazy clock.

When Harold's greeting had aroused him, Dermot said, nothing could be
more touching than the meeting with Prometesky, who looked at him as a
father might look at a newly-recovered son, and seemed to lose the joy
of the prospect of his own freedom in the pride and exultation of his
own boy, his Ambrose's son, having achieved it. The beauty of the
place enchanted Dermot, and his first ride round the property made him
marvel how man could find it in his heart to give up this free open
life of enterprise for the tameness of an old civilised country. But
Harold smiled, and said he had found better things in England.

Harold found that there were serious losses in the numbers of the sheep
of the common stock, and that all the neighbouring settlers were making
the like complaint. Bushranging, properly so called, had been
extinguished by the goldfind in Victoria, but as my brothers had
located themselves as far as possible from inhabited districts, Boola
Boola was still on the extreme border of civilisation, and there was a
long, wide mountain valley, called the Red Valley, beyond it, with long
gulleys and ravines branching up in endless ramifications, where a gang
of runaway shepherds and unsuccessful gold diggers were known to haunt,
and were almost certainly the robbers. The settlers and mounted police
had made some attempts at tracking them out, but had always become
bewildered in the intricacies of the ravines, and the losing one's way
in those eucalyptus forests was too awful a danger to be encountered.

A fresh raid had taken place the very night before Harold arrived at
Boola Boola, upon a flock pasturing some way off. The shepherds were
badly beaten, and then bailed up, and a couple of hundred sheep were
driven off.

Now Harold had, as a lad, explored a