s of. I wish this was Melbourne
we were coming to, instead of Sydney. I'd like to have her look at it."

"Better than this?" said Mr. Amos, for Eleanor was silent.

"A better colony, for beauty and riches," said the captain. "It's the
most glorious country, sir, you ever saw! hundreds of square miles of
it are as handsome as a duke's park; and good for something, which a
duke's park ain't. There's a great tract of country up round Mt.
Macedon--thirty or forty miles back into the land--its softly rolling
ground without a stone on it, as nice as ever you saw; and spotted with
the trees they call she-oaks--beautiful trees; and they don't grow in a
wood, but just stand round in clumps and ones or twos here and there,
like a picture; and then through the openings in the ground you can see
miles off more of just the same, till it gets blue in the distance; and
mountains beyond all. And when you put here and there a flock of
thousands of sheep spotting the country with their white backs--I ain't
poetical, sir, but I tell you! when I saw that country first, I thought
maybe I was; but it's likely I was mistaken," said the captain
laughing, "for the fit has never come back since. Miss Powle thinks
there's as much poetry in the water as on the land."

Still Eleanor did not move to answer; and Mr. Amos, perhaps for her
sake, went on.

"What is it that country is so good for? gold? or sheep?"

"Sheep, sir, sheep! the gold grows in another part. There's enough of
that too; but I'd as lieve make my money some other way. Victoria is
the country for wool-growing, sir. I've a brother there--Stephen
Fox--he went with little more than nothing; and now he has a flock of
sheep--well, I'm afraid to say how many; but I know he needs and uses a
tract of twelve thousand acres of land for them."

"That is being a pretty large land-owner, as well as sheep-owner," Mr.
Amos said with a smile.

"O he don't own it. That wouldn't do, you know. The interest of the
money would buy all the wool on his sheep's backs."

"How then?"

"He has the use of it,--that's all. Don't you know how they work it? He
pays a license fee to Government for the privilege of using the land
for a year--wherever he pitches upon a place; then he stocks it, and
goes on occupying by an annual license fee, until he has got too many
neighbours and the land is getting all taken up in his neighbourhood.
Then some one comes along who has money and don't want the plague of a