warmth and colour of tropical Australia and in the daily life of
its inhabitants. This fondness for posing her heroines is one of the
minor features of her work. Its results in some of her later novels are
not, however, always agreeable: a few of the scenes in the history of
the unhappy Judith Fountain in _Affinities_ are painful, and the
portrait, in _The Brother of the Shadow_, of Mrs. Vascher as she lies in
the mesmerist's blue-silk-lined room is an unnecessary ghastly
elaboration.

The hardships suggested by the beginnings of pastoral life amid the
giant forests and intense loneliness of Australia are never allowed by
Mrs. Praed to give a gloomy colour to her stories. It is one of their
distinct merits that they present the humorous incongruities rather than
the trials of pioneering, though the latter are by no means ignored. In
the first three chapters of _The Romance of a Station_ some excellent
humour is provided by the young bride's account of her home-coming to
the rude mansion on her husbands mosquito-infested island station, and
the ludicrous privations she encountered there. There is nothing of the
kind more amusing in the whole of Australian fiction. The description of
the household pets, and the vermin--including a lizard with an uncanny
habit of 'unfastening its tail and making off on its stump when
pursued'--rivals the famous verandah scene in _Geoffry Hamlyn_. An
intimation in the preface that these experiences are a faithful record
from the early life of the author herself sufficiently explains their
graphic quality. Amusing also are the sketches of the aristocratic
settlers in _Policy and Passion_ and _Outlaw and Lawmaker_ who try to
apply the principles of aestheticism to the crude surroundings of their
new-made homes in the backwoods--Dolph Bassett with his ornamental
bridges and rockeries and his grand piano; Lord Horace Gage explaining
with his maxim, 'If we can't be comfortable, let us at least be
artistic,' a neglect to fill up the chinks in his slab hut.

Queensland, the scene of Mrs. Praed's colonial experience and the
'Leichardt's Land' of her stories, differs notably from the rest of
Australia only in climate; its social and political conditions are
essentially the same in character as those in the rest of the country.
The Englishman acquiring colonial experience, the squatter living in
various stages of comfort or discomfort, the gentleman spendthrift from
whom his family has parted with t