ops, increasing year by year,
until at length the tree attains maturity. Then there are full crops,
and you realize a handsome profit on your planting.

Our station--or, as you may choose to term it, our estate, selection,
place, farm, location, homestead, or run--may be reckoned a choice bit
of land.

The soil is not all of one character, it seldom is so on any one farm in
this country, but it is all good class. Most of it is a rich black
humus, resting on clay and mountain limestone. In configuration it is
of the roughest, like the country generally, being an abrupt succession
of ranges, gullies, and basins, in every variety of form and size.

When we took possession, nearly every inch of the property was covered
with what is termed light bush. It might have been a slice out of the
New Forest. The light bush is just as dense a wood of small trees,
twenty to fifty feet in height, shrubs, creepers and undergrowth, as can
well be conceived of. Where the thicket is thinner the trees are larger,
and the smaller they are the denser the covert. If you wish to journey
through this light bush, where there is no semblance of a track, it will
take you perhaps two hours to make a single mile, so thick is it. To
ride through it is, of course, impossible, unless a track has been cut.

Two or three miles back from the river--at our back, or behind us, as we
say--the heavy bush begins. This is the primeval forest: endless miles
of enormous timber-trees, girthing ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet,
forty feet, and even more, and of startling height. People cannot make
farms out of that; at least, not all at once. The timber is slowly
encroached upon to feed the saw-mills. Then the land so denuded can be
done something with. The stumps can be fired and left to rot, which they
do in about twelve or fifteen years, or they can be stubbed up with
infinite labour, or blown out with dynamite, the quickest and least
expensive way.

We have not much big timber on our section. Here and there are groves of
larger trees amidst the jungle, and most of this sort we shall leave
standing, for it is not good to totally clear a large farm. Patches of
bush are wanted for shade, for cover, and to keep up the supply of
moisture. Settlers before us, who have inconsiderately made a clean
sweep of everything, have found out their error, and are now planting
out groves.

But when you get a slice out of miles and miles of pathless woods, and
have to hew