correspendent of that great woman, I
was able to say that I had seen and talked with her, and that she
considered me a competent critic of her work. Mrs. Oliphant says that
George Eliot's life impelled her to make an involuntary
confession--"How have I been handicapped in life? Should I have done
better if I had been kept, like her, in a mental green-house and taken
care of? I have always had to think of other people and to plan
everything for my own pleasure, it is true, very often, but always in
subjection to the necessity which bound me to them. To bring up the
boys--my own and Frank's--for the service of God was better than to
write a fine novel, if it had been in my power to do so." The heart
knows its own bitterness. There might have been some points in which
George Eliot might have envied Mrs. Oliphant.

CHAPTER X.

RETURN FROM THE OLD COUNTRY.

Before leaving Scotland I arranged that my friend, Mrs. Graham of the
strenuous life and 30 pounds a year, should undertake the care of my
aunts, to their mutual satisfaction. My last days in England were spent
in either a thick London fog or an equally undesirable Scotch mist,
which shrouded everything in obscurity, and made me long for the sunny
skies and the clear atmosphere of Australia. I told my friends that in
my country it either rained or let it alone. Indeed, the latest news
from all Australia was that it had let it alone very badly, and that
the overstocking of stations during the preceding good seasons had led
to enormous losses. Sheepfarmers made such large profits in good
seasons that they were apt to calculate that it was worth while to run
the risk of drought; but experience has shown that overstocking does
not really pay. The making of dams, the private and public provision of
water in the underground reservoirs by artesian bores, and the
facilities for travelling stock by such ways have all lessened the
risks which the pioneer pastoralists ran bravely in the old days. An
Australian drought can never be as disastrous in the twentieth century
as it was in 1866; and South Australia, the Central State, has from the
first been a pioneer in development as well as in exploration. The hum
of the reaping machine first awoke the echoes in our wheatfields. The
stump-jumping plough and the mullenicer which beats down the scrub or
low bush so that it can be burnt, were South Australian inventions,
copied elsewhere, which have turned land accounted worthles