‘I tell you what,’ said Malcolm Grahame, who just came on to the scene of action, ‘there’s Jedwood and old Doubletides up at the drafting yards, waiting for some of you to come up and help put through those hoggets that got boxed. The old man is swearing just awfu’.’ Every one hasted at this intimation to the scene of action, where the dust was ascending in a cloud, curiously reminding Ernest of a Biblical passage. For the rest of the day, ‘Keep them up, wether, hogget, ewe, weaner, slit-ear, near crop,’ were the principal terms and phrases interchanged. Ernest Neuchamp speedily discovered that he had reason to congratulate himself heartily upon the fact that, from the never-ending work at Garrandilla, he was much too tired and sleepy at night to care for conversation, or to desire congenial companionship. Had he craved for such ever so longingly, he would have found it impossible to obtain. Allan Jedwood, a man of singular energy and indomitable persuasion, had devoted all his powers of mind and body with ceaseless, unrelaxing obstinacy to what he was pleased to consider the main end of existence. In his case, the reaching and maintaining of an independent pastoral position had been the goal which had stood forth before his eyes, a celestial mount, but slightly obscured by mists of pleasure, extravagance, or sympathy, from his youth up. In the pursuit of this somewhat restricted ideal, bounded by a good station, a fine herd of cattle, forty thousand sheep, and a balance at his bankers, he had spared not himself. He had strongly repressed the ordinary temptations, _desipere in loco_, to harmless dillettanteism, to amusement, or imaginative contemplation. Tendencies literary or artistic he had none. Everything in his eyes that did not lead directly to the increase or maintenance in good order and condition of his stock, he had eschewed and forsworn as unprofitable, almost immoral. Such was the rigid discipline which he had enforced over his own spirit for long years. From the days that he had been a hard-worked under-overseer, a toiling owner of a small station, a hampered purchaser of a larger one, until now, that he was sole proprietor of a magnificent unencumbered property, he had foregone nothing of this rule and regimen, and the usual effects had followed the causes. Successful labour and unwearied self-denial had created the position for which he had so longed and thirsted all his early life through. And yet was there a side to this picture which did not call for so much gratulation. In the stern repression, the pitiless starvation to which the spiritual portion of the man had been subjected, the germs of all intellectual and speculative tendencies had first dwindled, then perished.