Unsparing vigilance, untiring concentration upon the daily routine of station work, was no longer necessary to the opulent possessor of stock and station, freehold and leasehold, town and city property. But the habits, inexorably welded into the being of the man, remained fixed and unalterable, when the circumstances which called them forth had long changed, long passed away. Still daily, as of old, Allan Jedwood rode over ‘the run,’ among his flocks and herds, his men and his ‘improvements,’ his dams, his wells, his fences, his buildings, his fields, and his teams. At nightfall, returning to the humble unchanged building which had sufficed for his wants for many a year, he spent the short evening which followed the day of hard exercise in writing business letters, or in posting up station accounts; or else, with military exactitude, he arranged with Mr. Doubletides the ensuing ‘order of the day,’ in which drafting of sheep, shifting of shepherds, mustering of cattle, and bargaining with dealers, took the place of marching and countermarching, sorties and retreats, embassies and diplomatic manœuvrings. Of the progress and potentialities of the outer world—literary, artistic, social, or political—Allan Jedwood knew and cared as little as any of his Highland shepherds, frequently arriving from the paternal farm, who ‘had not the English.’ In Ernest Neuchamp’s zeal for mental growth, for the onward march of humanity generally, and for the particular community with which he was temporarily connected, this stage of arrested development was very painful and grievous to the soul of an enthusiast and reformer. He tried all the units of the Garrandilla world, but he found no rest, æsthetically, for the sole of his foot. Malcolm Grahame, who exhausted whatever mental vigour he possessed in trying to discover a cure for foot-rot, and in improving a natural aptitude for wool-classing, bade fair to become as complete and as prosperous a bucolic Philistine as Jedwood himself. Fitzgerald Barrington was conversational and discursive enough, in all conscience, but his mental exercise chiefly took the direction of regret for the joyous days he had spent in his father’s house and among his own people—whom, not observing any near prospect of a fortune in Australia—he bitterly reproached himself for having ever quitted. Besides, he held no particular views about the destiny of the human race, or of the Australian nation, or of any other race or people but his own. He did not see the use of wasting the life that could be so much more pleasantly spent in hunting, shooting, feasting, flirting, four-in-hand driving, drinking, and dicing, as became a gentleman of long descent (if he only had the money), in bothering and interfering with a lot of low people, not worth caring about and who did not thank you the least bit.