‘This has been no ordinary home-wreck,’ thought he; ‘it needs but little imagination to picture to oneself the overflowing hospitality, the wild revelry, the old-world courtesy, that these crumbling walls have witnessed. Mark the great range of stabling! For no ordinary carriage and pair, with couple of hacks only, were they needed, I trow. There you can still trace the shape and sweep of the avenue leading from the outer gate to the front entrance, and see where the broken bridge spanned the little brook! A few glorious irregular orange-trees mark the place “where once a garden smiled.” This was doubtless one of the great houses in the period which corresponded with the palmy days of the West Indian planters, with the old slave-holding times of the Sunny South, when money was plentiful and (compulsory) labour cheap; when the magnates of the land held high festival, not periodically but as the rule of their daily life, and drank and danced and drove and diced and fought and feasted, all heedless of the morrow, whether in South Carolina, Jamaica, or in Sydney. The morrow _had_ come during the lives of some proprietors. In other cases, not until their heirs were fitted to realise the misery of a lost inheritance. And was this the end, the moral, of that _bon vieux temps_? The broken arch, the down-trodden shrubberies, the ghostly portals?’ By the time Mr. Neuchamp had brought his musings to a reluctant conclusion, the sun lay goldenly in the clear autumn eve, athwart the dark blue many-shadowed mountain-chain which rose with abrupt sternness from the broad green fertile levels. A wondrous clearness of atmosphere was manifest to the wayfarer from the misty mother-lands, now irradiated with the glories of a southern sunset. Tints of all hues and gradations of colour, clear unflecked amber, burning gold, purple, and orange, cast themselves in softly blending masses upon the fast darkening, solemn, unrelieved mountain-chain. He was aware, from guide-book lore, that at this point the early progress of civilisation and prosperity of the struggling colony of New South Wales had come to an abrupt conclusion. All things which he saw around explained so much. Careful cultivation of land now disused and restored to grazing. A multiplication of small well-improved farms. Expensive and thorough clearing of timber from great tracts of indifferent soil, only explicable on the hypothesis of cheap labour and artificially heightened prices for all kinds of farm produce. Then the end had come. The pent-up flocks and herds, the fall of the protection prices, dearth of employment for labour, the vigorous manhood of the colony native to the soil clamouring for remuneration and adventurous employment—all the causes, in fact, which lead to the decay of a weak or the development of a strong race.