The usual meal of corned meat, damper, and milkless tea was brought in by the hutkeeper of the period, whose moleskins were strictly in keeping with the prevailing tone of the furniture and apartment. Much Ernest wondered at the precise mental condition which could suffer two free agents of legal age, the owners of a proverbially rich and extensive run, of a well-known highly-bred herd, free from debt and incumbrances, to live in a state of squalid savagery. He did not exactly put his questionings into this shape, but his manner had expressed a patent astonishment, which his host seemed to consider himself called upon to answer. ‘We haven’t done much in the building way here,’ he remarked apologetically, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. ‘I daresay we’ll put up a cottage next year. But the old man never would spend a penny on the run here. He was snug enough at the old farm down the country, and somehow I’ve got used to the life, and it does me as well as any other. Hardy isn’t often at home; he’s half his time in Sydney. So he manages to hang it out here when he comes to help muster and so on. I reckon he thinks it saves money, and as he hasn’t to live here _he_ don’t care.’ Ernest felt remorseful after this explanation, very simply delivered, at his feelings of disgust and disapproval. ‘Suppose,’ he asked himself, ‘_I_ had been set down here, a raw schoolboy, transplanted from half-learned tasks to the daily labour, the rude association, the unbroken loneliness of a distant station, debarred by a penurious old father from the smallest outlay not immediately connected with the herd, without books, change, society, or recreation, would it have been all-impossible that I should have grown into the mould in which my host is enclosed, or settled down into the resigned, sad-visaged man of five-and-thirty whom I see before me?’ It _would_ have been impossible in his case, he thought. Still he could enter sufficiently into the probabilities of the situation to comprehend the injustice to which the mental development of the elder brother had been exposed.