Certainly they did not need any large outlay. There are few lands under the sun, the Coral Islands of that charmed main the Great South Sea excepted, where there is such a possibility of tranquil, joyous progress along life’s pathway, without the use of the circulating medium, as in the settlements of the older colonies of Australia. For instance, the Freemans had, as it were for nothing, house-room, fuel, water, and light. Their garden supplied them with an annual crop of pumpkins, melons, and other esculents, which gave them vegetable food for the greater part of the year. Far larger crops might have been produced by a comparatively trifling increase of labour or thought. They had milk, butter, and meat from their herd, in ordinary years in profusion. The few necessaries which they were absolutely reduced to import or purchase were clothes, of which, owing to the mildness of the climate, they needed but few; tea and sugar, salt and flour, with a trifling stock of household utensils and furniture. With respect to the tea and sugar, a large reduction might have been made in this section had it been the fashion, as it was the exceptional practice, of isolated settlers to substitute milk for the former, as an ordinary adjunct to the three meals of the day. But tea in Australia, grateful alike in the burning heat of summer and in the bitter frosts and sleet of winter―portable, innocuous, nutritive, and slightly stimulating―is the beer of the common people; and we know from experience that the attempt ‘to rob a poor man of his beer’ has always hitherto proved unpopular and unsuccessful. We must therefore assume that a half-chest of tea and a couple of bags of medium brown sugar must be added to the expenditure of the small farmer, or ‘free selector,’ as he is now universally called. Australia is not a good game country. Still the different varieties of the kangaroo are palatable and nutritious, more resembling the flesh of the hare and rabbit, with a flavour of veal, than beef or mutton. With the aid of a brace of rough greyhounds―the kangaroo-dog of the colonists―these are easily procured in any quantity. The skins are worth a shilling each, and are useful as mats or for coverings. The rivers and creeks, particularly the larger watercourses, are generally filled with fresh-water codfish and several other divisions of the perch family. These are considered to afford valuable supplementary aid to the perhaps scanty supply of butchers’ meat, on many a far-out farm in summer time.