When Mr. Neuchamp, with his friends, servants, and allies, reached his castle gate, otherwise the stockyard slip-rails, that night, he rode behind three hundred head of as fine fat bullocks of _his own_ as ever were sent to the Sydney market. The first draft of fat cattle! Grand transaction! ‘What would Courtenay say,’ he thought, ‘if he saw me in possession of a magnificent drove of cattle like this, all my own and just about to be turned into cash? Let me see, I expect to send away this year five or six such drafts. That will be―let me see―how much at £3 or even £3:10s. per head’―and then Mr. Neuchamp fell to calculating the number of calves he should brand this year―and the next, if the cattle went on increasing―the number of cattle he should send off,―and generally piling up Alnaschar’s basket to the greatest elevation which that tempting but insecure receptacle of riches would permit. The fat cattle were duly despatched to market under the charge of Charley Banks and Jack Windsor, Piambook accompanying them for the first fifty miles, to return when they might be supposed to be ‘steadied’ more or less to the road. Mr. Neuchamp himself rode by them on the first day, and his heart swelled as the drove of grand-looking bullocks, all ‘rolling fat,’ as became a Rainbar draft, after a few fruitless dashes for return and liberty, paced quietly though with subdued swiftness along the far-stretching trail that did duty for the highway. ‘There is something fascinating, it must be confessed, about this bush life,’ he soliloquised. ‘I don’t wonder at youngsters running away to the bush, as long ago they did to sea. What a man, what a hero, a lad feels himself to be mounted upon a good horse behind a trampling drove like this. Sometimes, even at Charley Banks’s age, he may be the owner of such a lot, and the lord of an estate of a hundred thousand acres (leasehold), where almost every one he sees belongs to his employment or dependency. The very numbers of the stock create a sense of responsibility and grandeur. There are three hundred and fifty head in this draft, not a large one. What would they think in England of seeing five hundred fat cattle in one drove, or even a thousand, like the one we met one day. “Where are these fine cattle from?” I remember saying to the stockman in charge. “From Yānga,” said he, with an air of perfect explanation, as who should say from London or Liverpool. All well-informed persons, to his mind, must be acquainted by report, at least, with Yānga.’ Mr. Neuchamp’s musings came to an end as he perceived that he was no longer needed, and must return, unless he proposed to spend the night away from home without adequate cause, so he paced back ruefully to Rainbar, which fully presented the aspect of a lodge in the wilderness bereft of the cheerful converse of Mr. Banks, the versatile activity of Mr. Windsor, and even the open countenance and expansive grin of Piambook.