While in Sydney a number of back blocks, at no greater distance from this outer lake than it was from the former ‘frontage,’ had been put under offer to him. What if he should accept the terms—the price was low—and trust to the chance of the next great flood in the full-fed chafing river sending the water leaping down his tiny canal, and thus giving a value never before dreamed of to this splendidly grand but unnatural region. In spite of his half-settled determination to accept no other speculative risks, but, like a wise man, to rest contented with proved success, the next post conveyed instructions to Messrs. Paul Frankston and Co. to close for all the blocks, each five miles square, from A to M, comprising all the unoccupied country at the back of Rainbar and Mildool, at the price named. On the following morning the weather was misty and unusually cloudy, with an apparent tendency to rain. No rain fell, however; but the raw air, the unusual bleakness of the atmosphere, seemed abnormal to Ernest Neuchamp. ‘I should not wonder,’ said Mr. Banks, in explanation, ‘that it was raining cats and dogs somewhere else, snowing, or something of that sort. Perhaps at the head of the river. If that’s the case, we shall have a flood and no mistake. Such a one as none of us has seen yet. However, we’ve neither hoof nor horn nor fleece on the frontage. It can’t hurt us, that’s one comfort.’ Mr. Banks’s prognostications were correct. Within three days— ... like a horse unbroken, When first he feels the rein, The furious river struggled hard, And tossed his tawny mane, And burst the curb and bounded, Rejoicing to be free, And whirling down in fierce career Battlement and plank and pier, Rushed headlong to the sea. Battlement and plank and pier were in this case represented by hut slabs and rafters, haystacks and pumpkins, from the arable lands and meadows through which the great river held its upper course; while drowned stock and the posts and rails of many a mile of submerged fencing represented the latter floating trifles. There was much that was grand in the steadily deepening, broadening tide which slowly and remorselessly crawled over the wide green flats, which undermined the great waterworn precipices of the red-clayed bluffs, bringing down enormous fragments and masses, many tons in weight, which fell, foamed, and disappeared in the turbid, hurrying wave. Who could have recognised in this fierce, swollen, tyrant river, yellow as the Tiber, broad as the Danube, resistless as Ocean, the shallow, pellucid streamlet, rippling over its sandy shallows, of the dead, bygone famine year? On the larger flats it was miles wide. The white, straight tree-trunks stood like colonnades with arches framed in foliage, disappearing in endless perspective above a limitless plain of gliding waters.