‘Accidents will happen, my dear Augusta,’ said Ernest, ‘in all companies and communities, you know. Cobb and Co. are the best of fellows in the main. But _whatever_ induced you to come up into this wild place without writing to me first? Have you not suffered all kinds of hardship and disagreeables?’ ‘Well, perhaps a few; but I knew all about the country from some books I read on the voyage out. I studied the directory till I found out the coach lines, and I should not have complained but for this last blunder. But what a barren wilderness this all seems. I thought Australia was a land of rich pastures.’ ‘So it is—but this is a drought. “And the famine was sore in the land.” You remember that in the Bible, don’t you? We are a good deal like Palestine in our periodical lean years, except that they didn’t import their flour from beyond sea, and we do.‘ ‘But this looks so very bad!’ said she, putting up her eyeglass and staring earnestly at the waste lands of the crown, which certainly presented a striking contrast to the Buckinghamshire meadows or uplands either. ‘Why, it seems all sand and these scrubby-looking bushes; are you sure you haven’t made a mistake and bought inferior land? A gentleman who came out with me said inexperienced persons often did.’ ‘My dear Augusta,’ said Ernest, quelling a well-remembered feeling of violent antagonism, ‘you must surely have forgotten that I have been more than two years in Australia, and may be supposed to know the difference between good country and bad by this time.’ ‘Do you?’ said his fair cousin indifferently. ‘Well, you must have improved. Courtenay says you are the most credulous person he knows; and as for Aunt Ermengarde, she says that, of all the failures the family has produced——’ ‘Please to spare me the old lady’s review of my life and times,’ said Ernest, waking up his bounding steeds. ‘We never did agree, and it can serve no good purpose to further embitter my remembrance of her.’ ‘Oh, but she did not wish to say anything really disparaging of you, only that you were not of sufficiently coarse material to win success in farming, or trade, or politics.’ ‘Or colonisation, my dear Augusta. Perhaps she was not so far wrong, after all; but somehow one doesn’t like to be told these things, and I must ask you and Aunt Ermengarde to suspend your judgment until the last scene of the third act. Then you will be able to applaud, or otherwise, on correct grounds. I think you will find the country and its ways by no means too easy to comprehend.’ ‘I expect nothing, simply, so I cannot be disappointed. It seems to me a sort of provincial England jumbled up with one’s ideas of Mexico.’ ‘And the people?’ ‘I haven’t noticed them much yet. I thought many of the women ridiculously overdressed in Sydney, copying our English fashions in a semi-tropical climate. I left everything behind except a few tourist suits.’