‘But why don’t you have a garden?’ promptly inquired Augusta. ‘I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have one?’ ‘You see, miss,’ said Mrs. Freeman, casting about for a mode of explaining to her young lady visitor that she didn’t know what she was talking about, ‘the ground ain’t very good just here; and though it’s so dry and baked just now, they say the floods come all over it; and perhaps we mightn’t be here altogether that long. And Freeman, he’s had a deal of trouble with the stock lately. I don’t say but what a garden would look pretty enough; but who’s to work in it? It ain’t like our place down the country. There we had a garden—lots of peaches and grapes, and more plums, apples, and quinces than we could use and give away, besides early potatoes and all kinds of vegetables.’ ‘I suppose you regretted leaving such a home,’ said Miss Neuchamp, rather impressed by the hothouse profusion of the fruits mentioned. ‘Well, I’d rather live there on a pound a week,’ said Mrs. Freeman, ‘than here on riches. Freeman thought the stock would make up for all, but I didn’t, and I’m always sorry for the day we ever left the old farm.’ As the good woman spoke the tears stood in her eyes, and Miss Neuchamp much marvelled that any spot in the desolate region of Australia should have power to attract the affection even of hard-worked, unrelieved Mrs. Freeman. ‘Mother’s always fretting about that old place at Bowning,’ said Tottie. ‘I don’t believe it was any great things either. It was a deal colder than this, and we had lots of milk and butter always; but bread and butter’s not worth caring about.’ ‘You don’t recollect it, Tottie,’ said her mother, ‘or you would not talk in that way. Don’t you remember going into the garden to pick the peaches? How cool and shady it was in the mornings, to be sure, without scores of mosquitoes to sting and eat us up! Then there was always grass enough for the cows, and we had plenty of milk and butter and cheese, except, perhaps, in the dead of winter. It was better for all of us in other ways too, and that’s more.’ ‘I don’t see that, mother,’ said Tottie. ‘But I do,’ said Mrs. Freeman, ‘and more than me knows it. There’s your father isn’t the same man, without his regular work at the farm, and the carrying and the other jobs, that used to fill up his time from daylight to dark. Now he’s nothing but the cattle to look after; and such weather as this there’s nothing to do from month’s end to month’s end, unless to pull them out of the waterholes. And I _know_ he had a “burst” at that wretched _Stockman’s Arms_ the last time he was down the river. He that was that sober before you could not tell him from a Son of Temperance.‘