water thus painfully obtained—for from three to five hundred pounds for two to three hundred feet sinking was no uncommon expense in a single well—was brackish, much salt, still progress was made. The stock was enabled in the midst of summer heat or protracted autumn drought to feed upon these previously locked-up pastures, upon the saline herbs and plants, the nutritious, aromatic shrubs peculiar to this land, where no white man had ever before seen stock except in winter. By degrees it began to be asserted that ‘back country,’ _i.e._ the lands remote from all visible means of subsistence for flocks and herds, as far as water was concerned, paid the speculative pastoral occupier better than the ‘frontage,’ or land in the neighbourhood of permanent creeks, and of the few well-known rivers. _There_ roamed that unconscionable beast of prey, the all-devouring free selector. He could select the choicest bends, the richest flats, the deepest river reaches, even where the squatter had fenced or enclosed. For were not the waters free to all? He naturally appropriated the best and most tempting conjunctions of ‘land and water.’ These were precisely those which were most profitable, most necessary, occasionally most indispensable to the proprietor of the run. But it was not so with the back blocks. There capital yet retained much of its ancient supremacy. The wielder of that implement or weapon was enabled to cause his long-silent wilderness to blossom as the rose, by means of dams and wells. He was in a position also to drive off, keep out, and withstand the invading pseudo-grazier, with his sham purchases and his wrongful grass rights. Thus, by a wise provision of the Land Act, all improvements of a value exceeding forty pounds sterling, when placed by the pastoral tenant upon the Crown lands which he was facetiously supposed to rent, protect the lands upon which they stand, or which, in the case of a well, they underlie; that is to say, a five-hundred-guinea well or a hundred-pound dam cannot be free-selected or taken cool possession of as a conditional purchase by the land marauder of the period. Some people might see a slight flavour of fairness in this provision which has not always in other colonies, Victoria notably, been granted by the democratic wolf to the conservative lamb. However the Government of New South Wales may have erred in other respects, it has in the main so far ruled the outnumbered pastoralists with a courtesy, fairness, and freedom from small greed such as might be expected from one body of gentlemen in responsible dealing with a class of similar social rank.