Among the characters, there are so many who inspire us with love rather than mere interest, that a multiplicity of similar scenes, of conversations, rides, pleasure-excursions, and other intercourse, which in another book might prove wearisome, becomes here the best enjoyment of the reader. With what vivacity and gusto the author describes the visits exchanged between the home stations, and the comforts and happiness which they reveal! Half the book is made up of them, and yet the majority remain sufficiently clear in the memory to be recalled separately. Brentwood, who is at first fifty miles away, buys a station near at hand, he and Buckley having become inseparable, and now Baroona, Garoopna, and Toonarbin are only a few miles apart. 'There was always a hostage from one staying as a guest at the other.' The visits were generally unannounced, and the visitors stayed as long as they felt inclined to. The effects of this custom are once amusingly illustrated at the home of Captain Brentwood. It is when the members of the little colony hear of the arrival of his beautiful daughter from Sydney, where she has been at school. 'That week one of those runs upon the Captain's hospitality took place which are common enough in the Bush, and, although causing a temporary inconvenience, are generally as much enjoyed by the entertainers as the entertained. Everybody during this next week came to see them, and nobody went back again. So by the end of the week there were a dozen or fourteen guests assembled, all uninvited, and apparently bent on making a long stay of it.' They help one another when there is work to be done, dine sumptuously, picnic luxuriously. Kingsley has properly made eating and drinking a noticeable part of the hearty full-bodied existence of his squatters and their friends. There is no class of people who have a better capacity for enjoying the material comforts of life than the country gentlemen of Australia. Major Buckley is just the sort of person one might have expected to hold decided views on the subject of dining as an art. To dine in the middle of the day was, in his opinion, a gross abuse of the gifts of Providence. 'I eat my dinner not so much for the sake of the dinner itself as for the after-dinnerish feeling which follows--a feeling that you have nothing to do, and that, if you had, you'd be shot if you'd do it.' On another occasion the author himself preaches a similarly agreeable doctrine, concluding with the advice: 'My brother, let us breakfast in Scotland, lunch in Australia, and dine in France, till our lives end.'