Henry Kingsley decided the movement of his characters with a loving care. Their interests were paramount to him. They made their own story; the story did not make them. Their author cared little for the externals of Australian life except in so far as they helped to tell something, especially something good, of his leading personages. His interest in them was not semi-scientific, like that of Thackeray or Jane Austen, Howells or Henry James, in their studies of human nature; it was that mainly of a sympathiser and a partisan. His frequently expressed anxiety about the impression they were making upon the reader was not always an affectation. There is a real solicitude in the confidences concerning William Ravenshoe upon his sudden promotion from the stable to the drawing-room of Ravenshoe Manor. 'I hope you like this fellow, William,' he says in one place, and then there is a naïve enumeration of some of the ex-groom's social deficiencies. This, at best, is a useless interruption of the story, but it helps, with other signs, to show Kingsley's constant interest in his characters. Nearly everything in his descriptions of Australian squatting pursuits is intended to have a definite and notable bearing upon them. Thus, the view we get of the drafting-yard at Garoopna, with Sam Buckley in torn shirt, dust-covered, and wielding a deft pole on the noses of the terrified cattle, is not presented as a piece of station-life so much as a picturesque means of leading Alice Brentwood into an involuntary display of her affection for Sam when he is struck down before her eyes. Again, the description of the kangaroo-hunt, given in the same novel, is remembered chiefly on account of the picture of Sam and Alice in the frank enjoyment of their first love as they loiter in the tracks of the sportsmen, and, relinquishing the chase with happy indifference, go home and sit together under the verandah. Kingsley avoided the fault, common to his successors, of exaggerating the interest which readers are supposed to take in the general aspects of life in a new country. He had a keen sense of the value of picturesque environment, but wisely contrived that nothing should withdraw attention from the progress of his drama. He was ever on the watch for opportunities to sketch in lightly and humorously small traits of character, and to emphasise salient ones. 'She had an imperial sort of way of manoeuvring a frying-pan,' he says, in allusion to the cheerful adaptability of the high-bred Agnes Buckley, that fine model of English womanhood, during her first rough experiences in Australia. When Hamlyn comes to Baroona from the neighbouring station to spend Christmas with his old friends, he finds the same lady 'picking raisins in the character of a duchess.' Considered apart from the story, these Dickensian touches might seem merely humorous exaggeration, but to those who have traced the development of Mrs. Buckley's character, how happy and pregnant they are!