The hardships suggested by the beginnings of pastoral life amid the giant forests and intense loneliness of Australia are never allowed by Mrs. Praed to give a gloomy colour to her stories. It is one of their distinct merits that they present the humorous incongruities rather than the trials of pioneering, though the latter are by no means ignored. In the first three chapters of _The Romance of a Station_ some excellent humour is provided by the young bride's account of her home-coming to the rude mansion on her husbands mosquito-infested island station, and the ludicrous privations she encountered there. There is nothing of the kind more amusing in the whole of Australian fiction. The description of the household pets, and the vermin--including a lizard with an uncanny habit of 'unfastening its tail and making off on its stump when pursued'--rivals the famous verandah scene in _Geoffry Hamlyn_. An intimation in the preface that these experiences are a faithful record from the early life of the author herself sufficiently explains their graphic quality. Amusing also are the sketches of the aristocratic settlers in _Policy and Passion_ and _Outlaw and Lawmaker_ who try to apply the principles of æstheticism to the crude surroundings of their new-made homes in the backwoods--Dolph Bassett with his ornamental bridges and rockeries and his grand piano; Lord Horace Gage explaining with his maxim, 'If we can't be comfortable, let us at least be artistic,' a neglect to fill up the chinks in his slab hut. Queensland, the scene of Mrs. Praed's colonial experience and the 'Leichardt's Land' of her stories, differs notably from the rest of Australia only in climate; its social and political conditions are essentially the same in character as those in the rest of the country. The Englishman acquiring colonial experience, the squatter living in various stages of comfort or discomfort, the gentleman spendthrift from whom his family has parted with the affectionate injunction, 'God bless you, dear boy; let us never see your face again!' and the political parties which go in and out of office 'like buckets in a well' (to use the author's own expression), are, or have been, common features of every colony. Like several of her heroines, Mrs. Praed alternated life in the country with the gaieties of the capital.