A bright, clear, transparent atmosphere--bright as that of the East, but vigorous and bracing as the air of the North; a broad and fair river, rolling through wide grassy plains; yonder, far in the distance, stretch away vast forests of evergreen, and gentle slopes break the line of the cloudless horizon; see the pastures, Arcadian with sheep in hundreds and thousands--Thyrsis and Menalcas would have had hard labour to count them, and small time, I fear, for singing songs about Daphne. But, alas! Daphnes are rare; no nymphs with garlands and crooks trip over those pastures. Turn your eyes to the right, nearer the river; just parted by a low fence from the thirty acres or so that are farmed for amusement or convenience, not for profit--_that_ comes from the sheep,--you catch a glimpse of a garden. Look not so scornfully at the primitive horticulture; such gardens are rare in the Bush. I doubt if the stately King of the Peak ever more rejoiced in the famous conservatory, through which you may drive in your carriage, than do the sons of the Bush in the herbs and blossoms which taste and breathe of the old fatherland. Go on, and behold the palace of the patriarchs--it is of wood, I grant you, but the house we build with our own hands is always a palace. Did you ever build one when you were a boy? And the lords of that palace are lords of the land, almost as far as you can see, and of those numberless flocks; and, better still, of a health which an antediluvian might have envied, and of nerves so seasoned with horse-breaking, cattle-driving, fighting with wild blacks--chases from them and after them, for life and for death--that if any passion vex the breast of those kings of the Bushland, fear at least is erased from the list. See, here and there through the landscape, rude huts like the masters'--wild spirits and fierce dwell within. But they are tamed into order by plenty and hope; by the hand open but firm, by the eye keen but just. Now, out from those woods, over those green rolling plains, harum-scarum, helter-skelter, long hair flying wild, and all bearded as a Turk or a pard, comes a rider you recognise. The rider dismounts, and another old acquaintance turns from a shepherd, with whom he has been conversing on matters that never plagued Thyrsis and Menalcas, whose sheep seem to have been innocent of foot-rot and scab, and accosts the horseman. PISISTRATUS.--My dear Guy, where on earth have you been? GUY (_producing a book from his pocket with great triumph_.)--There! Dr Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. I could not get the squatter to let me have _Kenilworth_, though I offered him three sheep for it. Dull old fellow, that Dr Johnson, I suspect; so much the better, the book will last all the longer. And here's a Sydney paper too, only two months old! (_Guy takes a short pipe or dodeen from his hat, in the band of which it had been stuck, fills and lights it._)