Hitherto the bushrangers of Australia had been, as the records prove, drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of those who "left their country for their country's good." Those who took the most prominent share in the next outbreak of the "epidemic" were generally native-born Australians. The _sequelæ_ of the old disease were not yet worked out. As I have already said, there were numbers of the "old hands" scattered about the bush, some of them with farms or small cattle or sheep stations of their own who lived fairly honest and useful lives, but even among these, whatever may have been their station in life, there was the old antagonism to "law and order," and their sympathies were all with those who waged war against society. Their children imbibed these ideas, and wherever there was a neighbourhood where this class had collected together, morality was at a low ebb. But besides these settlers there were numbers of nomads, men who worked as shepherds, bullock-drivers, splitters and fencers, shearers, and so on, and as long as the old hands formed a majority, or even a considerable minority of the bush-workers, it was the custom for men to work from shearing to shearing, or from harvest to harvest, and then "draw their cheques," make for the nearest public-house, and indulge in a wild spree, until they were informed by the landlord that the money which their cheques represented had been expended. There were some respectable inns in the back country where they got fair value for their money perhaps, but in too many of these "bush pubs," as they were called, the object of the landlord was to "lamb them down" in the shortest possible space of time. Perhaps when the character of the liquor sold in these places is taken into consideration, this method of cheating was not altogether an evil. It prevented the bushmen from swallowing such large quantities of the deleterious stuff as they might have done if they had received full value for their money. During the time when they were working their principal mode of amusing themselves was telling or listening to tales of the convict days. Some of these stories told by the old hands were of too revolting a character for repetition, but no doubt they were founded on fact. Nothing is too horrible or obscene to have been true of the convict times. The stories, however, which appear to have had the greatest influence over the minds of a certain class of Australian youth were those told of the bushrangers. In these stories there was of course much that was apocryphal, to put it mildly. Many of the exploits of the historic highwaymen of old were told as actual facts in the careers of some Australian bushrangers, with just sufficient variation to adapt them to local purposes. One of the ancient superstitions introduced into Australia by these story-tellers was that the highwaymen robbed the rich to give to the poor. I have no desire to raise any doubts as