Returning home one evening I stopped my horse to look at our ploughman breaking up a fine piece of alluvial flat, which had recently been cleared and fenced in. He had ten pair of oxen and a heavy swing plough at work. There was a man to help him to drive, but his voice was as good as his hands, and it was a pleasure to see him, as he turned up a broad furrow of virgin soil, and halted his team, and lifted the big plough over the roots of the stumps that dotted the paddock, as if it had been a feather weight. Our ploughman, Jem Carden—Big Jem he was commonly called—was a specimen of English peasantry such as we don’t often see in Australia, tall, though a round shouldered stoop took off something from his height, large limbed but active, with a curly fair-haired bullet head, light-blue good-natured eyes, and hooked nose, large mouth full of good teeth, a solid chin, a colour which hard work and Australian sun could not extract, and an expression of respectful melancholy good nature that at once prepossessed me in his favour. He was then in the prime of life, a perfect master of every kind of rural work, ploughing, sowing, reaping, mowing, thatching, breaking-in, and driving bullocks and horses, and not less an adept in all Colonial pursuits, for he could do as much with a saw, an auger, an axe, and an adze as a European workman with a complete chest of tools. He was a very good fellow, too, always ready to help any one at a pinch; when the stockman broke his leg he walked twenty miles through the rain, a tropical rain in bucketfuls, although they had fought the day before about a dog of Jem’s, the stockman had been ill using; and yet Big Jem was a convict, or speaking colonially, ‘a prisoner.’ About a year after my arrival at the Station, Mr. Gumscrew having purchased a large herd of cattle a bargain from a person living some 200 miles from us, in the Mochi district, where all the grass was burned up, determined on sending me for them, as there was little doing at Springhill, and left me to choose any one I pleased to accompany me. I chose Carden. We got our horses into the paddock close to the hut overnight; the next morning, at sunrise, buckled a blanket, a couple of shirts, a bag of tea and sugar, a quart pot, and a pair of hobbles to my saddle, and started in high spirits. Now, living in the Bush, and especially while travelling, there is not the same distance between a master and well-behaved man, although a prisoner, as in towns. From the first I was interested in the ploughman, so I took the opportunity of this expedition to learn more about him.