Here dwell in scattered families or sparsely settled hamlets the various classes of Australian highlanders. Hardy, active, fearless are they as their Scottish prototypes;--originally recruited from the wandering stock-rider, or in later years the lonely gold-seeker prospecting the basaltic dykes and quartz-filled fissures of the foot-hills of the Australian Alps. Herds of half-tamed or wholly wild cattle and horses roam the profuse pastures, richly verdant during the short summer, though snow-covered and deathlike during the winter months. Here, late lingering and entrapped, they often perish, a company of skeletons within a circle formed by unavailing trampling of the surrounding snow only remaining in the spring to show the operation of nature's stern, irrevocable laws. Lonely and chiefly silent this mountain land--dividing the watersheds of three colonies--pierced by precipitous defiles--barred of access by rugged ranges, the only means of crossing the savage region being by dangerous tracks skirting terrific precipices, sometimes, as is the well-known King River pass, narrow, elevated, almost in mid air, with abysmal deeps on either side. The first dwellers in these dread solitudes were men inured to every peril of the Australian bush, to whom the faint trail of the wilderness was familiar as the field-path to the village rustic. Strayed cattle and ownerless horses accumulated in the virgin mountain pastures. These were at first driven to the nearest market by tracks only known to the outlaws of the waste, or their confederates the stock-riders in charge of rarely visited cattle-stations. Suddenly the trade developed, owing to the higher prices ruling since the gold eruption. An organised system of horse and cattle stealing arose. Outlying lots of fat cattle were 'cut out' or separated from the border herds of Monaro or Gippsland, and crossed into opposite colonies. Detection in such cases was well-nigh impossible. Much of the illegal work was done at night. If pursued, the tracks were purposely blinded by station cattle driven across the trail, while, from the rugged character of the country, strangers were at a special disadvantage. Horses averaging from fifty to a hundred pounds each, if capable of drawing a wash-dirt cart or transporting a digger's movables from one mining district to another, were profitable plunder.