It boots not to grieve. If we don't ride steeplechases, or try conclusions with the half-tamed steed, we still find a warm place in our hearts for a good hack. His Honour Sir William Stawell doesn't do much in the four-in-hand line nowadays, but I hear that he can walk up a mountain yet, and do his share of bush travelling in vacation. Life is but a battlefield at best, and we, the survivors of more than one decisive action, must bow to the merciful fate which has kept us so far unscathed, while in secret we make moan over those who lie beneath green turf or murmuring wave, desert sand or wild-wood tree; whose place in our hearts, spite of careless speech and smiling brow, may never be filled up. CHAPTER XX YERING When Mr. Lemuel Bolden and I rode to Yering from Heidelberg, about the year 1845, to pay a promised visit to Mr. William Ryrie, the Upper Yarra road and the place of our destination presented a different appearance. We forded the Yarra below Mr. D. C. M'Arthur's orchard, and crossing a heavily-timbered river-flat, with deep reed-fringed lagoons, debouched on the up-river road. This particular locality was well known to me, inasmuch as, being formerly in our pastoral possession, it had constituted a species of "chase" in my early sporting days. The only denizens of that period were an occasional pair of sawyers, generally "Derwenters," as the Tasmanian expirees were called, thither attracted by the unusual size and straightness of the timber which grew in the flats and "bends" of the winding Yarra. Owing to the sinuous shape of the lagoons on the south side of the river, coupled with the dense nature of the thickets, it was not an easy matter for a stranger to find his way through the maze. It naturally came to be, therefore, the happy hunting ground of my boyhood; many a grand day's sport and thrilling adventure did I have therein. The largest lagoon was fringed with a wide border of reeds, growing in deep water. It had in the centre a clear lakelet or mere, upon the lonely waters of which disported the mountain duck, with his black and other congeners, the greater and lesser grebe; while among the reeds waded or flew the heron (_Ardea australis_), the sultana water-hen, a red-billed variety of the coot, the bittern, the land-rail, and in the season an occasional flock of pied geese or black swans.