I may here state that we got our stock-yard up in due time. It was seven feet high, and close enough--a rat could hardly get through. My share was chiefly the mortising of the huge posts, which afforded considerable scope for amateur execution, by reason of their size and thickness. If the yard is still standing--and nothing less than a stampede of elephants would suffice to level it--I could pick out several of "my posts" with unerring accuracy. "God be with those days," as the Irish idiom runs; they were happy and free. I should like to be drafting there again--if the clock could be put back. But life's time-keeper murmurs sadly with rhythmic pendulum, "Never--for ever: for ever--never!" All of a sudden war broke out. The reasons for this last resource of nations none could tell. The whites only wished to be let alone. They did not treat the black brother unkindly. Far from it. There were other philanthropists in the district besides myself, notably Mr. James Dawson, of Kangatong, then known as Cox's Heifer Station, distant about twenty miles to the east. Then, as now, my old friend and his amiable family were most anxious to ameliorate his condition. They fed and clothed the lubras and children. They even were sufficiently interested to make a patient study of the language, and to acquire a knowledge of tribal rites, ceremonies, and customs, which has lately been embodied in a valuable volume, praised even by the super-critical _Saturday Review_. It is a fact, not altogether without bearing on the historical analysis of pioneer squatting, that four of us--rude colonists, as most English writers persist in believing all Australian settlers to be--were, in greater or less degree, authors. Charles Macknight had a logically clear and trenchant way of putting things. As a political and social essayist he attracted much attention during the latter years of his life. His theories of stock-breeding, culled from contemporary journals, are still prized and acted upon by experienced pastoralists. Of the two brothers Aplin, the elder was a lover of scientific research, and, having a strong natural taste for geology, addressed himself to it with such perseverance that he became second only to Mr. Selwyn, the late Victorian Government geologist, a man of European reputation, and was himself enabled to fill the position of Government geologist for Northern Queensland. His brother Dyson was a poet of by no means ordinary calibre. Mr. Dawson's book is now before the public, and the present writer has more than one book or two to his credit, which the public have been good enough to read, and reviewers to praise.