Then there was "Scab"--word of dread and hatefulness, herald of ruin and loss, of endless torment to all concerned, of medicated dippings, dressings, deaths and destructions innumerable; the dreadful multiplication of station hands, who assisted with cheerful but perfunctory effort, patently disbelieving in "any species of cure," and looking on the whole affair--disease, dressing, and dipping--as a manifest dispensation of Providence for the sustentation of the "poor man." When all had been done that could be done by the proprietor in his desperate need, a single sheep straying among the straggling flocks, or reintroduced by a careless or malignant station hand (and the latter crime is alleged to have been more than once committed), was sufficient to undo a year's labour. Then the distracting, expensive task had to be commenced _de novo_. In those days, too, when fencing was not; when the shepherds comprised, perhaps, the very worst class of labour in the colonies, it may be guessed how hard and anxious a life was that of the western Victorian sheepowner. His neighbour, too, was but too often his natural enemy. A careless flockholder might supply a nucleus of contagion from which a whole district would suffer. This state of matters continued until the gold discoveries, when the shepherds having mostly withdrawn themselves, and a compulsory admixture of flocks taking place, scab spread throughout the length and breadth of Victoria. What its cost to the Government and to private persons was before it was finally stamped out would be difficult, very difficult, to find out--so large a sum that it would have paid all concerned ten times, a hundred times over, to have purchased all infected stock at, say, L5 per head, only to have cut the throats of and cremated the lot. "Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth" is a scriptural aphorism strictly applicable to acarian development. Many a well-to-do sheepholder was burnt out of house and home by the quick-spreading ovine leprosy which germinated at a friend's carelessly-ordered establishment. So that it came to pass that the "Gallants of Westland" were loath to exchange the free roving lives of cattle-tending caballeros for the restricted, "pokey," worrying round of duties to which the sheepholders seemed doomed. At one of our gatherings, at which--the majority being cattle-men--a toast involving a little indirect self-laudation was duly honoured, a pioneer squatter from a distance remarked gravely, "How little you fellows can realise what a life _we_ have been leading in our district the last year or two!" He had just finished "cleaning" his flocks, as had also his neighbours. He certainly looked, as the financial survivor of a drought expressed it once, as though he had "come through the Valley of the Shadow."