The parents of these weedy boys and girls—who seem, like Jonah’s gourd, to spring to an untimely maturity—were, maybe, conceived and born in the open air, and toiled for their daily bread under conditions of hardship and danger such as we can scarcely realize. A people who lived in vast open spaces, the immensity and loneliness of which very few European minds can grasp, and yet who were dowered with such an abundance of air and sunshine that it is little to be wondered at that their progeny wilt as they do in the towns. And, after all, there is one persistent and saving quality about them: they hark back again to the open; their hearts are never really at one with the cities. The young boys and girls flock there, and love it for a while; but as they mature they begin to long beyond words for the country. Every little shopman, every successful artisan and his wife, cherishes, with few exceptions, the one ambition—to have a tiny place in the country, to farm a little, keep poultry, grow fruit, and live in the open. People settled for life, as one might imagine, in comfortable homes in Melbourne will give up everything—in what can but seem the most surprising fashion to those who have not got that touch of the wild, or the patriarchal, in their blood—and start afresh. Sometimes they are well over fifty years of age before they can feel free to please themselves. But even then, confident in the knowledge that all the youngsters are out in the world doing well for themselves, they will fly to the country and begin all over again in a little two-roomed iron-roofed shanty, where the bush still remains to be stubbled up, growing as it does to the veranda step, and the water has to be carried half a mile, while the only possible chance visitor is an occasional opossum on the roof, or black snake in the bed. Yet for all this the Bush, which somewhere deep in their hearts has been calling to them all their lives, draws them at last irresistibly to its bosom; so that they will dare anything to be near it, to hear the laughing-kachass at their very door, and see the wild wattle-bloom in flower. To us who have grown used, through many generations, to the life of the cities, such behaviour seems incredibly mad. We forget how very, very new the whole country still is; how it was won and watered by sheer sweat, and how the people love it all the more because of the life and youth that were lost in its making—love it because it is so near to them, so completely in their blood that the glint of stars through the weather-boards of a bush shanty is a better sight to weary eyes than any wall-paper that even the genius of Morris has evolved.