He tells, too, of the annoyance that the “cocky” farmers even then were to the more settled colonists; how, on paying one pound an acre, or five shillings down and promising the rest, they could pick out the very best bits from the run; often ruining the squatter by taking the entire river frontage or water-holes, till the banks came forward, and in some measure checked the evil by advancing money to the squatters on the security of their leases, to a sufficient extent to enable them to buy the land. Mrs. Frank Madden—the Speaker’s wife—once told me a very amusing story of the biter being bit by overreaching himself. A “cocky” had picked out a very fine slice of an estate on the Murrumbidgee, at the river-edge, as he thought. The squatter and his wife had been as kind as possible to the man and his wife, and the kindness of the people in the country districts in Australia is something worth having. But the new-comers, a common, mean, little Glasgow man and his wife, had been bitterly jealous of the comfort and refinement of their neighbours’ home—in which, by-the-by, they had been staying while their own was building—and, once settled, they determined on equalling matters up. They had picked out and fenced a long narrow strip along the water-edge, and absolutely refused to let the squatter’s sheep be driven through it to drink, so that the poor beasts had to trail many miles before they could reach the water, many actually dying of thirst on the way, for, as the whole estate had originally run along the river-edge, no water-holes had been dug. In vain the squatter and his wife remonstrated and pleaded, and offered money; the mean little wretch’s envy and spite proved even greater than his rapacity, and he absolutely refused to concede an iota of his right. The squatter might well have been driven distracted, but for one thing. He knew that it was only a matter of time. Before the “cocky” had taken up the land there had been heavy rains, and the river had swollen, and flooded fully a mile of the land at either side, and along the edge of that flood the stranger had pegged out his claim. Gradually it began to seem to him that the water—day by day, inch by inch—was slipping away from his border. Then, as the whole truth dawned on him, he drove off post-haste to the nearest town to buy up the rest of the land between himself and what he had begun to suspect was the true river-bank. But he was too late; the squatter had been there before him and already completed the purchase; so that as the water sank back into the river-bed and the billabongs gradually dried up, the “cocky” found himself obliged to beg the same boon for himself as he had refused to his neighbour, which—as the squatter was a man, and not an archangel—was promptly and consistently refused, till there was no choice left for the interloper but to move on elsewhere.