It was a bald enough narrative, rendered all the balder from the sing-song, drawling voice in which it was recounted; but I have never forgotten it. The long, uneventful years there in the clearing, more than twenty years from the time that the drab-faced woman arrived there as a fresh young bride; the fear and fascination of the tree gathering to an obsession during those long nine months before her child was born—with no nurse or doctor to stay her fears. Then that awful night, when she did not know rightly whether it was her or the tree that was to be torn up by the roots; the twenty years of busy days, when doubtless it seemed less terrible, and when her husband was too hard-worked to bother about it; and the twenty years and more of nights when it had seemed to tower over the tiny house like some wild beast; tugging at a too slender chain, which some night would—and must—give way, leaving it free to spring; the only rest possible being when the wind was blowing steadily in the other direction. And, above all, the man who had the strength and the knowledge to rid her once for ever of such torment sleeping heavily night after night by her side. Still, it is not only women who are tormented by such fears. Men have spoken of having been possessed by a horror of the loneliness of the Bush that has half driven them mad, while a Sister in one of the large Melbourne hospitals told me that they had far more cases of nervous breakdown among men than among women, particularly from the effects of isolation and loneliness; perhaps because, on the whole, a woman’s day is more filled up with a succession of trifling duties, so varied in themselves that she has but little time to brood. Curiously enough—though the number of male and female lunatics in Victoria is very nearly equal—the number of women who had committed suicide during the year before the latest statistics were compiled is less than a third of that of the men; while I honestly believe that any man who had been obsessed by fear during all those years, as was the woodcutter’s wife, and yet was unable to remove the cause of it, would have put an end to himself. About a couple of hours’ journey from Melbourne, and within a short drive from Haelesville, there is a Blacks’ Settlement, where there is gathered together a remnant of those people who, with their four-footed fellows, were once in undisputed possession of these mountains and forests—before the days of the axe and saw, the “stump-jump,” and the “mallee roller.”