In 1840 took place the only really organized attempt made by the blacks, round Melbourne, to rescue their country from the whites, an abortive enough attempt, beginning with a large corroboree about nine o’clock one evening, and an over-liberal allowance of rum. Two hundred black fellows were taken prisoners, and marched to Batman’s Hill, where there was a rough prison in the form of a stockade, where they were placed, with a strong patrol guard all round them; these were packed off next day in boats, and let loose in the dense scrub where St. Kilda and Prahan now stand, as it would have been no joke to support 200 prisoners in those days, when flour was selling at £80 the ton, and meat at 1s. 6d. the pound—the white population, which in 1836 consisted of 143 men and 35 women, having by that time risen to 10,291 persons, and constituting a great drain on the resources of the new colony. Soon, however, as the stock began to increase by leaps and bounds, meat became cheaper and living less difficult. The early settlers, however, used to have to work day and night to evolve some sort of order on their holdings, to live themselves, to clear their land, and at the same time to increase their flocks. An old lady told me once of the struggles she and her husband had in the early days, before they could get any proper bush shelter up on their run, when the ewes lambed too early in the season, while the nights were yet damp and cold. Her husband or the shepherd used to go round at night and collect armfuls of what they called “green-bobs”—freshly born lambs—and, after roughly cleansing them, insist on their being taken into bed, under the blankets, with herself and her children. Not—as she declared—that she ever raised any real objection; for she had the sense to know that all their lives hung on the existence of these poor little weaklings, and was only too proud to find, a few months later, when the flock came to be ear-marked, that it had more than doubled—partly, no doubt, as the result of her mothering. And yet no one has ever thought of canonizing women such as this! Can you picture it—the one-roomed house, with rough log walls, mud-plastered, and roofed with bark; the log fire on the open hearth, with the kettle slung above it, ready to warm milk for the young lambs, who lay on sacking before the fire, or shared the bed—where the mother and children lay together, heads and tails? The wild Australian wind outside—and what a wind, gathering in its gallop across miles of open country, and pushing and blustering in at the door, as the farmer thrust it open with his foot, his arms full of the tiny, trembling creatures, on whom his future depended. And all around the endless stretch of the unknown land. Something of the dangers and the loneliness being possible to gather from the matter-of-fact recital, by “A Pioneer,” of the finding of the body of a dead man who had been “bushed,” and died of thirst, to which he adds