the rule, and a man who will work and can work may be independent. Success in emigration depends much on the fashion of the thing, and this peculiar exodus,--to Western Australia namely,--is not at present fashionable. If in the course of the next two or three years two or three thousand new-comers were to land upon its shores and stay there, the thing would be done. And the two or three thousand would find plenty and happy homes. But solitary immigrants to the colony feel that they become mixed with the convict population. At the present moment great encouragement has been offered to new-comers,--to men who on arriving with a few pounds in their pockets will be willing to work with their own hands, but who will so work on their own lands. I do not know how far, in what I have written of the other colonies, I may have been able to make my English reader understand the nature and position of a “free-selecter.” I found it very difficult to understand myself, or to come to a conclusion whether he should be regarded as the normal British emigrant,--manly, industrious, independent, and courageous,--or a mere sheep-stealer. There was one other alternative, hardly more attractive than the last. He need not be a mere sheep-stealer, though probably he would do a little in that line; but might have free-selected with the first great object of making his presence so unbearable to the squatter on whose run he had perched himself, that the squatter would be obliged to buy him out. I certainly found that the manly, independent, and courageous free-selecter was not the free-selecter of whom the squatters talked to me in Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. The squatters did not carry me with them altogether; but it certainly is the case that free-selecters in these colonies often do steal sheep, and often do make themselves disagreeable. A man desirous of free-selecting,--say in Queensland and New South Wales, for the game has nearly been played out within the smaller and more valuable confines of Victoria,--has the whole world of the colony open to him, and very little to divert his course. He searches and inquires, and, actuated by good or bad motives, settles down on some bit of land which he thinks will grow corn, and where he is sure to be hated by the squatter whom he is invading. The colonial governments offer him every possible encouragement as to money,--land at 15_s._ an acre, land at 10_s._ an acre, and especially land with deferred payments,--with payments taking the shape of rent, perhaps 1_s._ 6_d._ or 1_s._ an acre per annum,--the land becoming his own at the end of a term of years, the yearly deferred payments having been taken as the price of it. But the governments have done little or nothing to assist the free-selecter in placing himself. A part of the charm of the thing in the eyes of the free-selecter has been the power of choosing his land. We can understand that there is a