prices will, perhaps, make him a rich man. But a fall again,--a speedy fall,--will bring him to the dust. It must be remembered that many of these men are dealing not with 20,000 sheep, but with more than five times that number; sometimes with more than ten times that number. When the large squatter really owns his flocks,--when he owes nothing to his merchant,--then even at the worst of times, with wool even at 8_d._, he does well; and in that condition, when wool rises he becomes a millionaire. Things, as I write now, are all rose-coloured with the squatters;--but it may well be that before these words are published there shall come a change. I went about two hundred miles north of Adelaide, so that I might get outside of Goyder’s rain-line, and see something of the country in which rain is so scarce. I cannot say that the country is attractive to a visitor. There is very little to gratify the eye, and almost nothing to satisfy the taste. The South Australian free-selecter makes for himself a plentiful and I hope a happy home;--but he does not surround himself with prettiness or even with neatness. The greatest part of our journey, however, was beyond the free-selecter’s limits, through a country that was brown, treeless, and absolutely uninteresting. I was frequently told that the run through which I was passing was excellently well adapted for sheep, and that the squatter who owned it was doing well. But I saw no grass and very few sheep. A stranger cannot but remark, throughout the pastoral districts of Australia, how seldom he sees sheep as he travels along. As in this country they do not carry above one sheep to ten acres, and as the animals would hardly be observed if each sheep maintained solitary possession of his own ten-acred domain, the result is not wonderful. But the traveller expects to see sheep and is disappointed. It may be that he will also expect emus and kangaroos, and he will generally be disappointed also in regard to them. Kangaroos I certainly have seen in great numbers, though by no means so often as I expected. An emu running wild I never did see. Tame emus round the houses in towns are very common, and of emus’ eggs there is a plethora. On this journey I saw hardly any living animals. We went with four horses, at about six miles an hour, through a brown ugly district, which was bounded, nearly the whole way, by low hills, and on which there is no sign that timber has ever grown there. We put up for the night at the station of a non-resident squatter, in seeking which we lost our way in the dark. For an hour or so I felt uneasy, thinking that we should have to “camp out,” without any preparation made for such a picnic;--but at last we were attracted by lights, and a party of us who had gone forth on foot reached the house. We met there a young man who was waiting for a companion, with whom he intended to make his way from the centre of Australia to the western coast.