"On one of these foraging excursions—starting at day-dawn on horseback, followed by her man Friday, an old _lag_, (prisoner,) in a light cart, to carry the provender—she went forth to look for the flour, milk, and mullet, for the breakfast of a party whose English appetites had been sharpened by travelling at the pace of the drays all day, and sleeping in the open air all night. "The welcome smoke of the expected station was found; the light cart, with the complements and empty sack despatched; when musing, at a foot-pace, perhaps on the future fortune of the half-dozen girls hired out the previous day, Mrs. C. came upon a small party which had also been encamping on the other side of the hills. "It consisted of two gawky lads, in docked smock frocks, woolly hats, rosy, sleepy countenances—fresh arrivals, living monuments of the care bestowed in developing the intelligence of the agricultural mind in England. They were hard at work on broiled mutton. A regular, hard-dried bushman had just driven up a pair of blood mares from their night's feed, and a white-headed, brisk kind of young old man, the master of the party, was sitting by the fire, trying to feed an infant with some sort of mess compounded with sugar. A dray, heavily laden, with a bullock-team ready harnessed, stood ready to start under the charge of a bullock-watchman. "The case was clear to a colonial eye; the white-headed man had been down to the port from his bush-farm to sell his stuff, and was returning with two blood mares purchased, and two emigrant lads hired; but what was the meaning of the baby? We see strange things in the bush, but a man-nurse is strange even there. "Although they had never met before, the white-headed man almost immediately recognised Mrs. C.,—for who did not know her, or of her, in the bush?—so was more communicative than he otherwise might have been; so he said—