have gone to crop a hundred; would stick to
all his old country notions, lost his money,
took to drinking, and died. Squire Brand's
son came to me with a letter of introduction;
he had £5000, would not wait to learn any
thing, bought sheep the Sydney bank had a
mortgage on—a regular bad lot; then left
all to his overseer while he was dancing
at the governor's balls, playing the fashionable,
and made a complete failure; he went
home. And so you see, sir, the long and
short of it is, that for a man that can work
himself, this is a famous country, and likewise
money is to be made by carefully laying out
money in stock and waiting for the increase;
but as a general rule the money made by
gentlemen who have not much capital, and have
not been accustomed to soil their hands, is by
saving, living being cheap and neither shop
nor fashions in the Bush to tempt into spending
money idly. I could tell a score of stories
about settlers I've known, of all sorts, that
have done well, and that have made a regular
mull of it. Fair words and hard work will
carry you through; it's better to say come
than go, if you want work done in the Colony.
There was young C——. But what's that by
the fallen gum-tree; as I live there's a dingoe
at a sick ewe. Loo Boomer, Loo Bounder!
at him, good dogs!" The hounds caught
sight just as master Dingoe began to steal
across the plain, just like a great hill fox,
only, instead of carrying his brush gallantly
in the air, it was tucked miserably between
his legs; away went the hounds, at full speed;
we followed, leaping fallen trees and cracks,
the old man standing up in his stirrup, with
his hat in his hand, cheering the dogs at the
top of his voice; after a sharp burst, just as
master Dingoe was getting into a scrubby
thicket, Boomer turned him, and Bounder
pulled him down, not without receiving a
grab that nearly cut off his fore leg; in one
minute my knife laid the brute's throat open.
This ended our gossip for that day, as I
suspect Father Gabriel was rather ashamed that
old sporting instincts and hatred of the
Bushman's curse, the native dog, should have made
him forget his position as an elder at Gabriel's
Chapel.

THE MODERN ROBBERS OF THE
RHINE.

"How picturesque!" says Mrs. Smith, as
she stands in the centre of a group on board
a Rhine steamer, all of whom are looking up
at the ruined castles along the choice portion
of the banks near Pfaltz.

"How poetical!" says her daughter, Miss
Smith (just budding sixteen), who has been
reading the scraps of Byron and Southey
quoted in that ubiquitous red volume,
Murray's "Handbook."

"Crack wines grow hereabouts, I believe?"
says the son of twenty-two, who smokes, and
wishes to be able to talk about what he has
tasted, when he gets back to London and his
untravelled companions.

"Ah! ah!" says Smith, senior, to his friend
Jones, who forms one of the party of forty or
fifty English people daily seen—now steam-
travelling is so cheap—making a holiday on
the Rhine."Ah! ah! Sir, I flatter myself
we now-a-days know a great deal better how
to manage things than our forefathers did.
Talk of the wisdom of our ancestors, Sir! it's
all moonshine; bosh, Sir; why every one
of those tumble-down places that my wife
thinks so picturesque, and my daughter calls
so poetical, used to be full of thieves. People
who write novels, and that sort of trash, may
colour them up into heroes, Sir; but they were
nothing but thieves, footpads, highwaymen;
nests of roystering vagabonds, who got along
by robbing on the highway and plundering
the boats that came down this river. But
now-a-days we manage these things better.
Policemen and newspapers have stopped that
sort of thing. Depend upon it, our brave
ancestors, our wise ancestors, were nicely
beaten and robbed. They put up with it;
but we, Sir, know better." And so saying,
Smith drew up his head in a very significant
way.

Mr. Smith used to go every year to
Margate or to Brighton; but cheap trains and
cheap steamboats have lured him to the
Rhine, where he thanks his stars that he
lives in 1850—in these our later days, when
the robbers of that famous stream are
supposed to exist only in its legends. Simple
Mr. Smith!

The bold robber-barons of the older period,
and the famous Schinderhannes of more
modern date, are gone, it is true; but just
change an English sovereign on a Rhine
steamer, speak English at a Rhine hotel,
or stay but one day at Wiesbaden, Homburg,
or Baden-Baden, and it will soon be evident
enough that we have modern types of the
old originals—real, living, breathing, cunning,
unscrupulous robbers of the Rhine.

Smith and family had changed English gold
for Belgian silver and German copper, and
they had found some difficulty in solving the
knotty problem, "How to make it right?"
They had stopped, too, at Belgian and at Rhine
hotels, and had been still more puzzled than
ever by the mysterious reckonings sometimes
made in Bavarian florins of twenty pence and
sometimes in German florins of two shillings;
they had tried in vain to unravel the difficulty
of kreutzers and silber groschen, of thalers
and gulden, and, more than all, to make up
their minds what could be the values of the
numberless varieties of little dirty coins they
received in change for their handsome English
gold. Young Smith, with an eye to realities,
had discarded descriptions and inquiries, and
had determined upon a plan of his own for
the study of Continental numismatics. He
had changed a sovereign when he landed at
Ostend into the money of Belgium, asking