they must fight with for the land if they
had it.

Of the seventeen thousand criminals,
burglars, highwaymen, assassins, et hoc genus
omne, who nourished on the island they had
left, many had found this a brave opportunity
to escape, and try a new life of adventure in
these boundless forests. And of others, who
came with the name of freemen, who could
trace all the secrets of their origin and
career?

Enough, the Tasmanian knew his fellow;
he was familiar with the marks and signs of
the various descriptions of his brother
islanders; Cain's mark is broad and
indestructible; the various shades of character
are shades, the various lines of life are lines,
and the practised eye reads them off as readily,
as rapidly, as infallibly as you could read the
title of a book in boldest type. Tom Scott
and his faithful followers, Ben Brock and
Joe Kitson, still moved on.

Once or twice they thought their opponents'
pretensions so unreasonable that they were
inclined to dispute them, and, looking at the
comparative apparent strength of the two
parties, they thought they could make good
their ground. Scott was a bold fellow, a
first-rate rider, a dead-shot, active, vigorous,
undaunted, and indefatigable. He wanted no
amount of spirit when he saw cause to exert
it, and his stalwart associates were the strong
and unflinching instruments of his will.
Strong as oxen, slow, but ponderously powerful,
they were like the very trees around
them in solid resistance, and where their
blows fell men fell under them. But in these
cases where they stood somewhat inclined for
battle, a few days brought up allies on the
other side. Once settled on the soil, there
appeared to spring up in the squatters a
principle of mutual defence, and men ready
for the fight seemed to start by magic out of
the ground and come forward to the rescue.
There were no justices of the peace, no crown
land commissioners here to settle disputed
claims, and, as Scott and Co. had come out to
seek a fresh chance of life and not of death,
they prudently went on.

They went on through scenes of strange
contrast. Over those plains, under the
interminable trees, amid those monotonous wastes,
where one score of miles of unbroken country
looked exactly like that before, and that
behind it, in those deep valleys at the foot of
far-stretching and wooded mountains, by
those deep and solemnly journeying rivers, by
those lesser streams enveloped in the dense
shade of the tea-tree and the acacia, amid the
barren, grey, and desolate region of granite,
or on the green and airy down where only
the graceful tresses of the shiock sighed in
the wind, Nature seemed to have established
the peace and the brooding solitude of ages.
but that reign of profound calm, varied, but
not disturbed, by the many voices of the birds,
the whirr of the cicada, and the audible
breathings of the wind, was now over, and
men, greedy, grasping, insatiate, and pugnacious,
were encountered in loud and angry
altercation. Fierce defiance, resolute intrusion,
calls for division, denunciations of
unreasonableness, and taunts, and scoffs, and
jeers, and blows, and vows of vengeance,
these were the scenes and sounds that stunned
the ancient heart of the wilderness. The
fairest place excited the foulest contention.
Men had not to seek out and sit down upon
their claims: they had to fight out their
possession of them, and maintain it by right of
conquest.

At length Tom Scott and his companions
reached a spot where Nature smiled on them,
and no man was present to frown. It was a
region of low hills, where the trees grew
pleasantly apart. The turf was fresh and
clear of underwood, or in the colonial phraseology,
scrub. Two or three little runnels
followed the course of the valleys, and
promised water. Here they set to work, and
built a small hut of stringy bark, and made a
pen of boughs for their flocks. They had
not lost more than a hundred sheep in their
advance up the country, in the intricacies of
the scrubby forest, by the wild dogs, and by
the natives or low squatters who had managed
to drive stragglers to their own folds. That
was no great matter: they had five hundred
sheep to begin the world with in a clean, open
country, and they were full of hope. Their
hut was of the humblest description. The
earth was its floor, and its only furniture
were their beds raised on a framework of
boughs on three sides of it, and consisting of
a mass of leafy twigs on which they lay
wrapped in their blankets. The luxury of
changing their clothes they never knew.
Their great refreshment was washing in the
little stream below, and there also washing
their extra shirt. Their fire was made in
front of this rude abode against the bole of a
huge tree that had long lost its head in some
tempest. Their cooking was of the simplest.
They had long ceased to possess flour or
sugar; their daily food consisted of the flesh
of opossums broiled on the embers, without
bread, and thankful they were still to retain
a little salt and a little tea. Their ammunition,
with all their economy, was exhausted,
except a few charges which they kept in case
of attack.

But the heart of the adventurer is not
made to sink at small difficulties; hope in a
brilliant future still bears him on; and Tom
Scott was adventurously sanguine. In every
struggle he was patient, in every annoyance
he was buoyant, and cheered on his fellows,
in the worst provocations he remained calm,
though the colour often flushed into his face,
and his hands longed to inflict chastisement
on vulgar insolence and selfishness. But he
looked onward, and resolved to achieve a
position of his own without contention. And
here he seemed to have it. Neighbours, as