his wool sent down, which seemed, indeed,
swallowed up as nothing; while sixteen per
cent. interest, which was charged on all the
balance, and had been growing like a foul
monster from year to year, stood there
against him, in the books of Davy Macleod,
as a most formidable something.

In eighteen hundred and forty-three, you
would have said, had you looked on Tom
Scott's station, that he was a flourishing and
happy man. He had come thither with
something less than two hundred sheep, and
now they numbered eight thousand! Four
shepherds regularly watched as many flocks,
at four different huts, on the noble run, which
included hills and woods, emerald meadows
and beautiful uplands—an estate befitting a
prince. But if you looked on Tom himself,
the delusion vanished. That clean-built,
clever-looking fellow, with that fair and
good-souled countenance, had shrunk into an
old man. Not seven, but seventy years,
seemed to have settled on him. His face was
withered, his head was bald, his body stooped;
his bony and knotted fingers clasped a stout
staff, which enabled him to drag along a pair
of legs that stooped feebly at the knees, and
feet that seemed too large for the man, and
were shrouded in shoes slit and slashed, to
give ease to their rheumatic deformity. That
was the work of outward exposure, and the
inward drag of a monstrous oppression. Care,
and the fear that kills, had done their work,
as well, or rather worse, than the elements.
Tom Scott was actually perishing of past
adversity and present abundance. His flocks
had flourished and grown till they had
positively annihilated their own value.

That year, douce Davy Macleod sent him
word that the balance against him, on his
books was seven hundred pounds. That his
eight thousand sheep, at one shilling each,
reached to the value of four hundred pounds;
that the colony was ruined for ever, and that,
therefore, his hut and few other traps must
be thrown in, the station made over to the
said unfortunate Davy; and he must endeavour
to content himself with a bad bargain.

Behold poor Tom Scott suddenly reduced,
after all his years of enormous exertions and
incredible sufferings, from a squatter to a
mere overseer! In the midst of a flock of
eight thousand sheep, and on an estate of a
beauty and extent worthy of the best prince
that ever lived, a pauper and a cripple. Old
in comparative youth; destitute in the midst
of abundance; a ruined man in fortune,
frame, and mind. Poor Ben Brock, one of
his faithful companions, had long ago
wandered away in that strange kind of insanity
which attacks the lonely shepherd of the
lonely Australian woods. The waddie of the
native had destroyed the equilibrium of his
brain. Kitson still lived, hale, faithful, and
gloomy.

For three years poor Scott continued to
manage the station of the soi-disant unfortunate
David Macleod, who absorbed, in raking
together, from the wrecks of his neighbours'
fortunes, in the great commercial tempest that
had passed over the colony, good pennyworths,
had never come up to look at his bargain on
the Loddon. Besides, David had not
ventured to journey so far up into the wilderness.
He possessed all the prudence of his
nation; and there had been awful rumours
of the doings of the natives.

At first, as in all new countries, these
natives had been friendly, and inclined to
rejoice in the presence of the white fellow, in
his mutton, his brandy, and his blankets;
but deep and shameful outrages on the part
of numbers of low and sensual wretches, who,
in one character or other, spread themselves
over the country, produced their invariable
effects; and then came vengeance and
retaliation. The flocks were attacked and
massacred; the homes of the squatters were
fired, and their families destroyed. The
native knew nothing of the principle of
property. To him, the white man's kangaroo
(the sheep) was as much the free growth of
the woods as his own. The white man
preyed on his kangaroo, and he preyed on
the white man's. The white man injured
him, and he speared the white man. But the
squatters soon mustered their steeds, collected
in bands, and pursued the natives with the
deadly onslaught of fire-arms. The natives
repaid the murderers' visits in stealth, and
perpetrated deeds of horror on unprotected
women and children, in the absence of the
men. Thus, returning from one of these
commandoes, Tom Scott, who could still
mount black Peggy, and forget his pains in
his indignation at the cruelties of the blacks,
found one day his hut burnt to the ground,
and the bodies of his wife and children buried
in the ashes.

Like Logan, the American chief, no drop of
his blood now flowed in the veins of any living
thing, and giving a dreadful curse to the spot
of such year-long disappointments, and of such
a tragedy, he plunged into the woods followed
by the faithful Kitson, and disappeared.
That was the fortune of the old squatter:
the original pioneer of the wilderness, one of
the forerunners of the present great Australian
race of pastural magnates, one of the
founders of the present magnificent trade in
wool. But Tom Scott was no solitary victim:
he was only one of a thousand. The same
causes swept off the majority of the same class
of men. Some yielded sooner, and some
later, to the irresistible momentum of adverse
circumstances; but small was the remnant
which escaped altogether. Theirs was the
fate of the first heralds of human progress,
and the whole victim race of discoverers,
inventors, and projectors, the advanced guard
and the forlorn hope of the army of the
world's destiny. They laboured, and others
have entered into their labours, lay claim to
their honours, and put forward marvellous