Job had seven thousand sheep, and three
thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of
oxen, and five hundred she-asses, and was a
marvel of wealth amongst the ovine and
bovine magnates of the east; but Job
himself would have cut but a sorry figure
amongst the wondrous men of the south.
Arabia Felix to Australia Felix?—a sandbank
to a paradise! Never since the world
began—under no régime of a most propitious
Providence—had mortal men been thus,
without any merit or demerit, forethought or
sagacity of their own, so blessed and pressed,
loaded and bedded, rained on in deluges, and
bolstered with bags of riches. Never again
till the world winds up its motley accounts of
bankruptcies and beggaries, monied plethora
and coffers of Croesus, destitution and surfeit,
will any nation continue to pitchfork such
piles of gold-sacks upon a knot of good honest
men, astounded at their own greatness.

But no state has its entire exemptions
from the shadow with the sun—the Bubbly
Jock with the grandeur. As Tom Scott, with
his one stern word—Justice! stood suddenly
before the startled David Macleod, so with
the in-rushing multitude which bought the
squatters' mutton, came a new cry for the
squatters' land. Those who had gold wanted
homes; those who had homes wanted farms.
The cry was—Land! land! and the squatters
recoiled in terror before it. What! those
noble estates, those woods, and mountains,
and charming valleys all their own? Those
lands yielding millions of sheep at sixpence
a-pound, and paddocks yielding hay at sixty
and one hundred and twenty pounds a-ton?
Give them up, or any part of them? Reader,
if government gave you the run of the Isle of
Thanet to-morrow, would you like to restore
it the next day, or next year, or next hundred
years? How much less, then, the whole
County of York? Believe me, you would
cling to it as to dear life. No man could
renounce, without a pang, and a bitter one,
so glorious a domain, so vast and fascinating
a power.

Therefore the squatters hurried into the
legislative council, and, in a serried phalanx
of anxiety and indignation, denounced the
unreasonable demands of multitudes clamorous
for land. There was raised a wild cry of
"the hated squatters, the injured squatters,
the squatters who had raised the flag of
enterprise, built the metropolis of Melbourne,
created the enormous wool-trade, suffered
unheard-of miseries in the bush, driven out
the natives, annihilated the dogs, and sold
mutton to tribes of famishing men." In
vain! From the inexorable Fawkner and
O'Shaughnassey came the ominous and
repeated echoes of—Tom Scott!

They stripped from the unfortunate squatters
the glorious coats of other men's merits,
in which they had so comfortably wrapped
themselves. True, there had not been many
actual Tom Scotts, the story had been more
commonplace, but not the less real. As
James Montgomery says of the Reformation—

Luther, like Phosphor, led the conquering day,
His meek forerunners waned and pass'd away.

So the early squatters, the real pioneers and
sufferers, had, for the most part, passed away,
and the present generation were, in a great
degree, the easy sons of a most wondrous
fortune, who reaped where other men had
sowed. Gentlemen amiable, and hospitable,
and accomplished, numbers of them, but still,
verily they have had their reward. When
they talk of compensation for the loss of
land, Fawkner asks, Whose land? The
nation's? For their improvements, O'Shaughnassey
reminds them, that their tenure forbids
them to make any, except on the homestead,
which they are allowed to purchase, at a
proportionate price. When they talk of the
injured squatters, the Argus points to their
enormous wealth, and to the injured public.
When they bemoan themselves as the poor
squatters, all the world laughs, and the jolly
rogues laugh in their own sleeves.

These are your new squatters, the
autocrats of boundless wilds, the most favoured
of all Fortune's sons. May they live a thousand
years! But may it be still following
their flocks in the van of settlement and
civilisation. With the sound of advancing
millions behind them, with the plough, the
hammer, the shuttle, and the railroad, a hum
of human activity and happiness, and before
them the pleasant wilderness, the calmly-
pasturing flock, the wild majestic herd, and
the neighing troop of unlimited steeds, till
the great continent of Australia shall be the
England of the south, traversed by steam,
surrounded by busy fleets—vast, populous,
mighty, and at peace.

A GERMAN TABLE D'HÔTE.

OUR table d'hôte at the Golden Plough is
not an imposing one. The Gasthaus itself is
not an important hostelry. It is on the
Rhine, but does not form part of the
outworks of any of the large and fashionable
Rhenish cities, which appear at first sight to
be composed entirely of hotels: neither is its
name painted in enormous characters all over
its exterior, in various languages, for the
behoof of tourists. In the Rhein Strasse of
our quiet town, at which the steamer stops
on its way up or down the beautiful river,
the weary traveller—who perhaps has been
tearing through Belgium viâ Ostend, anxious
to do that country, the Rhine, Switzerland,
and perhaps Italy, in the smallest possible
amount of time—will, as he steps from the
steamer, discover the modest portals of the
above inn, and perchance, if it be late, pass
the night there. I am not, however, about
to speak of its sleeping accommodation; but
of the mid-day meal, to which I subscribe
a small sum monthly; and of the circle,