no wonder that our artificial mode of existence should impel us, warm with youthful impulses, not only to visit in imagination all time-hallowed and song-hallowed old pastoral lands, but actually to emigrate half over the wide world, and to locate ourselves where such views of simple and natural occupation and wealth may be realised.

Alas, that the actual and the poetical are not one!

Whilst visiting the sheep stations within fifty or sixty miles of Melbourne, you meet with nothing to unrealise your golden visions of the good fortunes and felicity of the Australian pastoral people. Around you in many places extend almost immeasurably level plains; and, perhaps, at the base of gentle hills you find the elegant verandahed, grass-thatched, white-washed-wattle-and-dab abode of the pastoral settler. Near it, with one or more flocks in sight, valleys narrowly opening, winding on into calm hollows, invite you. There, under what is called by the natives the shiac-tree, profuse of waving tresses, that sigh sedgily in the wind, you may seat yourself, how cozily, with a book. Here English and Scotch gentlemen are more closely secluded in a land that is itself a retirement, and enjoy with a freshness, seldom known in society, the most beautiful of our famous national literature. For them Milton and Shakspeare, Byron and Burns, have sung; and Scott, Cooper, Mitford, or Austen, have for them woven the web of never-tiring fiction. Then how pleasant beneath such skies to read Vathek, the Epicurean, Kehama, and Thalaba.

At home the squatters breakfast early; then a few hours' ride takes them to dinner, in congenial society, at the Melbourne club-house, to friendly chat over their wine,* or to read letters, duly awaiting them there, from their home-English or Scotch relatives and friends. I have heard of one of these gentlemen shepherds, a magistrate of his district, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Portland Bay, who, so little is he of the austere justice, that he is frequently found playing on the guitar, surrounded by his flock. Nor does he solely make the bush musical for his own gratification; he declares that upon the sheep it has a tranquillising and delightful effect.

Surely there is nothing to ruffle the current of so much_ruralseeming happiness. But what is this in a recent Port-Phillip Patriot?

Champagne, nothing less certainly, since Sir George Gipps' vision of empty Champagne bottles, never seen by anybody else, strown for hundreds of miles round Melbourne.

SQUATTERS' MEETING.

"THE squatters of Australia Felix will meet on horseback, upon Batman's Hill, on the 1st of June, for the purpose of forming a Mutual Protection Society. From the Murray to the sea-beach, from the snowy mountains to the Glenelg, let no squatter be absent."

This body of squatters is in a great measure composed of British gentlemen; men of unsullied reputation; of old and honourable families; educated too in our best schools and colleges; not a few of them have grey hair; changed to grey whilst fighting year after year the battles of their country. Their actions do not forget their ancestry, nor yet their indomitable independence of spirit. In these respects they belong essentially to a people

"In whose halls is hung,

The armour of the invincible knights of old."

The hill on which these horsemen were to meet is at the west end, and overlooking Melbourne: the most conspicuously beautiful elevation for miles, with its graceful crown of shiac-trees. It was once feared it would be desecrated, but was not; for Sir George Gipps did not fulfil his promise, that he would give it to the town of Melbourne for a botanic garden. It ought to stand as it is for ever; and young shiac-trees should be planted upon it as the others decline, and more especially if it becomes sacred to liberty as well as to nature.

It is well known that the pastoral settlers are but too generally implicated in the almost universal insolvency of the colony. Delusion there has been, and there is distress. Most of them came out from their far-away lands, encouraged by the most fascinating representations;* urged in some instances also by the vast wealth realised by fortunate home-returned Australian adventurers-to do what? Not themselves to return thus enriched no; but to make investments at the most unfortunate periods; to give from twenty to thirty-five shillings per head for flocks, that now, per head, would not realise five. And year after year have they lingered in exile, struggling against adverse

* A table, in a Port Phillip pamphlet, reprinted in London, makes it appear an indisputable fact, that a person commencing sheep-keeping in Australia Felix with £600, must inevitably be, in ten years' time, worth £13,000 !!!

circumstances, to be year after year less wealthy than when they left first, strong in hope, their friends and country. Such was notoriously not a time or condition of things calling for additional taxation. It is true that Lord Stanley announced, sometime ago in the House of Commons, it to be his opinion that it would be well to try by a tax of one penny to threepence per head on sheep, to compel the squatters to purchase their locations. True wisdom did not suggest any such experiment. Were the squatters left at their ease a little more; were they to become a little more prosperous; were their locations, by a more liberal course of colonial policy, through domestic government, made more valuable to them, perhaps they might purchase them. Compelled they will never be. Compulsion would drive them from the land; they would transfer themselves, as they have publicly declared, and their flocks, to the more fortunate colony of South Australia; or abandon, as others do, the country altogether. There is no home-feeling in the land; such as do not quit Australia for Britain, Valparaiso, and the Cape of Good Hope, are awaiting anxiously some great political change in their favour; are seeking some sure foundation for public confidence and gradual prosperity,-never to be theirs in alliance with the middle district!

As an instance of expectations, disappointed by pastoral Australia, let this suffice:-A young gentleman, who emigrated from England to Van Diemen's Land in 1840, was advised by his friends in that island, before he located himself there, to try what could be done in Port Phillip, then so famous as a scene of pastoral adventure. Over he came, and brought with him twentyone Merino rams, which, with the expense of shipment, &c., cost nearly, if not all out, eighty pounds. He attended the government land sale, but bought nothing. Then agreeing to join a friend and shipmate at a squatting station, he went over to Van Diemen's Land a second time, to purchase a dray, horses, and other requisites for their intended station. The rams had proved troublesome enough, having to be dressed for a disease, the scab, which they are often liable to after being on shipboard; three of them were worried, and the rest were left in some butcher's care at Melbourne. He crossed Bass's Straits three times; and these, with the voyage from England, could not have cost him less than one hundred pounds. Men were hired, and driving the rams before them, our squatter and his cavalcade went up by slow marches to the river Goulbourn, seventy or eighty miles. The station to which they were bound proved, on a second visitation, destitute of water, and the squatting scheme

had to be abandoned. Before he reached once more Melbourne he had lost all his sheep but three, and of these he had cut the throats, and cast them away in the Bush, as more merciful than leaving them to be chased and torn to pieces by wild dogs. Another loss he had by the way; his best horse was drowned through attempting, whilst in the dray, to drink at a water hole. From the dray, into the same hole, another loss, his gun-case and a beautiful gun were precipitated. The horse cost eighty guineas. This miserable journey occupied six weeks; and he was never undressed during the time, but slept under the dray. Vexed and dispirited, he had resolved to dispose of his remaining purchases and embark for England; when, accidentally meeting one of his ship-friends, he was persuaded to join him at a sheep station just then to be disposed of. There, comfortably located, he thought his ill-fortuue at an end, when there was another misery; the cottage was robbed, a loss to him of thirty pounds, and afterwards it was burnt down. He must have sacrificed nearly four hundred pounds.

None of these misfortunes were dreamt of in setting forth; all was bright in the distance; the rainbow of hope was bent before him from hill to hill, in the pastoral paradise of Australia Felix.

This was enough: still he was more fortunate than hundreds of his fellow squatters; he did not purchase any shares in Sir George Gipps's land lottery; to have done which would have been utter ruin.

Five years have elapsed since he bade adieu to his mother and other relatives; and he has not regained the position, as it regards capital, in which he was placed when he first set foot on the Australian shore, that he might, by a ten years' voluntary exile, on returning to the land of his affections, look on the future with confidence.

Amongst other serious miseries collisions take place frequently betwixt the shepherds and natives; blood is shed; and a black stain rests on the lustre of the golden fleece.

Flocks are subject to the scab, and, if from New South Wales, to catarrh. Natives sometimes, at far-away stations, drive away the sheep in hundreds. Wages too are higher in unquiet districts; wool is sometimes in those districts also unwashed, is shorn and packed in the grease, and is nearly worthless. Then wages, generally, add no little to the expense in the growth of wool. And were it not for these things, through what a rude and almost impracticable country has the wool to be conveyed! Much, too, of its golden lustre fades before the agencies through

which it has to pass : merchants, and wool-sorters, and packers, in Australia; lighterage to the ship and freight to England; then merchant's commission in England; dock dues, and for shewing samples;" besides other expenses. These not only dim the lustre, but eat deeply into the fleece itself. The atmosphere grows dimmer; the wool, although admirably fine, is only wool; Jason here says good bye-and we look about us in vain for the golden fleece.

Still, after all, what a goodly sight it is to see, as I have done, drays after drays, with their teams of eight or ten bullocks, the loads of wool extraordinarily large and square, coming from all parts of the land, to be laid down in vast heaps on the wharf. Then it is scarcely safe to go by the steamer in the wool season, it so swings about with its enormous loads of wool.

This product of the colony, if not so individually golden in its nature and results as it has been represented to be, is an incalculably general blessing; its vast importance is known, and every day more justly appreciated; you feel at once that it is the basis, and must be for years yet, of colonial wealth; one of the broad and deep pillars on which the prosperity of Australia must rest,

HOME-RETURN-ANXIETY-ITS EFFECTS.

NATIONAL and local attachments exert evil influence on the progress and prosperity of colonies. The kind of people who emigrate generally, are not prepared by nature and habit to benefit colonization. Those who cherish strong local prejudices, and in whom the affections have a liberal empire, act with one aim, unremittingly and injuriously, to new countries. "Wealth" is the watchword, and "Return!" Adventurous, if not conscientious, they quit their native land as conquerors, to come back laden with the spoil; to leave nakedness-desolation behind them. Personally they are abroad, but mentally at home; living, moving, and having their existence amongst their friends and kindred. The roots are the affections, the stem avarice, the branches accumulation, aggrandisement. The rich man visits the region of speculation with temporary sunshine; he steps forth from the clouds of its morning

"Flattering the mountain-tops with sovereign eye."

All is brightness about him, every thing is tributary. But the gorgeous visitation is too good for continuance; the radiance is