The first week of December! And seeing that we are in the realm of Australia, in the district of Riverina, where the season has been wet, which is \'dry country\' English for triumphantly prosperous, also that vegetable growth is at its acme, we regard our title as fully justified.

All plant-life is now profusely, riotously luxuriant. A drenching winter, following a wet autumn, preceded a late, showery spring; thus, and because of which, the pastures and cornfields, the orchards and gardens, are rich with verdure and promise to a degree unknown since the proverbial year of 1870.

Some few sultry days have we had, but the true Australian summer has not, so far, appeared in its lurid, wasting splendour. Hardly a ripening tinge is yet visible on the wide-waving prairies, the bespangled meadows, the shaded forest lawns. Wild flowers of every shape and hue—blue and scarlet, pink and orange, white and yellow, perfumed or scentless—glorify the landscape.

As we drive along, this balmy, breezy, sun-bright day, through the champaign, which lies anear and around an inland country town, let us (if haply it may tend to dispel some small portion of the ignorance of our British friends as to the \'bush of Australia\') put on record the \'scenes and sounds of a far clime\' in this season of the year.

The wheat crops, standing strong and level for leagues around, as high, generally, as the rail fence which protects them, have not as yet been assailed; but the reaper and binder has made many a foray into the hayfields. Here we notice one of the results of machinery. In the majority of instances the oats, though green of hue, are in sheaves and 475stooks. The time-honoured spring romance of fragrant haycocks is hastening to its doom, inasmuch as the greater portion of the oat-crop saved is intended to be reduced into chaff, as being more portable or saleable in that form. It is obviously better economy, by using the reaper and string-binder, to have it arranged mechanically in sheaves and hand-placed in stooks. It is then more convenient for loading, stacking, and the final operation of the chaff-cutter. Most of these sheaves are six feet and over in height. Heavy-headed, too, withal. We were informed that four tons of chaff to the acre is not an uncommon yield this year. The lambs, which are running with their mothers in the great enclosures, wire-fenced and ring-barked as to timber, through which the high road passes, are wonderfully well-grown and healthy-looking. The percentage, averaging from eighty to ninety, is exceptionally high, when it is considered that the expense of tendance is nominal. From five to seven thousand ewes—even more sometimes—are running in each paddock, unwatched and untended till marking-time, thence to the shearing, which is also the weaning period. This year the shepherd-kings have a right royal time of it, though not more than sufficient to compensate them for the losses and crosses of the last decade. Apropos of this woolly people, here approaches an aged shepherd. He is mounted, so that he has received his cheque. Solvent and resolved, he is journeying to the town, on pleasure bent, of a rational nature let us hope. The flies of mid-day are troublesome, but he has a net-veil round his weather-beaten face; so has the steady veteran steed. The collie, following dutifully, is unprotected from flies, but accoutred with a wire muzzle—not, as the young lady from the city supposed, to prevent his biting the sheep, but lest he should swallow the innocent-seeming morsel of meat by the wayside, intended for vagrom canines, and containing the deadly crystals of strychnine. Certes, with plenteousness the land runs o\'er, this gracious year of our Lord 1887. The cattle lounging about the roads—the roads, like the fields, knee-deep in thick green grass—with their shining coats and plump bodies, testify to the bounty of the season. The birds call and twitter. The skylark, faint reflex as he is of his English compeer, yet mounts skyward and sings his shorter lay rejoicingly. The wild-duck, gladsome and unharmed, swims in 476the meres which here and there divide the river meadows. The fat beeves in the paddock ruminate contemplatively, or recline around some patriarchal tree. All nature is joyous; the animated portion \'rich in spirits and health,\' the vegetable contingent spreading forth and burgeoning in unchecked development. As we pass Bungāwannāh, one of the large estates, formerly squattages, which alternate with the farms and smaller pastoral holdings, a fallow doe with her fawn starts up from the long grass, gazing at us with startled but mildly-timid eye. They are outliers from a herd of nearly a hundred, which have increased from a few head placed there by a former proprietor.

In this our Centennial year it must be conceded that Australia is a land of varied products. We pass orchards where the apples are reddening fast, where apricots are turning pink, and the green fig slowly filling its luscious sphere. We note the vivid green of the many-acred vineyards, now in long rows, giving an air of formal regularity to the cultivated portion of the foreground. Then we descry the dark green and gold of an orangery, hard by the river-bank—in this year a most profitable possession to the proprietor.

Amid this abundance we miss one figure sufficiently familiar to the traveller in other lands, or the European resident, viz. \'the poor man.\' He may be somewhere about, but we do not encounter him. He does not solicit alms, at any rate. His nearest counterpart is the swagman or pedestrian labourer. He is differentiated from the shearer and the \'rouseabout\' (the shearing-shed casual labourer), who travel, the former invariably, the latter occasionally, on horseback. But the humble dependant upon the aristocratic squatter or prosperous farmer is a well-fed, fairly well-dressed personage, who affords himself an unlimited allowance of tobacco. Say that he elects to journey afoot in an equestrian country, he needs pity or charity from no man.

When one thinks of England, with its three hundred souls to the square mile, one cannot but be thankful, in spite of the ignorant, insolent diatribes of the Ben Tillett agitator class, for the condition of the labouring classes in this favoured country. They are at a premium, and will be for years to come, while tens of thousands of acres of arable land are awaiting the hands which shall clear and plant them. 477Meanwhile, a small annual rent is obtained for the State by means of purely pastoral possession—a form of occupation destined to be surely, if slowly, superseded by agriculture, when demanded by the needs of a more developed epoch and a denser population.

This particular district has for many years been settled after a fashion which permits of moderate-sized holdings. For a lengthened period, therefore, have the exotic trees and shrubs, which even the humblest farms boast, grown and flourished. The tall, columnar poplars, the wavy, tremulous aspens, the umbrageous el............