good-looking chap, I believe, then; not so tall as I am by three inches,
but wonderfully strong and quick on his pins. They did say
as he could hammer any man in the district before he got old and stiff.
I never saw him `shape' but once, and then he rolled into a man
big enough to eat him, and polished him off in a way that showed me
-- though I was a bit of a boy then -- that he'd been at the game before.
He didn't ride so bad either, though he hadn't had much of it
where he came from; but he was afraid of nothing, and had a quiet way
with colts. He could make pretty good play in thick country,
and ride a roughish horse, too.

Well, our farm was on a good little flat, with a big mountain in front,
and a scrubby, rangy country at the back for miles. People often asked him
why he chose such a place. `It suits me,' he used to say, with a laugh,
and talk of something else. We could only raise about enough
corn and potatoes, in a general way, for ourselves from the flat;
but there were other chances and pickings which helped to make the pot boil,
and them we'd have been a deal better without.

First of all, though our cultivation paddock was small,
and the good land seemed squeezed in between the hills,
there was a narrow tract up the creek, and here it widened out
into a large well-grassed flat. This was where our cattle ran,
for, of course, we had a team of workers and a few milkers when we came.
No one ever took up a farm in those days without a dray and a team,
a year's rations, a few horses and milkers, pigs and fowls,
and a little furniture. They didn't collar a 40-acre selection,
as they do now -- spend all their money in getting the land
and squat down as bare as robins -- a man with his wife and children
all under a sheet of bark, nothing on their backs, and very little