without any under-wood, between which the sheep could wander at their
will, and men could ride, with a sparse surface of coarse grass,
which after rain would be luxuriant, but in hot weather would be
scorched down to the ground. At such times--and those times were by
far the more common--a stranger would wonder where the sheep would
find their feed. Immediately round the house, or station, as it was
called, about one hundred acres had been cleared, or nearly cleared,
with a few trees left here and there for ornament or shade. Further
afield, but still round the home quarters, the trees had been
destroyed, the run of the sap having been stopped by "ringing" the
bark; but they still stood like troops of skeletons, and would stand,
very ugly to look at, till they fell, in the course of nature, by
reason of their own rottenness. There was a man always at work about
the place--Boscobel he was called--whose sole business was to destroy
the timber after this fashion, so that the air might get through to
the grasses, and that the soil might be relieved from the burden of
nurturing the forest trees.

For miles around the domain was divided into paddocks, as they were
there called; but these were so large that a stranger might wander in
one of them for a day and never discover that he was inclosed. There
were five or six paddocks on the Gangoil run, each of which comprised
over ten thousand acres, and as all the land was undulating, and as
the timber was around you every where, one paddock was exactly like
another. The scenery in itself was fine, for the trees were often
large, and here and there rocky knolls would crop up, and there were
broken crevices in the ground; but it was all alike. A stranger would
wonder that any one straying from the house should find his way back
to it. There were sundry bush houses here and there, and the so-
called road to the coast from the wide pastoral districts further