still kept his seat. Of course he was now thinking of the man who had
just left him, whom he declared to himself to be an ignorant,
prejudiced, ill-constituted cur. "I believe in his heart he thinks
that I'm going to set fire to his run," he said, almost aloud. "And
because he grows wool he thinks himself above every body in the
colony. He occupies thousands of acres, and employs three or four
men. I till about two hundred, and maintain thirty families. But he
is such a pig that he can't understand all that; and he thinks that I
must be something low because I've bought with my own money a bit of
land which never belonged to him, and which he couldn't use." Such
was the nature of Giles Medlicot's soliloquy as he sat swinging his
legs, and still smoking his pipe, on the fence which divided his
sugar-cane from the other young man's run.

And Harry Heathcote uttered his soliloquy also. "I wouldn't swear
that he wouldn't do it himself, after all;" meaning that he almost
suspected that Medlicot himself would be an incendiary. To him, in
his way of thinking, a man who would take advantage of the law to buy
a bit of another man's land--or become a free-selector, as the term
goes--was a public enemy, and might be presumed capable of any
iniquity. It was all very well for the girls--meaning his wife and
sister-in-law--to tell him that Medlicot had the manners of a
gentleman and had come of decent people. Women were always soft
enough to be taken by soft hands, a good-looking face, and a decent
coat. This Medlicot went about dressed like a man in the towns,
exhibiting, as Harry thought, a contemptible, unmanly finery. Of what
use was it to tell him that Medlicot was a gentleman? What Harry knew
was that since Medlicot had come he had lost his sheep, that the
heads of three or four had been found buried on Medlicot's side of
his run, and that if he dismissed "a hand," Medlicot employed him--a