self-sufficient also--that he wanted neither help nor sympathy. He
never cried out in his pain, being heartily ashamed even of the
appeal which he had made to Medlicot. He spoke aloud and laughed with
the men, and never acknowledged that his trials were almost too much
for him. But he was painfully conscious of his own weakness. He
sometimes felt, when alone in the bush, that he would fain get off
his horse, and lie upon the ground and weep till he slept. It was not
that he trusted no one. He suspected no one with a positive
suspicion, except Nokes, and Medlicot as the supporter of Nokes. But
he had no one with whom he could converse freely--none whom he had
not been accustomed to treat as the mere ministers of his will--
except his wife and his wife's sister; and now he was disjoined from
them by their sympathy with Medlicot! He had chosen to manage every
thing himself without contradiction and almost without counsel; but,
like other such imperious masters, he now found that when trouble
came the privilege of dictatorship brought with it an almost
unsupportable burden.

Old Bates was an excellent man, of whose fidelity the young squatter
was quite assured. No one understood foot-rot better than Old Bates,
or was less sparing of himself in curing it. He was a second mother
to all the lambs, and when shearing came watched with the eyes of
Argus to see that the sheep were not wounded by the shearers, or the
wool left on their backs. But he had no conversation, none of that
imagination which in such a time as this might have assisted in
devising safeguards, and but little enthusiasm. Shepherds, so called,
Harry kept none upon the run; and would have felt himself insulted
had any one suggested that he was so backward in his ways as to
employ men of that denomination. He had fenced his run, and dispensed
with shepherds and shepherding as old-fashioned and unprofitable. He