benigner skies of Australia not only was there no necessary connection between shepherds and crippled limbs, but that shepherdesses had had a very real existence, and that, if now extinct in the colony, it was only of late that they had become so.
At our friend's house we met two very charming young ladies, whose father had purchased land many years before, in a part of the bush so remote from other colonists that, when he first went there, the natives used to settle their quarrels close to his threshold, and his wife, on such occasions, would have to run out and catch up her younger children who might be playing in front of the house, for fear of accidental hurt from the spears, one or two of which, missing the aboriginal at whom they were aimed, would sometimes alight on the thatched roof, and stick there as in a pincushion.
There was no sort of labour suited to female hands which these young ladies had not attempted in the effort to lighten their father's first struggle with the wilderness, and the elder of the two told me that at sixteen years of age she and a younger sister had been his shepherdesses for many months, their successful care of the flock needing no other eulogy than the mention of the fact that, when relieved from their charge by a hired shepherd, more sheep died of "poison" in one month than in the whole previous six.
To those who own the sheep the task of hindering them from browsing upon "poison" is, as I have said, not only troublesome but very anxious, and my informant told me that if she had had to follow the flock any longer, she "thought that she should have gone crazy." It is
