but for alleged doing to death of aboriginals the license of these gentlemen had been withdrawn. It was subsequently granted to Mr. Chamberlain. The paternal Government of New South Wales, until late years, kept the whip-hand of the squatters by reason of its power to withhold the only title by which we held our lands, and occasionally, as in the case referred to, the power was exercised. This run was also assailed by the auctioneer's hammer, but being strictly non-agricultural land, it retained virtually its integrity as a grazing estate. "Tarrone" was the station which suffered most on that day of fiery wrath, long remembered as "Black Thursday." All did so more or less; but Mr. Chamberlain, who then lived there, lost fences and homestead, house and furniture, his household escaping barely with their lives. For weeks previously the summer weather had been hot and dry. There was, for a wonder, a cessation of the coast showers. The fated morning was abnormal—sultry and breezeless. The vaporous sky became lurid, darksome—awful. More than one terrified spectator believed that the Last Day had come, and not altogether without reason. The whole colony of Victoria was on fire at the same time, from the western coast to the eastern range of the Australian Alps. Farms and stations were burning at Port Fairy and Portland. The wife and children of a shepherd on the Upper Plenty rivulet, eastward of Melbourne, were burned to death, nearly three hundred miles in another direction. Far out to sea passengers viewed with wonder and alarm a dense black cloud overhanging the coast-line like a pall, such as may have shrouded buried Pompeii when the
