patience, and when the drought breaks and good seasons come round again things will be better, but it’s no good of trying to stuff me like that.  I remember when the seasons were wet.  It was no good growing anything, because every one grew so much that there was no market, and the sheep died of foot-rot and you couldn’t give your butter away, and it is not much worse to have nothing to sell than not he able to sell a thing when you have it.  And the long and short of it is that I hate dairying like blue murder.  It’s as tame as a clucking hen.  Fancy a cove sitting down every morning and evening pulling at a cow’s tits fit to bust himself, and then turning an old separator, and washing it up in a dish of water like a blooming girl’s work.  And if you go to a picnic, just when the fun commences you have to nick off home and milk, and when you tog yourself on Sunday evening you have to undress again and lay into the milking, and then you have to change everything on you and have a bath, or your best girl would scent the cow-yard on you, and not have you within cooee of her.  We won’t know what rain is when we see it; but I suppose it will come in floods and finish the little left by the drought.  The grasshoppers have eaten all the fruit and even the bark off the trees, and the caterpillars made a croker of the few tomatoes we kept alive with the suds.  All the cockeys round here and dad are applying to the Government to have their rents suspended for a time.  We have not heard yet whether it will be granted, but if Gov. doesn’t like it, they’ll have to lump it, for none of us have a penny to bless ourselves with, let alone dub up for taxes.  I’ve written you a long letter, and if you growl about the spelling and grammar I won’t write to you any more, so there, and you take my tip and don’t write to mother on that flute any more, for she won’t take a bit of notice.

Yr loving brother,

Horace.

So!  Mother had no pity for me, and the more I pleaded with her the more determined she grew upon leaving me to suffer on, so I wrote to her no more.  However, I continued to correspond with grannie, and in one of her letters she told me that Harry Beecham. (that was in February) was still in Sydney settling his affairs; but when that was concluded he was going to Queensland.  He had put his case in the hands of squatters he had known in his palmy days, and the first thing that turned up in managing or overseeing he was to have; but for the present he had been offered the charge of 1600 head of bullocks from a station up near the Gulf of Carpentaria overland to Victoria.  Uncle Jay-Jay was not home yet:  he had extended his tour to Hong Kong, and grannie was afraid he was spending too much money, as in the face of the drought she had difficulty in making both ends meet, and feared she would be compelled to go on the banks.  She grieved that I was not becoming more reconciled to my place.  It was dull, no doubt, but it would do my reputation no harm, whereas, were I in a lively situation, there might be numerous temptations hard to resist.  Why did I not try to look at it in that way?