The Italian rustic is yet musical, and the Roman citizen has not lost the genius of his race.  He is still unrivalled in sculpture and architecture, in painting, in poetry, and philosophy; and in every handicraft his fingers are as deft as ever.  But empire has slipped from his grasp, and empire once lost, like time, never returns.  Who can rebuild Ninevah or Babylon, put new life into the mummies of the Pharoahs, and recrown them; raise armies from the dust of the warriors of Sesostris, and send them forth once more to victory and slaughter?  Julian the Apostate tried to rebuild the Holy City and Temple of Israel, to make prophecy void—­apparently a small enterprise for a Roman Emperor—­but all his labours were vain.  Modern Julians have been trying to resuscitate old Rome, and to found for her a new empire, and have only made Italy another Ireland, with a starving people and a bankrupt government.  ’Nos patriae fines, nos dulcia linquimus arva’.  The Italians are emigrating year after year to avoid starvation in the Garden of Europe.  In every city of the great empire on which the sun never sets they wander through the streets, clad in faded garments of olive green—­the toga long since discarded and forgotten—­making sweet music from the harp and violin, their melancholy eyes wandering after the passing crowd, hoping for the pitiful penny that is so seldom given.

The two shepherds were employed on a station north of Lake Nyalong.  It is a country full of dead volcanoes, whose craters have been turned into salt lakes, and their rolling floods of lava have been stiffened into barriers of black rocks; where the ashes belched forth in fiery blasts from the deep furnaces of a burning world have covered the hills and plains with perennial fertility.

Baldy had been entrusted with a fattening flock, and Nosey had in his care a lambing flock.  From time to time the sheep were counted, and it was found that the fattening flock was decreasing in numbers.  The squatter wanted to know what had become of his missing sheep, but Baldy could give no account of them.  His suspicions, however, soon fell on Nosey.  The latter was his nearest neighbour, and although he had only the same wages—­viz., thirty pounds a year and rations—­ he seemed to be unaccountably prosperous, and was the owner of a wife and two horses.  He had been transported for larceny when he was only fifteen years of age, and at twenty-eight he was suspected of being still a thief.  Girls of the same age were sent from Great Britain to Botany Bay and Van Diemen’s Land for stealing one bit of finery, worth a shilling, and became the consorts of criminals of the deepest dye.  You may read their names in the Indents to this day, together with their height, age, complexion, birthplace, and other important particulars.

Baldy went over to Nosey’s hut one evening when the blue smoke was curling over the chimney, and the long shadows of the Wombat Hills were creeping over the Stoney Rises.  Julia was boiling the billy for tea, and her husband was chopping firewood outside.