cadet.  Then came two navvies and a New Zealander, five Chinamen, a Frenchman, two Germans, Tin Pot, Jerry, and Wallaby—­three aboriginal blacks.  There are no invidious distinctions as to caste, colour, or nationality.  Every one is a man and a brother at sheep-washing.  Wage, one pound per week; wood, water, tents and food “A La discretion.”  Their accounts are simple:  so many weeks, so many pounds; store account, so much; hospital? well, five shillings; cheque, good-morning.

The wool-pressers, the fleece-rollers, the fleece-pickers, the yardsmen, the washers’ cooks, the hut cooks, the spare shepherds; all these and a few other supernumeraries inevitable at shearing-time, having been paid off, the snowstorm of cheques which has been fluttering all day comes to an end.  Mr Gordon and the remaining “sous-officiers” go to rest that night with much of the mental strain removed which has been telling on every waking moment for the last two months.

The long train of drays and wagons, with loads varying from twenty to forty-five bales, has been moving off in detachments since the commencement.  In a day or two the last of them will have rolled heavily away.  The 1400 bales, averaging three and a half hundredweight, are distributed, slow journeying, along the road, which they mark from afar, standing huge and columnar like guide tumuli, from Anabanco to the waters of the Murray.  Between the two points there is neither a hill nor a stone.  All is the vast monotonous sea of plain—­at this season a prairie-meadow exuberant with vegetation; in the late summer, or in the occasional and dreaded phenomenon of a dry winter, dusty, and herbless as a brickfield, for hundreds of miles.

Silence falls on the plains and waters of Anabanco for the next six months.  The woolshed, the washpen, and all the huts connected with them are lone and voiceless as caravanserais in a city of the plague.