purposes.  She may be wayward in accepting the interferences of man, but all her vigorous impulses are expended in productiveness.  She cannot sulk or idle.  Kill, burn and destroy her primeval jungle, and she does not give way to sadness and despair, nor are any of her infinite forces abated.  Spontaneously she begins the work of restoration, and as if by magic the scar is covered with as rich and riotous a profusion of vegetation as ever.  Nature needs only to be restrained and schooled and her response is an abundance of various sorts of food for man.

The routine that cultivators of the soil have to obey is diverse, but the life of the dweller in the country in tropical Queensland can be asserted with perfect safety to be more comfortable than that of the average settler in any other part of Australia.  There are no phases of agricultural enterprise devoid of toil, save perhaps the growing of vanilla, the very poetry of the oldest of pursuits, in which one has to aid and abet in the loves and in the marriage of flowers.  But vanilla production is not one of the profitable branches of agriculture here yet.  We have to deal only with things that are at present practicable.

Whether the settler grows maize, or fruit or coffee, or as a collateral exercise of industry gets log timber, or raises pigs or poultry, the life has no great variations.  If he farms sugar-cane, being resident within the zone of influence of a mill, he belongs to a different order—­an order with which it is not intended to deal.  My purpose refers only to men who do not employ labour, who have to depend almost solely upon their own hard hands.  The conditions upon which the land is acquired demand personal residence during a period of five years and the erection of permanent improvements, such as fencing, thereon, and there are not many who take up a selection who are in the position to pay wages.  The selector must do the clearing, and the preparation of the soil for whatever crop in his experience or the experience of others is considered the most remunerative.  During this period his love for the particular piece of land by-and-by to become his own begins.  More realistically than anyone else he knows the quantity of his energy and enthusiasm, his very life, the land has absorbed.  It becomes part of himself even in the early days of toil, and though when in the fulness of time and the completion of conditions he may lease the land to Chinese cultivators, and become a resident landlord, he cannot leave the place even for the attraction of town life, for possibly the rent he receives does not make him independent quite.  At any rate he lives on the land.  The alien race does the hard work, and takes the greater portion of profit; but he enjoys the luxury of possession, and must make sacrifices accordingly.

I am fearful of entering upon a description of the cultivation of maize, or bananas, or citrus fruits, or pineapples, or mangoes, or coffee, or even sweet potatoes, because experience teaches me that others know of all the details in a far more practical sense.