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that year, all beautiful four and five year olds.

"We'll send sixty of them to the seleyards," he said, "and the rest will be kept in work on the station. There’s one of them," he added, "just about up to your weight, Jim, a black colt out of one of the Mt. Abundance mares. A hit small, but looks like a derby winner."

I was over sixteen then, and weighed about eight and a half stone.

"I've my eve on a bie chestnut for myself," he concluded as I hopped out of the buggy to open the horse-paddoek gate. And how different were my feelings as I flung it wide, to the heavy heart I had when opening it going away a few years before! If there’s a sadness at heart in doing things we have been in the habit of doing for the last time, I can vouch for the joy and lightness of heart there is in returning to do the old familiar things once again!

What a scene there was at the yards when we started to draft those young Exiles, and to tackle the first of them! A noble, magnificent mob they were. And what snorting and reckless rushing and crushing! Bunches of shapely chestnuts, with here and there a bay and a grey and a brawn mingled with them to relieve the sameness. Willie Williams, who had returned again to Runnibede, and Bustace and Warabah and Kearney were all there in their element "woh-ing" and "werping" and "shoo-ing" amidst clouds of dust, and scrambling and trampling of hoofs. Astride the yard-caps at every viewpoint, sat a contingent of the Curlew Lagoon blacks, dusky, grinning, mirth-making spectators. Combo,