Mr. Amos allowed that it did.
"It's the most beautiful country, if you come to that," Captain Fox went on;—"that's what Miss Powle thinks of. I wish this was Melbourne we were coming to, instead of Sydney. I'd like to have her look at it."
"Better than this?" said Mr. Amos, for Eleanor was silent.
"A better colony, for beauty and riches," said the captain. "It's the most glorious country, sir, you ever saw! hundreds of square miles of it are as handsome as a duke's park; and good for something, which a duke's park ain't. There's a great tract of country up round Mt. Macedon—thirty or forty miles back into the land—its softly rolling ground without a stone on it, as nice as ever you saw; and spotted with the trees they call she-oaks—beautiful trees; and they don't grow in a wood, but just stand round in clumps and ones or twos here and there, like a picture; and then through the openings in the ground you can see miles off more of just the same, till it gets blue in the distance; and mountains beyond all. And when you put here and there a flock of thousands of sheep spotting the country with their white backs—I ain't poetical, sir, but I tell you! when I saw that country first, I thought maybe I was; but it's likely I was mistaken," said the captain laughing, "for the fit has never come back since. Miss Powle thinks there's as much poetry in the water as on the land."
Still Eleanor did not move to answer; and Mr. Amos, perhaps for her sake, went on.
"What is it that country is so good for? gold? or sheep?"
"Sheep, sir, sheep! the gold grows in another part. There's enough of that too; but I'd as lieve make my money some other way. Victoria is the country for wool-growing, sir. I've a brother there—Stephen Fox—he went with little more than nothing; and now he has a flock of sheep—well, I'm afraid to say how many; but I know he needs and uses a tract of twelve thousand acres of land for them."
"That is being a pretty large land-owner, as well as sheep-owner," Mr.
Amos said with a smile.
"O he don't own it. That wouldn't do, you know. The interest of the money would buy all the wool on his sheep's backs."
"How then?"