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All day he had been walking, and now as he neared home his steps began to quicken with anticipation of rest. Over his shoulder projected a double-barrelled fowling-piece, from which was slung a bundle of such necessities as he had purchased in town that morning. It was the prosperous settler, the master of the frame house.
When this latch string was out, anybody could pull it, lift the latch, and come in. When it was drawn inside, nobody could come in without knocking. The floor was made of "puncheons," or planks split and hewn with an ax from the trunk of a tree, and laid with the round side down. The furniture the settler brought with him, or made on the spot. The household utensils were of the simplest kind.
Horrible as had been the announcement made by the dejected and discomfited settler to him who now, for the first time, learnt that his parent had fallen a victim to ruffian vindictiveness, too many years had elapsed since that event, to produce more than the ordinary emotion which might be supposed to be awakened by a knowledge rather of the manner than the fact of his death.
For instance, the settler may obtain seed, implements, and provisions on a promise to pay with interest after harvest, and thus he is enabled to break an extra quantity of virgin soil. If the crop is good all benefit alike dealer, maker of implements, and grower of wheat; while if the grain fails, instead of one man to bear it there are several to divide the loss.
A settler going to occupy a new station, removes, perhaps, beyond all other Europeans, taking with him his flocks, and his herds, and his men, and locates himself wherever he finds water, and a country adapted for his purposes.
Of all who came, the immigration agents thought the Lowland Scots and the Ulster Irishmen the best, and while the poorer class of settler lagged behind in the cities of Lower Canada, these others generally pushed on to find a hard earned living among the British settlers in the Upper Province. Some of them found their way to the United States.
For a settler the locality was anything but attractive.
Shortly after his arrival Donald took him to call on Mr Skinner, who welcomed him kindly, and led him to enter freely into conversation, that he might, as Donald suspected, ascertain his opinions. Donald, when speaking of his brother, had merely stated that he declined entering the ministry, and preferred coming out to join him as a settler.
But if reason acquiesces in the ultimate triumph of that busy, pushing energy which distinguishes the British settler, there is something very attractive to the imagination in the picture presented by the peaceful community of French habitans, living under the gentle and congenial control of their coûtumes de Paris, with their priests and their seigneurs, their frugal, industrious habits, their amiable dispositions and simple pleasures, and their almost exaggerated reverence for order and authority.
Across the mountain, north of Lake Omeo, not far from the mighty cleft in which the infant Murray spends his youth, were two huts, erected years before by some settler, and abandoned. They had been used by a gang of bushrangers, who had been attacked by the police, and dispersed.
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