shirts, broad belts filled with pistols, knives, and tomahawks, tremendous beards, and moustachios. They generally encamped and let their stock refresh about 100 miles from Adelaide, and then rode on to strike a bargain with their anxious customers. Before the journey became a matter of course, the arrival of a band of these brown, bearded, banditti-looking gentlemen created quite a sensation—something like the arrival of a party of successful buccaneers in a quiet seaport, with a cargo to sell, in old Dampier'a time.
In a few days the stock was sold; the overland garments were exchanged for the most picturesque and fashionable costume which the best Hindley-street tailor "from Bond-street" could supply; and then, with hair combed, brushed, oiled, and gracefully arranged after Raphael or Vandyke, the overlander proceeded to spend freely the money he had so hardly gained, and, as one of the lions of the place, to cast into the shade the pert, smooth, political economists and model colonists fresh from the Adelphi.
New arrivals from England, fortunate enough to be admitted to the delightful evening parties given by a lady of the " highest ton," the leader of the Adelaidean fashion, were astonished when, to fill up basso in an Italian piece, she called on a huge man with brown hands, brown face, and a flowing beard, magnificently attired, in whom they recognised the individual they had met the day before in a torn flannel jersey, with a short black pipe in his mouth.
The overlanders included every rank, from the emancipist to the first-class Oxford man. By the end of 1840 they had introduced nearly 50,000 sheep into the colony, and taught the wiser colonists the necessity of looking to pastoral pursuits for the safe investment of capital.
The trade of turning wild land worth a few shillings an acre into building sections, to be sold at from four or five pounds to one thousand pounds an acre, by the simple expedient of a few pegs and a coloured plan, was too good to be monopolised by South Australia. The government and private speculators followed the ingenious example in New South Wales and Port Phillip; while in England a dozen foolish or fraudulent schemes were started, under the patronage of names as respectable as those who patronised the South American mines of 1824, and the railway delusion of 1845, for colonising New Zealand, the Chatham Islands, New Caledonia, the Falkland Islands, and other countries having the inestimable advantage of being very distant and almost unknown; all to be divided into "town, suburban, and country lots," to be sold in England at a "sufficient price."
The competition of these new bubbles, home and colonial, diverted
