"If you are all so anxious to hear the contents of letters from your uncle Wilfred, you may fancy how eagerly he and I used to watch for the arrivals of the mails at Sydney, and be sure that one or both of us were certain to be at the office in Kiandra on the day it reached there, and with what delight we read and re-read the letter which never failed to make its appearance monthly to one or other of us.
"Our winter fall of snow generally began about the 12th of May, and from that date till the month of October it was a matter of no small difficulty to get our letters at the place where we lived, a long nine miles from Kiandra of a very mountainous track.
"186- was an extraordinary season. May passed, no snow--June the same, only heavy, I may say, nearly constant showers of rain. 'A glorious year,' the diggers called it. 'Never such a season for work since the diggings broke out. Two months' work at a time when there is never any water. O, what a wash-up there will be in November!'
"Such was the substance of the conversation when any two of the residents met, varied, perhaps, by remarks as to whether old So-and-so, who had been twenty years in the district, would be right in saying there was to be nine feet of snow, or whether So-and-so was a better judge in saying we were to have none at all?
"I was then living by myself, Wilfred being away in Sydney, and was looking out for him every day, and hoping he might be back before the winter fairly set in, when it was scarcely possible to travel. As I said before, June had passed, and we were getting well into July, when I heard that our English mail would be in Kiandra on the following Wednesday. It was now Friday.
"We had got a fine week for work, raining gently all the time, which is what we diggers like, and no frost, which dries up the water, and makes us all idle, when on Sunday the weather completely changed, and very suddenly, too, as, indeed, it always did there. The wind, which had been from north or east, without any warning chopped right round to the south-west, and we had a strong frost. Next day was cloudy, but at night frost was harder than ever, and everything with liquid in it, even to the tea-pot in a room where there was a fire nearly all night, was full of solid ice.