Excerpt from The Outlaw Winter is quaintly beautiful upon the Southern Highlands of Australia. At dawn, in the snow-grass country, a drear landscape presents itself, White with heavy frost, yet, by noon, the whole scene is trans formed into a warm sunlit fairyland. Thus, for two or three hours, in the middle of most winter days, you have, up there, summer warmth, verdure, flowers and a crystal atmosphere. But all is transitory, for behind the hills chilling Winds lie ambushed, and once the sun touches the distant skyline, they hustle winter in again to reoccupy its old territory. When night comes, with myriad stars, the still landscape is again quickly robed in pure white vesture. It was during a Winter's residence in tents in the snow-grass country that I heard the gist of the following story from one of the Old hands, a grizzled veteran whose hair was white with the frosts and snows of many winters spent among those bleak and little known highlands, which stretch for a hundred miles along the north-eastern border of the State of Victoria. Our tents were pitched on a grassy terrace in a forest clearing overlooking a rushing ice-cold crystal stream. For many miles around was bush and forest, where the foot of man, or hoof of rider's horse, rarely trod. It was a land of many wonders, the haunt of old time bushrangers and lone-hand miners, and of birds and animals becoming every year more rare. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.