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THIRTY YEARS IN AUSTRALIA

THIRTY YEARS IN
AUSTRALIA

BY

ADA CAMBRIDGE

AUTHOR OF "PATH AND GOAL" AND "THE DEVASTATORS"

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
1903

TO
MY TWO LIVING CHILDREN
AND THE DEAR MEMORY OF ONE
WHO WAS LIVING WHEN I WROTE IT
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

CONTENTS

THIRTY YEARS IN AUSTRALIA

CHAPTER I[ToC]

"ISLE OF BEAUTY, FARE THEE WELL!"

I knew nothing whatever of Australia when I rashly consented to marry a young man who had irrevocably bound himself to go and live there, and, moreover, to go within three months of the day on which the wild idea occurred to me. During the seven weeks or thereabouts of a bewildering engagement, the while I got together my modest trousseau, we hunted for information in local libraries, and from more or less instructed friends. The books were mostly old ones, the tales the same. Geoffrey Hamlyn was my sheet anchor, but did not seem to be supported by the scraps of prosaic history obtainable; we could not verify those charming homes and social customs. On the other hand, cannibal blacks and convict bushrangers appeared to be grim facts. As for the physical characteristics of the country, there were but the scentless flowers, the songless birds, the cherries with their stones outside (none of which, actually, is the rule, and I have found nothing to resemble the description of the latter), and the kangaroo that carries its family in a breast-pocket, which we felt able to take for granted. These things we did believe in, because all our authorities mentioned them. G. had a letter from a college friend who had preceded him to Australia, reporting the place not wild at all, but quite like home. He instanced an episcopal dinner-party that he had attended, and a church dignitary's "three sweetly pretty daughters," who had come in the evening, and with whom he had sung duets. But at time of writing he had got no further than Melbourne—knew no more than we of the mysterious Bush, which I thought of as a vast shrubbery, with occasional spears hurtling through it. When we had assimilated all the information available, our theory of the life before us was still shapeless. However, we were young and trusting, and prepared to take things as they came.

G. was an English curate for a few weeks, and an English rector for a few more. It was just enough to give us an everlasting regret that the conditions could not have remained permanent. Doubtless, if we had settled in an English parish, we should have bewailed our narrow lot, should have had everlasting regrets for missing the chance of breaking away into the wide world; but since we did exile ourselves, and could not help it, we have been homesick practically all the time—good as Australia has been to us. At any moment of these thirty odd years we would have made for our native land like homing pigeons, could we have found the means; it was only the lack of the necessary "sinews" that prevented us. Such a severe form of nostalgia is, however, uncommon here, and would be cured, I am told, by a twelve months' trip. Certainly, in nine cases out of ten, where I have known the remedy tried, it has seemed infallible. The home-goers come back perfectly satisfied to come back. It is when they stay at home for more than twelve months that they want to stay altogether.

G.'s brief curacy synchronised with our brief engagement. I was a district visitor in the parish which he served, and in which he was born. He became a rector on the wedding day. The charming rectory was placed at our disposal for the honeymoon by the real incumbent, our mutual friend, he and his good wife taking the opportunity to pay visits until we had done with it. We drove thither in the afternoon, and heard the bells ringing as we entered the village, and found the rectory-gate set wide and the white-satin-ribboned maids awaiting us on the doorstep of the beflowered house. We had two maids and a man servant; we had a brougham; we had a tiny hamlet of a parish in which (compared with what we have known of parishes) there was nothing to do—two services on Sunday, and a little business of coal and clothing clubs during the week—and where our parishioners dropped curtseys to us on the road, and felt honoured beyond measure when we went to see them. No wonder that, under the too totally opposite circumstances of clerical life as we have lived it here, we have looked back to that haven of dignified peace and ease with the wish—the stupid wish—that we could have had it always.

Nothing could have suited us better while we did have it. We were but four miles from our homes, and could see our people, who were to lose us in a month, while still ostensibly in bridal seclusion. A sister from whom I was separated for the whole of the thirty years, but who is with me now, to gossip, as we are always doing, of those old days, used to walk out before breakfast. We would have a quiet sewing morning, getting forward with the preparations still so far from completed; then we would perhaps drive her home in the afternoon, and get an hour with my mother, who surpassed all the mothers I ever knew in her unselfish passion for her children, and for whom my heart bleeds to this day when I think of what my going cost her—for I know more of mothers' sufferings in that way than I did then. She would be working her dear fingers to the bone over something to add to the array of zinc-lined boxes which were being fed by instalments in my deserted room, and I see now the flash of tearful joy that lit her fair, fine-featured face when I came with my poor crumb of comfort for her hungry heart. Intimate girl companions walked over to lunch or to play a game of croquet, or to make better use of the little time remaining to us; and we walked half-way back with them on the lonely road and through the leafy lanes. It was April and May, and, as far as I can remember, all fine weather—a last impression of English springtime that has lived with me like a beautiful portrait, an idealised portrait, of a dead and longed-for friend. "Oh to be in England now that April's there!" has been the yearly aspiration of my homesick soul, which takes no account of east winds and leaden skies, but only of chaffinches and apple boughs, just as Browning's did. My birds are the skylarks above those fen-meadows, and the flower I think of first my favourite lily-of-the-valley, of which I carried a great bunch, with the dew still on it, to the cathedral on my wedding-morning. And those golden May evenings, when we wandered back along the empty road, after setting our friends on their homeward way—I see them in some of Leader's pictures, which, if I were rich, I would buy to live with me, for that reason only. The friends could dine with us at the then usual hour, and still get home before the slow twilight passed into night—a thing impossible in this country. They were the last hours that we spent together—all young things then, but now grey and elderly, though I cannot realise it; three of them widows, most of them grandmothers, but never old to me, nor I to them. For more than thirty years we have not met, and there have been long gaps in our correspondence; but friendship has survived all, unchanged. They still write to ask when they are to see me, and I still write back to make provisional appointments which I can by no effort contrive to keep.

I was married on the 25th of April 1870. On the same date of the following month I left them all, never—as now seems only too probable—to return. We buoyed ourselves up through the anguish of the last farewells with a promise, made in all good faith, that I should come back in five years. My husband promised to bring me. "We must save up," we said to each other, "and have a holiday then." It was an easy thing to plan, but proved too difficult to carry out. After we became a family, going anywhere meant going as a family, and taking all the roots of its support and livelihood with it. Theoretically, I could have run home alone, if not in five years, in eight or ten—we could have afforded that—but practically it was as impossible as that we should all go, which we could never afford. So here we are still, and my poor mother, who lived to the last on the hope that we had given her, has long been in her grave. There is no trace of an English home to go back to now.

We went alone to London for two or three busy days. Friends of G.'s, whom I had never seen before, adopted us for the time, and fathers and mothers could not have done more for us. They furnished our cabin in the docks, and attended to our luggage—we saw neither until we went on board at Plymouth—and pressed help and comfort of every kind upon us. The ship's regulation against private liquors was set at naught by a great box that stood in our cabin throughout the voyage, placed there by the order of one of these friends. The box was a complete wine-cellar, containing, in addition to wines of the best and dozens of soda water, an assortment of choice cordials and liqueurs, the like of some of which we have not tasted since. There was a particular ginger-brandy—administered to me in the cold, wild weather of which we had so much—that we have tried to get at various times in vain. What we get is as moonlight unto sunlight compared with that ginger-brandy of the ship. I may say that the donor was a London wine merchant in extensive business. Not we only, but many a sick and shivering fellow-passenger had cause to bless his generous heart and hand.

Our last sight of this gentleman and his family was on Paddington platform, whither they had driven us after a festive farewell dinner, at which our healths were drunk and good fortune invoked upon our journey. We sat in the train, and they piled their parting presents on our laps. One of them brought me a fine pair of field-glasses to look at flying-fish and porpoises with—I use them now, daily, to watch the approach of family and visitors coming across Hobson's Bay; another rushed to the bookstall that had already supplied us with all its papers, bought a complete set of Dickens' novels, and tumbled them in armfuls upon the carriage seat beside us, just as the train was moving off. Australian hospitality cannot surpass that of those kind people, to whom I had been a perfect stranger two days before.

Most of the night, as we travelled down to Plymouth, I talked with paper and pencil to my beloved ones at home. For change of position, and to get better light, I knelt on the carriage seat for a time, spreading my sheet on the leather of the back. Our one fellow-traveller, a stout clergyman, dozing since we started in his distant corner, woke up to see what I was doing, and remonstrated with me. "Don't you think," said he, "that you had better try to sleep a little now, and write your letters in the morning?" In the fulness of my heart, I told him that I did not know how much of the morning might be left me, and the pressing reasons that there were for making the most of my time. Then he informed us that he too was to sail for Australia to-morrow, and by the same ship; and it immediately transpired that he was the person for whose sake that ship had been chosen for us. We had arranged a later start by one of Green's line, when a venerable archdeacon, visiting us at our rectory, urged us to change to one of Money Wigrams', because he knew of a Melbourne clergyman who was going in her. The clergyman had his wife with him, which our archdeacon thought would be so nice for me. With great difficulty we transferred ourselves, anticipating advantages that we did not get. The Melbourne clergyman—here revealed—was a good man, but an uncongenial companion at close quarters; his wife—she was his second, and had been the servant of his first—was more so, and a terrible stirrer-up of strife amongst the other lady passengers. She had embarked in London.

I remember the look of Devonshire in the early May dawn. My grandmother had died at Ottery St. Mary, and I loved the pleasant county and for years had wanted to explore it. But this was all I ever saw of its beautiful face—Ivy Bridge (was that the name?), one scene that has not faded, and the place where the railway ran close beside the sea. We reached Plymouth at a ghastly hour before anybody was up. At the hotel recommended to us by our latest friend we were shown into a room where the dirty glasses and tobacco ashes of the night before still defiled the air and the tablecloth. Here we sat until a bedroom was ready for us, when we went to bed—which seemed a most useless proceeding—until there was a fair chance of getting breakfast. A bath and a good meal pulled us together, and then we went out for our last walk on English ground. A charming walk it was, exploring that old town—I would give something to be able to repeat it—and a sweet conclusion to our home life. We returned to our hotel for a bite of lunch, hired an old man and a barrow to trundle our few things (the heavy baggage having been put on board in London) to the waterside, and after him a waterman and a boat, and got out to our ship lying in the Sound—the first we saw of her—at a little before noon, which was her advertised sailing hour. The newspapers called her a "fine powerful clipper ship of 1150 tons," and boasted that her saloon, which was "a very spacious apartment," could "accommodate forty passengers with ease." We were thirty-two and a baby, which seemed just to fill it comfortably. Such were the mammoth liners of those days. As we were rowed up to her gangway, bashful under the eyes of a number of keenly-interested spectators, whose heads hung over the bulwark, we thought her wonderful.

The wife of our latest acquaintance received us on deck, but all she wanted of us was information as to where her husband was and what he was doing. We could not tell her; we had not seen him since our arrival in the town. She could do nothing but watch for him, fuming; and we went to our quarters and our discoveries of the comforts there provided for us by the thoughtfulness of our London friends. We had one of the only two large cabins on the ship; the other was the captain's; the rudder clanked between us and him, behind the bulkhead at the end of our wide curved sofa, where the pillow, tucked into a bright rug, was a full-sized feather bed, a wedding present that at first we did not know what to do with, but which soon proved the most valuable of them all, as it still is, in the form of plenty of soft, fat cushions all over the house. I spent a large part of my days at sea reclining upon this downy mass, which began below my shoulder-blades and sloped upward nearly to the ceiling; as I lay I could look out of and down from the row of stern windows that made one side of my couch, and watch the following birds and fishes—sometimes a shark beguiled with a piece of pork—without lifting my head. It was an envied place in the tropics, when the air swept free to the main deck through open doors; but in rough weather—and it was nearly all rough weather—the swing of the sea-saw was killing. It used to fling me out of bed over a high bunk board until I was black and blue with my falls, and it kept me sea-sick the whole voyage.

We "settled up" our room according to our inexperienced notions, and at four o'clock we sat down to dinner in the "cuddy," still in port. Excellent dinners we had at that odd hour for dining, which was the regular hour, and really a very suitable one under the circumstances of sea life, breaking up the long day of which most of us were tired by the time the first dressing-bell rang at half-past three. The function practically occupied the afternoon, and, as I said, was carried out to the satisfaction of all save those who would never have been satisfied with anything. That the company could feed us so well, and lodge and carry us, for less than ten shillings a day argued good management, but I think they must have relied on the dead cargo for their profits. We were in Plymouth Sound on Sunday morning. On Sunday evening a party of passengers went ashore to attend church. "Mind," said the captain, "if a wind gets up while you are away, I shall not wait for you." But no wind stirred that night, nor all the next day, nor the next. Our clergyman friend (without his wife) darted to and fro, for he was confident that no ship would venture to leave a person of his importance behind, but we dared not risk it. We spent our time leaning over the poop-rail, gazing at the dear land, so near and yet so far, and thinking of our mourning relatives, with whom we might have been if we had known. When I was not doing that, I was writing to them. On Wednesday morning, the 1st of June—we had embarked on Saturday—the post-bag was closed for the pilot, and I looked my last on England through a grey sheet of rain.

CHAPTER II[ToC]

AUSTRALIA FELIX

The story of a sea-voyage thirty years ago, if it could properly be included in this chronicle, might interest the young reader, born since the era of the sailing ship, and to whom therefore the true romance of ocean travel is unknown. To me, who, if I could cross the world to-morrow, would choose the most civilised steamer I could afford, the memory of the Hampshire on her maiden trip brings regret for beauty vanishing from the world, as the Pink Terraces of New Zealand have vanished, or the big bird-thronged hedges of rural England in my nutting and blackberrying childhood. All such losses have been amply compensated for, no doubt—I am not of those who, having outlived them, insist that the old times were better than the new—but they are losses, notwithstanding. The fine old sailing sailor-men and their noble seamanship, and the almost sentient responsiveness of the "powerful clipper" of a thousand tons or so in their hands—the spectacle of her with all her tiers of sails full, leaning to the breeze, or fighting storms, bare-poled, by sheer brain sense and the inspiration of the divinest unconscious courage that human history can show—there is nothing in the splendid new régime to touch the heart and the imagination as these did. I forget the hard-bottomed and treacherous bunks, the soon-carpetless, soaked floors, the dancing table that shot fowls and legs of mutton into our laps out of dish and fiddle, the cold that one could find no shelter from except in bed, the terrible gales, the incurable sea-sickness, the petty feuds of the lady passengers; that is, I think of them as not worth thinking of, with the feeling that it was finer to rough it a bit as we did than to be pampered at every turn as sea-travellers are now, and in recognition of the fact that my sufferings brought me many pleasures that otherwise I should have been deprived of. The captain wanted to—only I would not let him—give me his own swinging cot. The head steward used to smuggle in mysterious parcels, which, when unwrapped, disclosed little dainties, specially prepared and hot from the cooking-stove, to tempt her who was said to be "the most sea-sick lady they had ever carried." The other ladies, when not immersed in their little social broils, from which my physical state and geographical position detached me, were kindness itself. One of them gave me that nearly extinct article, a hair net—it was the day of chignons, the manufacture of which was beyond me—and seldom have I received a more useful gift. With my hair tucked into this bag, dressing-gowned and shawled, I used to go up after nightfall to a couch on the skylight; there I would enjoy myself, feeling fairly well until I moved to go down again—amused with the little comedies going on around me, and enraptured with the picture of the winged vessel as I looked up through her labyrinth of rigging to the mastheads and the sky, and then down and around at the sea and the night through which she moved so majestically. Pictures of her sweeping through a dream-like world of moonlight and mystery are indelible in my mind. Sometimes the moonlight was so bright that we played chess and card games by it on the skylight and about the deck. At other times we lay becalmed, and I had my chance to dress myself and enjoy the evening dance or concert, or whatever was going on. But at the worst of times—even in the tremendous storms, when the ship lay poop-rail under, all but flat on her beam ends (drowning the fowls and pigs on that side), or plunged and wallowed under swamping cross-seas that pounded down through smashed skylights upon us tumbling about helplessly in the dark—even in these crises of known danger and physical misery there was something exhilarating and uplifting—a sense of finely-lived if not heroic life, that may come to the coddled steamer passenger when the machinery breaks down, but which I cannot associate with him and his "floating hotel" under any circumstances short of impending shipwreck.

We sighted Cape Otway on the 16th of August. Seventy-seven days! Yet the Melbourne newspapers of the 19th called it smart work, considering the sensational weather we had passed through. More than forty ships were reported overdue when we arrived—a curious thing to think of now, with the steamers crowding every port keeping time like clockwork. The pilots that bring them up the bay can rarely enjoy the popularity and prestige of their predecessors of the last generation. The sensation caused by the knowledge that ours was on board, with his month-and-a-half-old letters and newspapers, filled with information of the happenings in the world from which we had been totally cut off for nearly a quarter of a year, must have been delightful to him. We came out to breakfast to find him there, crowded about by the young men, the honoured guest of the company, one and all of whom hung upon his every word—particularly the gamblers who had had to wait till now for the name of the Derby winner. I remember that this item of news was considered the most important; next to it was the news that Dickens was dead.

Although we sighted land on the 16th, it was not until the 19th that we set foot upon it, so leisurely did we do things in those days. Contrary winds kept us hovering about the Heads for some hours. The pilot who came on board before breakfast saw us well into our afternoon dinner before he decided to tack through the Rip against them; we shortened the meal which it was our custom to make the most of in order to watch the manœuvre, which was very pretty. The captain was charmed with it, although there was one awful moment when the vessel was but her own length from one of the reefs—the noise of the wind had caused one of the yelled orders to be misunderstood—and it was amusing to note his joyous excitement as he marched about, rubbing his hands. "She's a yacht, sir," he bawled to the sympathetic pilot; "you can do anything with her." "You can that," the pilot answered, as he made his delicate zig-zags through that formidable gateway in the teeth of the wind—a feat in seamanship that the dullest landlubber could not but admire and marvel at.

And so we came to shelter and calm water at last. We anchored off Queenscliff and signalled for the doctor, who did not immediately put out to us, as he should have done. We had had such hopes of getting to a shore bed that night that most of us had stripped our cabins—the furniture of which had to be of our own providing—and packed everything up; now we had to unpack again, to get out bedding for another night and find a candle by which to see to take off the smart shore clothes in which we had sat all day, eyeing each other's costumes, which for the first time seemed to reveal us in our true characters. We were ungratefully disheartened by this trivial disappointment, and retired to rest all grumbling at the Providence which had brought us through so many perils unharmed.

Next morning the ship seethed with indignation because the doctor still made no sign. What happened to him afterwards I don't know, but the penalties he was threatened with for being off duty at the wrong time were heavy. He detained us so long that again our confident expectation of a shore bed was frustrated; for yet another night we had to camp in our dismantled cabin. The pair of tugs that dragged us from the Heads to Hobson's Bay, making their best pace, could not get us home until black night had fallen and it was considered too late to go up to the pier.

I suppose it was about nine o'clock when we dropped anchor. All we could see of the near city was a three-quarter ring of lights dividing dark water from dark sky—just what I see now every night when I come upstairs to bed, before I draw the blinds down. We watched them, fascinated, and—still more fascinating—the boats that presently found their way to us, bringing welcoming friends and relatives to those passengers who possessed them. We, strangers in a strange land, sat apart and watched these favoured ones—listened to their callings back and forth over the ship's side, beheld their embraces at the gangway, their excited interviews in the cuddy, their gay departures into the night and the unknown, which in nearly every case swallowed them for ever as far as we were concerned. Three only of the whole company have we set eyes on since—excepting the friend who became our brother—and one of these three renewed acquaintance with us but a year or two ago. Another I saw once across a hotel dinner-table. The third was the clergyman who had been so kindly foisted on us—or we on him—before we left England; and it was enough for us to see him afar off at such few diocesan functions as we afterwards attended together; we dropped closer relations as soon as there was room to drop them. However, he was a useful and respected member of his profession, and much valued by his own parish, from which death removed him many a year ago. Quite a deputation of church members came off to welcome him on that night of his return from his English holiday, and to tell him of the things his locum tenens had been doing in his absence. He was furious at learning that this person—at the present moment the head of the Church of England in this state—had had the presumption to replace an old organ—his old organ—with a new one. In the deputation were ladies with votive bouquets for his wife; the perfume of spring violets in the saloon deepened the sense of exile and solitude that crept upon us when their boat and the rest had vanished from view, leaving but the few friendless ones to the hospitality of the ship for a last night's lodging.

However, in the morning, we had our turn. It was the loveliest morning, a sample of the really matchless climate (which we had been informed was exactly like that of the palm-houses at Kew), clear as crystal, full of sunshine and freshness; and when we awoke amid strange noises, and looked out of our port-hole, we saw that not sea but wooden planks lay under it—Port Melbourne railway pier, exactly as it is now, only that its name was then Sandridge and its old piles thirty years stouter where salt water and barnacles gnawed them.

With what joy as well as confidence did we don our best clerical coat and our best purple petticoat and immaculate black gown (the skirt pulled up out of harm's way through a stout elastic waist-cord, over which it hung behind in a soft, unobtrusive bag, for street wear), and lay out our Peter Robinson jacket and bonnet, and gloves from the hermetically sealed bottle, upon the bare bunk! And the breakfast we then went to is a memory to gloat upon—the succulent steak, the fresh butter and cream, the shore-baked rolls, the piled fruits and salads; nothing ever surpassed it except the mid-day meal following, with its juicy sirloin and such spring vegetables as I had never seen. This also I battened on, with my splendidly prepared appetite, though G. did not. The bishop's representative—our first Australian friend, whose fine and kindly face is little changed in all these years, and which I never look upon without recalling that moment, my first and just impression of it and him—appeared in our cabin doorway early in the morning; and it was deemed expedient that G. should go with him to report himself at headquarters, and return for me when that business was done. So I spent some hours alone, watching the railway station at the head of the pier through my strong glasses. In the afternoon I too landed, and was driven to lodgings that had been secured for us in East Melbourne, where we at once dressed for dinner at the house of our newest friend, and for one of the most charming social evenings that I ever spent. The feature of it that I best remember was a vivid literary discussion based upon Lothair, which was the new book of the hour, and from which our host read excruciating extracts. How brightly every detail of those first hours in Australia stands out in the mind's records of the past—the refined little dinner (I could name every dish on the dainty table), the beautiful and adored invalid hostess, who died not long afterwards, and whom those who knew her still speak of as "too good for this world"; the refreshment of intellectual talk after the banalities of the ship; the warm kindness of everybody, even our landlady, who was really a lady, and like a mother to me; the comfort of the sweet and clean shore life—I shall never cease to glow at the recollection of these things. The beautiful weather enhanced the charm of all, and—still more—the fact that, although at first I staggered with the weakness left by such long sea-sickness, I not only recovered as soon as my foot touched land, but enjoyed the best health of my life for a full year afterwards.

The second day was a Saturday, and we were taken out to see the sights. No description that we had read or heard of, even from our fellow-passengers whose homes were there, had prepared us for the wonder that Melbourne was to us. As I remember our metropolis then, and see it now, I am not conscious of any striking general change, although, of course, the changes in detail are innumerable. It was a greater city for its age thirty years ago than it is to-day, great as it is to-day. I lately read in some English magazine the statement that tree-stumps—likewise, if I mistake not, kangaroos—were features of Collins Street "twenty-five years ago." I can answer for it that in 1870 it was excellently paved and macadamised, thronged with its waggonette-cabs, omnibuses, and private carriages—a perfectly good and proper street, except for its open drainage gutters. The nearest kangaroo hopped in the Zoological Gardens at Royal Park. In 1870, also—although the theatrical proceedings of the Kelly gang took place later—bushranging was virtually a thing of the past. So was the Bret Harte mining-camp. We are credited still, I believe, with those romantic institutions, and our local story-writers love to pander to the delusion of some folks that Australia is made up of them; I can only say—and I ought to know—that in Victoria, at any rate, they have not existed in my time. Had they existed in the other colonies, I must have heard of it. The last real bushranger came to his inevitable bad end shortly before we arrived. The cowardly Kellys, murderers, and brigands as they were, and costlier than all their predecessors to hunt down, always seemed to me but imitation bushrangers. Mining has been a sober pursuit, weighted with expensive machinery. Indeed, we have been quite steady and respectable, so far as I know. In the way of public rowdyism I can recall nothing worth mentioning—unless it be the great strike of 1890.

We went to see the Town Hall—the present one, lacking only its present portico; and the splendid Public Library, as it was until a few years ago, when a wing was added; and the Melbourne Hospital, as it stands to-day; and the University, housed as it is now, and beginning to gather its family of colleges about it. We were taken a-walking in the Fitzroy Gardens—saw the same fern gully, the same plaster statues, that still adorn it; and to the Botanical Gardens, already furnished with their lakes and swans, and rustic bridges, and all the rest of it. And how beautiful we thought it all! As I have said, it was springtime, and the weather glorious. There had been excessive rains, and were soon to be more—rains which caused 1870 to be marked in history as "the year of the great floods"—but the loveliness of the weather as we first knew it I shall never forget.

We finished the week in the suburban parish that included Pentridge, the great prison of the State—an awesome pile of dressed granite then as now. The incumbent was not well, and G. was sent to help him with his Sunday duty. The first early function was at the gaol, from which they brought back an exquisitely-designed programme of the music and order of service, which I still keep amongst my mementoes of those days. It was done by a prisoner, who supplied one, and always a different one, to the chaplain each Sunday.

At his house—where again we were surprised to find all the refinements we had supposed ourselves to have left in England, for he and his wife were exceptionally cultivated persons—we slept on the ground floor for the first time in our lives, all mixed up with drawing-room and garden, which felt very strange and public, and almost improper. Now I prefer the bungalow arrangement to any other; I like to feel the house all round me, close and cosy, and to be able to slip from my bed into the open air when I like, and not to be cut off from folks when I am ill. For more than twenty years I was accustomed to it, sleeping with open windows and unlocked doors, like any Bedouin in his tent, unmolested in the loneliest localities by night-prowling man or beast. I miss this now, when I live in town and have to climb stairs and isolate myself—or sleep with shut windows (which I never will) in a ground-floor fortress, made burglar-proof at every point.

Bishop and Mrs. Perry had a dinner-party for us on Monday. That day was otherwise given to our particular ship friend (of whom I shall say more presently); with him, a stranger in the land like ourselves, we had adventures and excursions "on our own," eluding the many kind folk who would have liked to play courier. We lunched plentifully at an excellent restaurant—I cannot identify it now, but it fixed our impression that we had indeed come to a land of milk and honey—and then rambled at large. The evening was very pleasant. Whether as host or guest, the first Bishop of Melbourne was always perfect, and we met some interesting people at his board. Others came in after dinner, amongst them two of the "sweetly pretty daughters," of whom we had heard in England, and who did not quite come up to our expectations. They are hoary-headed maiden ladies now—the youngest as white as the muslin of the frock she wore that night.

We did many things during the remainder of the week, which was full of business, pleasure, and hospitalities, very little of our time being spent in privacy. The shops were surprisingly well furnished and tempting, and we acted upon our supposition that we should find none to speak of in the Bush. We made careful little purchases from day to day. The very first of them, I think, was Professor Halford's snake-bite cure. We had an idea that, once out of the city, our lives would not be safe without it for a day. It was a hypodermic syringe and bottle of stuff, done up in a neat pocket-case. That case did cumber pockets for a time, but it was never opened, and eventually went astray and was no more seen—or missed. Yet snakes were quite common objects of the country then. I used to get weary of the monotony of sitting my horse and holding G.'s, while at every mile or so he stopped to kill one, during our Bush-rides in warm weather. English readers should know that in the Bush it has ever been a point of honour, by no means to be evaded, to kill every snake you see, if possible, no matter how difficult the job, nor how great your impatience to be after other jobs. That probably is why they are so infrequent now that any chance appearance of the creature is chronicled in the papers as news.

Another early purchase was a couple of large pine-apples, at threepence a-piece. We each ate one (surreptitiously, in a retired spot), and realised one of the ambitions of our lives—to get enough of that delicacy for once.

On Saturday the 24th, the eighth day from our arrival, we turned our backs upon all this wild dissipation and our faces towards stern duty. We left Melbourne for the Bush.

CHAPTER III[ToC]

THE BUSH

It was not quite bush, to start with, because we travelled by railway to our immediate destination, and that was a substantial township set amongst substantial farms and stations, intersected by made roads. But on the way we had samples of typical country, between one stopping-place and another. First, there were the ugly, stony plains, with their far-apart stone fences, formed by simply piling the brown boulders, bound together by their own weight only, into walls of the required height. This dreary country represented valuable estates, and remains of the same aspect and in the hands of the same families, I believe, still. Gradually these stone-strewn levels merged into greener and softer country, which grew the gum-trees we had heard so much of; and presently we came to closely-folded, densely-forested hills, the "Dividing Range"—a locality to be afterwards associated with many charming memories—where snow and cloud-mists enwrapped one in winter, and from which the distant panorama of the low-lying capital and the sea was lovely on a clear day. But it was like eating one's first olive, that first acquaintance with Bush scenery; we had not got the taste of it. I cannot remember that we admired anything. Rather, an impression remains—the only one that does remain—of a cheerless effect upon our minds. Perhaps the weather had changed.

There was no lack of cheer in the welcome awaiting us at our journey's end. Our clergyman-host met us on the railway platform with the face of a father greeting children home from school. There was a cab waiting, into which our traps were thrown, but we preferred to walk up to the parsonage through the streets of the clean little town, that we might study its unexpected points and see how enterprising and civilised the Bush could be. The parson's wife, aged twenty-one and four years married, received us on the doorstep of the cheerful house, and at once we were as perfectly at home in it as in our own. That was the way with all Australian houses, we found.

Sunday was certainly wet. The two parsons drove out to a Bush service in the afternoon, and we their wives had a bad quarter of an hour listening to the bell ringing for the evening one, while yet there was no sign of their return who had promised to be back for tea; the boggy roads and swollen water-courses so delayed them that it was on the stroke of church time ere they turned up. But next day the sun shone again, and we were taken for a drive over macadamised roads and shown things that corrected our opinion of Bush scenery. And that day, neighbouring clergymen, Sunday off their minds, came to make our acquaintance, all full of information and advice for us, all eager themselves for news from the "Old Country." Mrs C. gave them shakedowns on sofas and floor, to which they repaired at disgraceful hours of the night, because they could not stop talking. Where is that party now?—the merriest clerical party I was ever in. The host, our friend from that day, and godfather to one of our sons, was made a bishop, and died but a few months ago; his merry wife is a broken-hearted widow, crippled with neuritis. One of the guests, in after years still more intimately dear, became an archdeacon, and is now dead also. Two others are past work, resting in retirement until the end comes. We, the youngest of the group, bar one, are beginning to realise that the evening for us also is drawing on.

It was here, by the way, that we had news of the commencement of the war between France and Prussia. It came by the monthly mail-boat, which was our one channel of communication with the world. This budget gave texts for the discussions that are so memorable for their vivacity and charm. A great day was mail-day in those times. Looking back, I cannot remember that we fretted much over our four blank weeks, during which the most awful and personally serious things might happen without our knowing it; but I do remember that when we got the cable many of us grumbled because it took away the interest of mail-day, which became to us as a novel of which we know the ending before we begin to read it.

Holiday travels ended on the last day of August. That night we started for the up-country post to which G. had been appointed, and where he was expected to begin his duties on the following Sunday. August 31st was a Wednesday, and therefore ample time seemed to have been allowed for a journey from Melbourne which the daily coach accomplished in less than a couple of days (and which is now done by the Sydney express in four hours). However, "the year of the great flood" was already making its reputation. Bridges and culverts had been washed away, and the coach-road was reported impassable for ladies. Men could wade and swim, assist to push the vehicle and extricate it from bogs—they were expected to do so—but the authorities in Melbourne advised my husband that the conditions were too rough for me. Consequently we took a round-about route, whereby it was still reckoned that we should get to our destination before Sunday.

The C.'s saw us off during the afternoon—not back to town, but on by the railway which ended at the Murray. We were passed on from friend to friend until a group of kind men—whom I never saw before or since, but shall never forget—established us on board the little Murray streamer which was to be our home till Saturday. It was the mild spring night of that part of the colony, which embraces so many climates; and I can see now, in my mind's eye, the swirl of the brimming river that so soon after overflowed the town; the lights of the wharf and the boat, which spangled the dark sky and water with sparks from its wood-fed furnace; the generally romantic picturesqueness of a scene—one of a sensational series—which indelibly impressed itself upon me, an imaginative young person seeing the world for the first time.

I can only with an effort remember how uncomfortable that boat was; when I think of it at all, my mind fills with recollections of the deeply interesting experiences that came to me by its means. On that flooded river—so flooded that its bed, for the greater part of the way, was marked by no banks, but only its bordering trees—I saw blacks in native costume, the now rare kangaroo and emu in flocks; black swans, white ibises, grey cranes; the iguana running up a tree, the dear laughing jackass in his glory; all the notorious characteristics of the country, and many more undreamed of. Most distinctly do I remember, the unceasing chorus of the frogs, and the solemn-sounding echo of the steamer's puffs and pants through the solitary gum-forests, especially at night. But we soon had to leave off travelling at night, on account of the many foreign bodies that the flood was whirling down—the débris of houses and bridges, trees, stacks, all sorts of things. Indeed, even in daylight the navigation of the turbulent stream was a most risky business.

Consternation fell upon us when Saturday morning came, and we were informed that there was small chance of completing the passage that day. This meant being stranded in a strange township, at some possibly low public-house, on Sunday, when the coach of our last stage would not be running, and the breaking of an engagement that was considered of immense importance.

"What shall we do?" we asked ourselves, and the question was overheard by fellow-passengers, anxious, as everybody was, to help us.

"It's a pity you can't cut across," said one. "From here to W—— is no distance as the crow flies."

Compared with the bow-loop we were making, it was no distance—a few hours' drive, with normal roads and weather; and just then the steamer stopped to take in cargo from a lonely shed, near which we perceived a cart, a grazing horse, and a man, evidently belonging to each other, and on the right (Victorian) side of the stream.

"Would it be possible," one of us suggested, "to hire that cart and cut across?"

G. went to try, while I leaned over the boat's rail and anxiously watched the negotiations. They were successful, and we hurriedly collected our wraps and bags, our heavy luggage was put ashore, and the steamer passed on and vanished round the next bend of the river, which was all bends, leaving us on the bank—in the real Bush for the first time, and delighted with the situation. The man with the cart had guaranteed to get us home before nightfall.

We climbed over our boxes, which filled the body of the vehicle, settled ourselves upon them as comfortably as their angles permitted, and started merrily on our way. It was the morning of the day, of the season, of the Australian year, of our two lives; and I could never lose the memory of my sensations in that vernal hour. I can sniff now the delicious air, rain-washed to more than even its accustomed purity, the scents of gum and wattle and fresh-springing grass, the atmosphere of untainted Nature and the free wilds. I can see the vast flocks of screaming cockatoos and parrots of all colours that darted about our path—how wonderful and romantic I thought them! And what years it is since the wild parrot has shown himself to me in any number or variety! Like the once ubiquitous 'possum, he seems a vanishing race—at any rate, in this state. I suppose they still have sanctuary in the larger and less settled ones. I hope so.

However, we were not far on this promising journey when troubles began. The rain returned, and settled to a solid downpour, that increased to a deluge as the day wore on. The Bush track became softer and softer, stickier and stickier, the dreadful bogs of its deeper parts more and more difficult of negotiation by the poor overweighted, willing horse, whose strength, as we soon saw, was unequal to the task before him. He got on fairly well until after the noonday halt, when he was rubbed down and fed—when we also were fed by a poor selector's wife at whose hut (in the absence of hotels) we solicited food, and who gave us all she had, bread and cream, as much as we could eat, and then refused to take a penny for it. But starting again, with rain heavier than before, the poor beast's struggles to do his hopeless best became more than I could bear. When I had seen him scramble through three or four bogs that sucked him down like quicksands, and it seemed that he must burst his heart in the effort to get out of them, I stopped the cart and said I would walk. My weight might not be much, but such as it was he should be relieved of it. G. also walked, but as he was needed to help the driver I left him and was soon far ahead, intending to give this negative aid to the expedition as long as I could find my way.

I had been told to "follow the track," and I followed it for miles. The Bush was drowned in rain, so that I had to jump pools, and climb logs and branches, and get round swamps, in such a way that I felt it every minute more impossible to retrace my steps. I carried an umbrella, but I was wet to the skin. I was quite composed, however, except for my distress on account of the poor horse, whose master's voice and whip I could hear in the distance behind me from time to time; and I was not at all alarmed. I had prepared myself for the savageness of a savage country. I imagined that this was the sort of thing I should have to get accustomed to. Now and then I sat down to recover breath and to wring my sopping skirts, and to wait for the sound of the cart advancing, after the frequent silences that betokened bogs.

By the way, I hear nothing nowadays of those bogs which, in their various forms, made our winter drives so exciting—the "glue-pots," the "rotten grounds," the "spue-holes," worst of all, indicated by a little bubble-up of clayey mud that you could cover with a handkerchief, but which, if a horse stepped on it, would take his leg to the knee, or to any depth that it would go without breaking. "Made" roads and drainage-works seem to have done away with them this long time, for the other day I met a resident of the locality who did not know, until I told him, what a spue-hole was.

At last it was all silence. I waited for the cart, and it did not come. I called—there was no answer. At the end of an hour—it may have been two or three hours—the situation was the same. What had happened was that the horse was at last in a bog that he could not get out of, and that bog was miles away. I could not go back to see what had happened. I did not know where I was. I conjectured that I had turned off the track somewhere, and that my husband was travelling away from me; that I was lost in the Bush, where I might never be found again—where I should have to spend the night alone, at any rate, in the horrible solitude and darkness and the drenching rain.

Appropriately, in this extremity, and just as dusk was closing in, I heard a splashing and a crashing, and my knight appeared—one of those fine, burly, bearded squatter-men who were not only the backbone of their young country, but everything else that was sound and strong. He drew rein in amazement; I rose from my log and stood before him in the deepest confusion. Finally I explained my plight, and in two minutes all trouble was over. Bidding me stay where I was for a short time longer, he galloped away, and presently returned in a buggy loaded with rugs and wraps, and bore me off to his house somewhere near, telling me that he would return again for my husband, and had sent men to the rescue of the cart and horse, now so buried in the bog that not much more than his head and neck were visible.

Ah, those dear Bush-houses—so homely, so cosy, so hospitable, so picturesque—and now so rare! At least a dozen present themselves to my mind when I try to recall a perfect type, and this one amongst the first, although I never was in it after that night. They were always a nest of buildings that had grown one at a time, the house-father having been his own architect, with no design but to make his family comfortable, and to increase their comfort as his means allowed. And this must have been the golden prime of the squatter class in Victoria, for the free selector had but lately been let loose upon his lands, and the consequent ruin that he prognosticated had not visibly touched him. In the early stages of home-making, his home-life had been rough enough; but there was no roughness in it now, although there was plenty of work, and although the refinements about him were all in keeping with his hardy manliness, his simplicity, and sincerity of character. I used to be much struck by the contrast of his cherished "imported" furniture with its homely setting—the cheval glass and the mahogany wardrobe on the perhaps bare, dark-grey hardwood floor—incongruities of that sort, which somehow always seemed in taste. Never have I known greater luxury of toilet appointments than in some of those hut-like dwellings. In the humblest of them the bed stood always ready for the casual guest, a clean brush and comb on the dressing-table, and easy house-slippers under it. And then the paper-covered canvas walls used to belly out and in with the wind that puffed behind them; opossums used to get in under the roof and run over the canvas ceilings, which sagged under their weight, showing the impression of their little feet and of the round of their bodies where they sat down.

The country-houses become more and more Europeanised, year by year. The inward ordering matches the outward architecture, and, although Australian hospitality has survived the homes that were its birthplaces, one hesitates to present one's self as an uninvited guest at the door with the electric bell and the white-capped maid, who asks, "What name, sir?" when you inquire if the family are at home. There is an off-chance that you may be unwelcome, or, at any rate inopportune, whereas it was impossible to imagine such a thing in what we now lovingly call "the old days."

I came in, an utter stranger, out of the dark night and that wet and boggy wilderness, weary and without a dry stitch on me, to such a scene, such a welcome, as I could not forget in a dozen lifetimes. The door had been flung wide on the approach of the buggy, and I was lifted down into the light that poured from it, and passed straight into what appeared to be the living room of the family, possibly their only one. The glorious log fire of the country—the most beautiful piece of house-furniture in the world—blazed on the snowy white-washed hearth, filling every nook with warmth and comfort; and the young mistress, a new-made mother just up from her bed, in a smart loose garment that would now be called a tea-gown, came forward from her armchair to greet me as if I had been her sister, at the least. The table was spread for the dinner, to which the husband had been riding home when I encountered and delayed him; and what a feature of the charming picture it was! I remember the delicious boiled chicken and mutton curry that were presently set upon it, and how I enjoyed them. But first I was taken into an inner bedroom, to another glowing fire, around which were grouped a warm bath ready to step into, soft hot towels, sponge and soap, and a complete set of my hostess's best clothes, from a handsome black silk dress to shoes and stockings and a pocket-handkerchief. In these I dined, and, retiring early, as she had to do, found a smart nightgown, dressing-gown, and slippers toasting by my fire. And I sank to rest between fine linen sheets, and slept like a top until crowing cocks, within a few feet of me, proclaimed the break of day.

That day was Sunday, and G. had to preach at morning service some eight or nine miles away. So we were early seated at a good breakfast, and a light buggy and a pair of strong, fast horses were brought round, to take us in good time to our destination. Our host himself drove us, and incidentally taught us what Bush driving meant. I remember how we made new roads for ourselves on the spur of the moment to avoid bogs, and how gamely we battled through those that were unavoidable; how we flew over the treacherous green levels that the expert eye recognised as "rotten," where, had the horses been allowed to pause for a moment, they would have sunk and stuck; and how finally we dashed in style into the township and up to the parsonage-gate, where a venerable archdeacon was anxiously looking for the curate whom he had almost given up for lost. The church-bell had not yet begun to ring. In fact, the family were still at breakfast when we arrived.

CHAPTER IV[ToC]

THE FIRST HOME

We had to wait in lodgings for a few weeks, during which time we made acquaintance with the place and people.

Our lodgings were very comfortable. Sitting-room and bedroom, with a door between, our other door opening upon a big plot of virgin bush, alive with magpies, whose exquisite carolling in the early hours of the day is the thing that I remember best. There is no bird-song in the world so fresh and cheery. I seldom hear it now, but when I do I am back again, in imagination, at breakfast near that open door, drinking in the sweetness of the lovely September mornings which were the morning of my life. Never had I known such air and sunshine, or such health to enjoy them; and never do I feel so much an Australian as when I go to the Bush again and am welcomed by that fluty note. The spirit of happy youth is in it, and of those "good old times" which we old colonists have so many reasons to regret to-day. No song of English nightingale could strike deeper to my heart.

Speaking of breakfast reminds me of the luxury we lived in, in respect of food. Never was such a land of plenty as this was then, when no one dreamed of butter and beef at what is their market rate this day. We had young appetites, in fine order after the sea-voyage, and the more we ate the better was our landlady pleased. It hurt her as a hostess and housewife to have any dish neglected. And she simply stuffed us with good things; the meal prepared for us two might have served half-a-dozen, and given bilious attacks to all. One mistake only did she make in the arrangement of her bill of fare—she gave us too many quinces; apparently they were a superfluity in her garden, as they have since been in nearly all of ours. At first they were a novel and welcome delicacy, but when we had had them at every meal for weeks—in jam, jelly, tart, pudding, and pie, with cream, with custard, with bread and butter, and inlaid in sandwich cake—we were so thoroughly sickened of them that neither of us have wanted to look at a quince since. We have given the fruit away in sacksful to our neighbours, season after season, all these thirty years, and not cooked one; just lately—tempted by a brilliant carbuncle-hued jelly presented to me by a gifted little cook in my family—I have suddenly re-acquired a taste for it (which G. says will never happen to him), and now for the first time we have no quinces in the garden. That is to say, we have quinces—as also pears and almonds and other fruits—but the thieving little town-boys that live around us steal everything before it is fit to pluck. And I may here add, in regard to this sad fact, that when we came to our town-house we found a notice-board up in the orchard-paddock at the back, offering a reward of £5 for the apprehension of "trespassers upon these premises." While it remained up, there was always a policeman outside the fence. It was the joy of our own school-boys to bamboozle him by scaling the fence at night or in some surreptitious manner, pretending to be trespassers, and only when they had given him all the trouble and satisfaction of apprehending them, revealing their identity as sons of the house. But I could not bear this board—such an anomaly in the colony, as I had known it; I thought it horrible in any case, but on a clergyman's land quite scandalous; and I did not rest until it was taken down. Now I understand the meaning of it. No sooner was it gone than the policeman disappeared for ever. And the thieving boys took, and keep, possession of the place—at any rate, of the fruit; and of the flowers when they fancy them, as occasionally they do. The fowls are locked up in their house at night, and could defend themselves with audible squawks in day-time. The back gate is also locked. But those young villains make their own gates; they breach the defences by simply tearing down a few palings, and pass through the hole. We mend it up, or hire a man to mend it—more than the £5 of the reward must have gone in this way—and next night they break it open again, or make another in an easier place. Then quite calmly, and boldly they come in and out, sit in the rifled and broken tree or on the top of the fence to munch their spoil and "cheek" the poor maid who goes out to expostulate; and, the once zealous policeman steadily holding aloof (he has been appealed to for succour a dozen times in vain), we have no redress, except when we take the law into our own hands, which is an unprofitable proceeding. One of my ex-schoolboys administers justice occasionally, in a fashion to bring irate parents, and threats of summonses for assault about his ears, but he cannot be in two places at once, and his long absences from this place are calculated upon. As for Bob, the current house-dog, a fox-terrier of some intelligence, he behaves like a perfect idiot in this case. He will bark furiously at the boys when ordered to do so, but will neither initiate the chase nor follow it up with effective action. My idea is that he takes them for permanent members of the establishment. Or "boys will be boys," he thinks. Or he has seen me bribe them to come and ask for fruit, instead of stealing it. Anyway the result is that we have no fruit for ourselves. Year after year we see our trees blossom and the young crop set and swell, knowing we shall gather no harvest beyond a few hard, half-grown pears, which can be stewed soft. If I want to make quince jelly, as now I do, I must buy the quinces.

But in the country there were no thieves—no locks and bars in use—no need for the policeman. The only raiders of the orchards were the birds, who had the right to tax us.

That town of W——, where we spent the first year of our Australian life, was a typical country-town of the better class, and at that period very lively and prosperous. The railway afterwards drained it of much of its local importance, which has only revived again in quite recent times—since the fat lands about it have become studded with dairy-farms and butter and tobacco factories, industries and population which have contrived to hold their own here and there against the crushing discouragements to which both are subjected. Within the last few months it has been made the seat of a bishopric.

We found a highly-civilised society. The police magistrate at the head of it—always a P.M. was at the head in those days, in the country-towns big enough to have one, and not only by virtue of his official standing, but by every right of personal character and culture, as a rule—was a (to me) surprisingly well bred as well as kindly gentleman; and his wife was as nice as he. They gave bright evening-parties, at which he played the flute with a delicate skill, and he read largely and liked to talk of what he read; also he was an exemplary husband and father. In the group of pleasant households his was one of the most serenely pleasant, and so we felt it deeply when one morning, a few months after our arrival, the news of his sudden death was brought to us. He had risen that morning apparently in his usual health, and was in his dressing-room, making his toilet and chatting with his wife through the open door between them—she with a baby a week or so old—when she heard him fall; he did not answer her call to know what was the matter, and when she went to see she found him dead upon the floor. The catastrophe left her with six little ones to provide for, and next to nothing to do it with. The good husband and father, taken without warning in his prime (of unsuspected heart disease), had begun to make provision for the rainy day, but not completed the task. However, with pupils and boarders and what not, she made a splendid fight of it. The baby son did not long survive his father, but the five daughters grew up to testify to her good mothering and to reward her for it. They are now good mothers in their turn, sharing her society between them.

Next to the P.M. in the social scale came the doctors. There were two, English gentlemen both. One had emigrated for adventure and the goldfields, and spent good years seeking his fortune by short cuts, but had been glad at last to return to his profession for a living. He was courting a girl of exactly half his age when we came upon the scene, and their wedding was the first smart function that we attended. The other doctor and his wife were new arrivals from home, like ourselves; they had landed but a month or two before us; and they were our special and best-beloved companions and friends. Alas! he too—one of the most delightful of men—died suddenly and dreadfully, shortly before the death of the P.M., also leaving six mere babies and a wife to whom he was perfectly devoted, as she to him. She came to stay with me after the funeral, and the almost simultaneous birth of my first child—the latter event hastened, it was thought, by the shock and grief that I had shared with her. She was the most uncommon woman I ever met, as she was one of the most adorable. Superficially, both in face and figure, with the exception of her beautiful hands, she was quite plain, and absolutely without trace of conscious fascination or coquetry—the only instance I have known of a woman of that sort being irresistible to every man she came across. The story of her engagement, as told me by her husband, was exactly appropriate to them both. He was leaving England for a foreign appointment, with but a few days to spare, when a friend or relative—a high church dignitary—wrote to beg a farewell visit, mentioning by way of special inducement that a charming girl was staying in the house. The doctor responded by falling in love with her on sight, in such a desperate and successful manner that she married him within those few spare days and accompanied him to his foreign appointment. Perfect love and bliss had been their portion ever since; it was an ideal union. They had the habit of driving up to our door, just as we were finishing dinner, and calling us, one or both, to come out with them. The country was new to us all, and we spent many of the evenings of our first summer exploring it together. We made common cause as new chums, although they were such citizens of the world as to feel at home anywhere. Even the little ones in the nursery could put us to shame in respect of their cosmopolitan experience. It filled me with envy to hear them chattering their pretty baby French to their Swiss nurse. The mother married again some years afterwards. And not a man of her acquaintance but felt and said—as my own husband did—that the not-too-well-off bachelor who saddled himself with the almost penniless widow and her six children did by that act the best day's work for himself that he had ever done or was likely to do. He, we have been told (for it is many a year since she drifted out of our reach), followed the example of his predecessor in marital behaviour—waiting on her hand and foot, writing her letters and packing her trunks to save her trouble, and generally worshipping the ground she walked on. That also is considered matter of course. But I wonder how it is with her now? She is living still, I hear. And she is considerably older than I am.

Next to the doctors, the bankers—i.e., the officials of the four or five banks which have branches in every town of any importance. The managers are handsomely housed, and live in the best Bush-town style; they are really the backbone of country society, it being to the interest of their employers that they should be popular with their constituents, as well as to a man's own interest to make life pleasant in a place where he may be settled for many years. The smart young bank clerks are the natural complement of the young Bush-town ladies, whose brothers always go away; the clerks will be managers in time, and meanwhile are essential to the upkeep of tennis clubs and the success of balls and picnics. In W——, in 1870-1, the bank people were of very good quality—one household in particular, the heads of which belonged to two substantial colonial families of high repute (which they still enjoy); the lady here was a charming woman and hostess, famous in local circles for her pleasant parties, for which I frequently needed the evening dresses that I had supposed would be superfluous. Indeed, with one thing and another, I was gayer in that first year of "missionary" life than I had ever been in England.

There were bazaars and church teas and such things—quite as exciting as the private functions—at which our circle of friends and acquaintances was augmented by the leading tradesfolk, between whose class and that conventionally supposed to be above them the line of demarcation is always very thin, sometimes scarcely perceptible—and properly so, in these isolated communities. I keep in affectionate remembrance the wife of a stationer who was like a mother to me, the wife of a general storekeeper who often sat with me when I was lonely and needed looking after, and the wife of a chemist with whom I was in particular sympathy at the time. We sewed baby-clothes together, she and I, and the wearers of them arrived in this world within an hour of each other. My beloved first-born died at five years old; his birth-mate at about twelve, I think. The gate by which he went seemed awful enough, but the passing of the poor little girl was too dreadful for words. She was coming home from a visit one day in the charge of a friend: the creeks were flooded that they had to cross, and one of them swept away horse and buggy, and drowned the driver. He hooked his little companion to a branch or snag sticking out of the swirl, before leaving her, as it was supposed, to swim ashore for help; there she clung through the whole of the long night, from early evening to daylight next morning, and was then found—warm, the breath just gone, not more, the doctor said, than a few minutes too late. And there were people living about the spot who testified that they had heard her crying in the night, without knowing what the sound meant!

And as for the cottage people—the marked thing about them was that they were not "the poor." There was none with whom a clergyman or his wife could safely take the liberties so customary at home. When a sister-in-law, once my fellow district-visitor, came out to be our guest for awhile, and started to make herself useful by teaching our parishioners their duty on the traditional lines and by bestowing doles of old clothes and kitchen scraps upon them, she got some tremendous surprises—"insolence" that simply staggered her. No, what they loved was to bring us little presents of new-laid eggs or poultry or what not, and to charge us less than they charged the laity for what they did for us in the way of business. The whole attitude of parishes and lay people in this country towards their spiritual pastors is benevolent to a degree. The parental spirit, tolerant, indulgent, making allowances (in more senses than one), is here on their side. The schools teach their children for half fees; the doctors doctor them for no fees at all; the very shipping companies—some, at least—make special fares for them. And so long as they accept this rôle of the lame dog that needs helping over the stile, so long will there be that tinge of contempt and patronage which embitters these favours to some of us who receive them.

Coming straight from our dignified Cathedral life, with its high and mighty Church-and-State traditions, into this democratic Salem-Chapel-like atmosphere, we still found nothing to disagree with us—only one circumstance excepted, for which neither the country nor the parish was to blame. Pure loving-kindness and open-armed hospitality to strangers surrounded us on all sides but one, and the unexpected welcome went to our young hearts. The single disappointment came from a quarter whence it was least expected. But, as to that, bygones may be bygones at this time of day. I shall not tell tales.

The absorbing joy, to start with, was the making of the first home. The town was so well filled that it was a difficult matter to find a house; we took the first possible one that offered, after waiting several weeks for it.

A large railway station now stands, and for many years has stood, upon the site. Walking about the Bush in the vicinity, we used to find here and there in the ground small pegs which we were informed were the surveyors' marks for the line—the line which now runs all the way to Sydney, and thence to Brisbane, but which was then but beginning to be made.

The spot was quite on the outskirts of the township, and we passed from our premises straight into the Bush behind the house, which faced some open waste ground, analogous to an English common of unusual size, which divided us from streets and church. House, do I call it! Three tiny rooms, opening one into the other, the first into the outer air, a lean-to at the back, and a detached kitchen—that was all. We paid one pound a week for it, which certainly was an excessive rent for such a place. Excessive also were the wages we gave our first servant, an amiable but inefficient Irish girl—fifteen shillings a week. We were told that these were the ruling rates; if they were, they did not long remain so.

The landlord papered the front rooms for us—for those to be occupied in day-time we chose from a local store an appropriate pattern of brown fleur-de-lys on a green ground; we papered the back ourselves. I made the drugget and matting floor-coverings, the chintz curtains, the dimity bed-furniture—made everything, in fact, that was sewable, for, fortunately, I come of a long line of good needle-women. When I remember the time-honoured theory that a writing person is no good for anything else, I feel obliged, at the risk of appearing a braggart, to parade the above fact. I take pride in announcing that I never hired a sewing-woman—that, having made all my own clothes as a girl, even to the wedding-gown, I made all my children's, until the boys grew beyond their sailor suits, and the girl put her hair up. In fact, housework has all along been the business of life; novels have been squeezed into the odd times. It was many a long year before I had a dress-maker's dress, or went to such lengths of luxury and extravagance as to order carpets or curtains to be made for me. I have even manufactured sofas, with G.'s assistance, he making the very solid hardwood frames. We once had two beautiful ones, regular Chesterfields, entirely home-made, in one of the several auction sales that the distance between one home and the next have forced upon us; there was quite a rush to buy them. Only when the purchasers attempted to take them away, it was found almost impossible to lift them from the ground. The feather bed that had cradled me on board ship—we had two really, but the smaller one cradled servants for awhile—now took its permanent place amongst the never-failing comforts of the house; I broke it up into pillows and cushions, a few of which covered, like charity, all the sins of amateur workmanship in our springless couches.

The room of our cottage that had the front door in it was the sitting-room, of course. Here we dined in full view of the street—had there been one—when summer evenings gave light enough; our doctor and his wife, pulling up their horses before the house, could see for themselves whether we were at the end of our meal or in the middle; I would go out with an offer of pudding or coffee sometimes, but as a rule I left everything and flew for hat and gloves. The room at the other end was our bedroom. The little cubicle between combined dressing-room and study. There was not space to swing a cat in any of them, had we wanted to swing a cat. There certainly was no room to swing the cradle, when that article of furniture was introduced; fortunately, we did not want to swing that either. We did not believe in rockers, and made a great virtue of necessity when we took them off.

But after all, humble as it was, it was a sweet little place when we had fixed it up. Bishop and Mrs Perry, paying us their first call, were enthusiastic about it. They had been making a long tour from country parsonage to country parsonage, which, notwithstanding the benevolence of parishioners, are as a rule struggling homes, "shabby genteel," in their appointments; and this bright, simple, tidy (though I say it that shouldn't) little toy dwelling was, to use their own word, an "oasis" amongst them. One truth that I have learned from my manifold domestic vicissitudes is that you can make a nice home out of anything, if you choose to try. You do not really want all the things that you are brought up to think you want. Sometimes it is even a relief to be without them.

CHAPTER V[ToC]

DIK

All my recollections of the first home, and the one succeeding it, embrace the figure of a friend who was virtually of the family while we lived in them. He has so long been dead that I may with propriety refer to him more fully than I can speak of his contemporaries yet living, and it is a particular pleasure to do so in view of his nationality and of the times in which I write. For he was a Dutchman—and everything, almost, that a man should be. If he did no good for himself in Australia—his birth and training were against that—he did much for his country within the compass of his little sphere. He gave some of us a faith in and a respect for it that nothing in the South African struggle has been able to impair. I have been British throughout the war to the marrow of my bones, but in the worst of times have had to bear in mind that our veldt foe comes of the stock which produced that perfect gentleman. I have not otherwise compared them, but I can never think meanly of any Dutchman after knowing him.

He joined our ship in London, and during the voyage we noticed that he was a lonely traveller, silent and sitting by himself. We therefore made little overtures, thinking to cheer him for the moment, and not foreseeing what they would lead to. G. played chess with him a good deal; when I was well enough to join them I undertook the difficult but interesting task of drawing him out of his shell, where his thoughts were. Although we learned from him that a knowledge of the English language was imperative in Holland amongst cultured people, it needed friendship to cast out of him the fear of making himself ridiculous by his manner of speaking it, which certainly was quaint. Without protestations on either side, friendship was established, and then he talked, and did not mind our laughing at him. We instructed him in our idioms and customs, and he us in his; some of the Dutch names for things that we learned from him are in domestic use to this day. I cannot remember that he overcame his sensitive reserve in respect of any other passenger, unless in the case of a childless married lady who was accompanied by her pet cat and dog. Pussy lived with her and her husband in their cabin, where the arrangements for its accommodation, and the cat's own intelligent adaptation to them, were so wonderful that it caused no annoyance either to them or us; the dog, for whom a high passage fare had been paid, spent his nights somewhere under the care of the butcher, but his days with his devoted mistress. Dogs were a passion with our friend, and there was soon an affectionate understanding between him and this one. He got permission to give it lessons, and at stated times went off with it under his arm to his own cabin, where they would be closeted together for an hour or two. Not a sound would we hear of what went on, but at intervals there was a public performance by the pupil, which, eye to eye with its teacher, would go through tricks and evolutions that a circus dog might envy. This was the only instance I can recall of social intercourse on his part with anyone on board, save us.

He was intensely proud, with a temper behind his pride that could never be safely played with, even by his familiar housemates; life itself was a trifle compared with any point of honour in his code—to be given in its defence, if need were, without an instant's hesitation; but there was not a trace of false pride in the whole warp and woof of him. This, however, goes without saying, since I have already said that he was at all points a gentleman.

And, back of his reserve and pride, which wore so cold and stolid an air, was a heart like a shut furnace. Rarely did the flame shine through his grave eyes, but it did when the moment of threatened parting came. "Tell me where you live," he said, as if asking for his life; "I must live there."

As soon as we knew, we told him, and a week after our arrival at W—— he turned up, together with a pair of beautiful (and very expensive) dogs. He boarded at the hotel, and came to us every day. And, so far as Australia was concerned, we were his family, and our house his home, thenceforth.

His name was Diederik, which we shortened to Dik. His other name was not undistinguished in his own country, as we learned from his family photographs and the casual but complete evidence provided by the conditions of our joint domestic life—not by direct statement from him, the most modest of men. The picture of his home in Leyden showed a beautiful old house on a tree-bordered canal; in this house, it seemed, each member of the large family had his or her suite of rooms and separate personal servant. "This is a brother of me," he would say, as we turned over his album; and questions would elicit the fact that the person indicated held a court appointment at the Hague. Another "brother of me" filled an important post in the Dutch East Indies; he was governor—kontroleur 1st klasse—of Riouw. Dik was a younger son, born with that bent for wandering which is not confined to any class or nation. And his equipment for the enterprise to which he had committed himself was almost ludicrously elaborate. He had a perfect arsenal of deadly weapons—for the native savages and wild beasts, I suppose. Guns and small arms of all sorts and sizes, the finest of their kind, with tons of ammunition to match, enough to furnish forth a small regiment. I still have a stumpy little six-chambered revolver, which he insisted on my keeping by me, in case I should be molested while alone in the house; and I ought to have also a beautiful inlaid hair-trigger pistol, which was the instrument with which he taught me the art of self-defence. Daily he would call me from my sewing or cooking to shoot bottles off the yard fence, until my execution upon ounce phials satisfied him that I was able to protect myself from the marauding black or bushranger. He had a tool-chest which contained every tool, and large sets of most of them, that handicraftsman could need under any circumstances—even to a turning-lathe, with which, and a great hunk of ivory tusk, he used to make me buttons and sleeve-studs. As for "hempjes" and such things, they were in dozens upon dozens. And all that costly outfit to be so soon disintegrated and dispersed!

The first thing he did at W—— was to help us into our cottage, himself inheriting our lodgings and the quinces from us. How useful he was! Until I had a maid—the last piece of furniture procured—he was up o' mornings to chop wood, draw water, boil kettles, and so on; and all day he was on the look-out for a job, the more menial the better. Tears, even now, are not far from my eyes when I open my old diary upon such items as these:—"October 31st. Dik beginning to make a garden for me." ... "December 7th. Dik up in the dark to catch fish for breakfast." ... "December 8th. Dik up early again to get me fish." Whenever he was at home this sort of thing went on, and all without the slightest fuss or gush, and with a frown for thanks. When there came the prospect of a most important domestic event, we had every reason to flatter ourselves that he had not the dimmest notion of it, from first to last. I made every scrap of baby-clothes myself, and he, being so constantly with us, must have seen me doing it; in fact, I abandoned the usual precautions just because he seemed too utterly dense to notice anything. He was nothing of the sort. It was part of his perfect gentlemanliness not by word or sign to show that he knew, even in his private talks with my husband, otherwise the talk of brothers. One evening he left for his lodgings, as usual, and the great business was comfortably disposed of before the hour of his return in the morning. G. and I, in the midst of our excitements, found a moment to laugh together over the tremendous shock of surprise that we were going to give him. But lo! when he came he manifested no surprise—only quite broke down in trying to express his thankfulness that it was safely over. He was brought in to peep at the new arrival, and I felt like a scoffer at sacred things to have met with a jest that smileless and speechless emotion. On leaving my room, he dashed for his horse, tied to the front gate, and galloped off towards the town; thence in a few minutes he returned, bearing as his offering to the new master of the house a wicker cradle on the saddle before him! He must have looked a ridiculous object, but was lifted above all care for the opinion of the street. That was the cradle I had to wedge into such a tight place that rockers were no use to it. Later it was his joy to nurse the little one, to watch his first movements of intelligence, and speculate as to what period "his nose would come downstairs."

I ought to mention here that his attitude towards women was one of austerest respect and dignity. I shall never forget the blackness of his brow and mood when we returned one night from a day's outing, having left him to keep house for us. It appeared that our Irish maid had taken advantage of the opportunity to make tender overtures to him. She had come behind him as he was reading and smoking, stroked his hair, and addressed him as a "poor feller." I was not supposed to know anything of this, but got the tale from G., and was thus able to take steps to prevent such assaults in future. To me, for whom he had so deep a regard, Dik was a brother, without ever using a brother's familiarities. No man ever treated me with such absolute reverence and respect.

Between the 30th of that first October, when he was making me a road through the "common" that the continued rains had turned into a swamp, and the 7th of December, when he went a-fishing for my breakfast, he made a start upon his own Australian career—the bright beginning that declined to so sad an end. By no fault of his, poor boy! unless his breeding was his fault. He was young and strong—immensely strong—the typical big-limbed, burly Dutchman, eager to work and to rough it, afraid of nothing; he simply failed as I have seen dozens of young men of good family fail—as they all do, if I may judge by my own experience—who come out to make their fortunes under the same conditions. Had he been a skilled mechanic, he would have found his luck immediately; had he been prepared to pay his premium as a "jackaroo"—i.e. an apprentice to the run-holder, who charged £100 a year or so for imparting "colonial experience"—he would have been taken into one of those delightful Bush-houses that I have mentioned, and might have risen (without capital) to be a station manager. But as an amateur who did not know the ropes, his ideas of the situation gathered from books or evolved from his inner consciousness, Dik fared as I shall describe. I give his case because, in its way, it is so distinctly characteristic of the country, and as such may be instructive to the English reader.

Having received ourselves such extraordinary kindness and attentions from the squatter families of our parish (hundreds of miles in area), we thought it an easy thing to make interest for our friend; and so it proved—to a certain extent, which did not go beyond the rough regulations of the Bush, not yet grasped by such new chums as we. An old squatter accepted our guarantee for Dik, and told us to send him along. It was the busy shearing-season, when odd hands were required. Joyfully we took home our news. Hopefully we borrowed a buggy, and ourselves drove him to the house of that old squatter, nursing-father that we imagined him. It was so far that we stayed the night, and we thought it odd to lose sight of Dik as soon as we arrived, and not to see him again to say good-bye; but we came away under the impression that, when not out on the run, he would be treated by the house as it treated us.

He left W—— on the 10th of November. On the night of the 19th he rode back, departing at dawn on the 21st, which means that he spent Sunday, his free day, with us. He was invisible for a time, while G. got him a bath and clean linen, and when he appeared he was taciturn and depressed, loth to talk of his experiences, which had evidently been a shock to him. Of course he had been sent to live at the "men's hut" amongst the all-sorts that at shearing season crowd that unsavoury abode. It was his place, but he had not known it; nor had we; and I for one was furious at the outrage, as I considered it, that had been put upon him. He had had fights, it appeared, with the lowest of the low—possibly decent work fellows, who had not understood him; he had come through personal foulnesses not to be mentioned in ladies' company. G. told me all about it afterwards.

On the 26th that job was done. He returned to us like a released convict, and we made much of him for a time. This would not do, however, and again he sought for employment. One night, in a fit of desperation at the delay in finding it, he took a sudden resolution to go out into the Bush, with a swag on his saddle, and ask for work from station to station, resigned to the men's hut—to anything. I remember my feelings as I saw him start in the moonlight, just before I went to my own comfortable bed. He was going to ride all the cool night, and take his rest in the fiery day; for it was December now, and horses and dogs were as children to Dik. By the way, he left his dogs with us while on these expeditions. Their puppy exuberance got us into many scrapes, although I do not believe that all the tattered fowls brought to us by our neighbours, with hints that we should make their excessive value good, came by their deaths as we were told they did. Otherwise the keep of the playful creatures cost little or nothing, because they were fed mainly upon opossums. Nightly, after dinner, the gun or guns were taken out, and I don't know which enjoyed the expedition most, the sportsmen or the dogs. There were 'possums in every tree in those days, and Dik and G. were both good marksmen. When too dark to distinguish 'possum or gun-barrel, they tied a white handkerchief round the muzzle of the latter and located the former (already approximately located by the dogs) with the stable-lantern usually held up by me. An artificial light not only fascinates but paralyses the little animal, draws him like a magnet, and then holds him rigid, his large, liquid eyes fixed upon it, so that he is as steady to shoot at as a target at the butts. Under those circumstances he seems completely indifferent to his shrieking enemies at the foot of the tree, ready to tear him in pieces the moment his limp body thuds down to them. Although our valuable pair flourished upon it, I am horrified now to think of feeding dogs upon such meat. Well, we could not do it now, if we wanted to. At that time 'possums were vermin to the white man, pests of the fruit garden (though we never found them eating fruit, but only leaves), like the parrots and minahs, from whom nothing was sacred. Not that they could have troubled us, for all the fruit we had was a double row of peach trees down one side of our back paddock. We had peaches of the finest quality literally in tons—and nothing else. In their season I would peel the flannel jackets from half a dozen before breakfast, and go on eating them at intervals all day (whereby I destroyed my taste for peaches, as it had already been destroyed for quinces, for the rest of my life); and the ground was so cumbered with them that we were grateful to the neighbours who came with buckets and wheelbarrows to get them for their pigs. The railway absorbed the peach trees with the cottage, and I buy peaches at the door to-day at a shilling the plateful. And the opossum seems in a fair way to become extinct—at any rate, in this state.

I still go, almost yearly, to rest from town life a a station in the neighbourhood of W——. The house—one of the first English-style houses in the district—is the same that it was thirty years ago, except that its red walls are mellower and its girdle of choice trees more grown and beautiful; and the dear family is the same, only the young ones now the elders, and a new generation in their place. On a late visit they drove me to W——, some eighteen or twenty miles distant; strange to say, it was the first time I had been into the town since those early days of which I am talking, although I had passed it many times on the railway; and we started on our journey home in a soft twilight, prelude to a clear, faintly-moonlit night—such a night as, thirty years earlier, would have shown us an opossum in nearly every tree we drove by. It was country road or bush-track all the way, and "Now, surely," I said, "I shall have the long-desired pleasure of seeing a 'possum again." I settled down into my front seat of the waggonette, laid my head back, and watched and watched for little ears sticking up, and bushy tails hanging down, which I should have been so quick to distinguish if they had been there. Not a hair—not a sign that a 'possum had ever lived in the land—all those lonely miles!

But a few nights afterwards I had my wish in rather a strange way. Being sleepless, I lit a candle at twelve or one o'clock, and tried to tranquillise myself with a book. The candle made a little halo about the bed, but left the rest of the room dim. One window was wide open, as I always had it; an armchair, with a cushion in its back, stood near the window. I heard no sound, but suddenly had that curious feeling of fright which precedes the discovery of the thing that frightens you; and, looking up, I saw two eyes, terrifyingly intense in their expression, glowing and glaring at me from the armchair. The thing crouched upon the top of the cushion, quite still, as if it had been there for hours. I thought it was a cat, and shooed and slapped my book; when it made no response to these manifestations, I knew it was an oppossum. The candle-light outside had lured him to its source, and he now sat lost in contemplation of the magic flame. I got out of bed and ran window-wards, in the greatest haste to be rid of the creature I had so long wished to see; he crawled cringingly an inch or two, but I had to push him with the edge of my book off the cushion and the window-sill and out into the night. I could not imagine how he had got in, for my room was in an upper storey of the tall old house, the roof of the verandah some distance below; but, looking out in the morning, I saw that a course of brickwork, just about wide enough for a mouse, ran along the face of the wall, not far from the window, and that a great white cedar tree stood close to one end of it. I boasted at breakfast that I had seen a 'possum at last, but I am careful now, when I sleep in that room, not to burn a midnight candle with the window open.

To return to Dik. On the 18th he came back to tell us he had found a job. I do not remember what it was, but it is recorded in my diary that we had a gala dinner in honour of it. He returned again before breakfast on Christmas Day. G. had distant country services afternoon and evening, and the three of us went together and made a picnic of it, keeping our domestic festival for Boxing Day, in the night of which Dik left us, while we slept. But on the 28th of January that job also came to an end—not from any fault of his, but just because it was a little one and he had finished it. The neighbourhood was searched again, and he went work-hunting into New South Wales with no success. He had long ago sold his horse, and now he began to sell his other things—guns, tool-chest, lathe, non-essential clothes—throwing them away one after the other, for a mere song, in spite of our remonstrances. He left his lodgings for cheaper ones; later on we persuaded him to exchange these for a shakedown with us; but he was too proud to owe us bed and board, and only stayed in the brief intervals between his futile tramps, when he knew we should be cut to the heart if he did not. It came to broken boots and ever-increasing shabbiness, to the shunning and slighting of him by persons who were not worthy to be named in the same breath with him, to his growing gaunt for want of sufficient food. "This in your hospitable Australia!" the reader may exclaim. Yes, indeed; and he is not the only one I have seen thus circumstanced, by many—only the others were mostly getting their deserts, which he was not.

One night a mysterious message was brought to G., who slipped out of the house in answer to it. It transpired later that Dik was lurking in the vicinity wanting to know if there were any letters for him. He had sent word secretly to G., not wishing me to know, because he was "not fit to see her any more." Of course, I was not going to stand that. We dragged him in, gave him a bath and clothes, fed him and talked to him—scolded him well, indeed, for his obstinate refusal to write to his father, a course that we had urged upon him until we were tired of the hopeless conflict with his preposterous pride.

However, he melted at last—that very night, I think. His confession was made and posted, and all we had to do was to hold on until the answer arrived. As it chanced, the only serious accident that I can remember happening to a P. and O. steamer on the Australian line (prior to the wreck of the China) happened to the one that had his money on board. Her letters were recovered from the sea-bed, but not in time to be of use to us; so there was yet another long delay. But eventually all came right. His empty pockets were filled once more, and a new career provided for him. He was to go to his brother in the Dutch East Indies, and become a planter of something.

The change was so great and sudden that he did not all at once "know how he had it with himself," to use his own phrase. He wrote to us from Melbourne before he sailed (April 20th, 1872):—"You know me enough for being a bad hand in making speeches. What I want to let you feel is"—and he made a very touching one upon the subject of our friendship for him. Then he mentioned his state of mind. "The time passes quick away. At day-time I have plenty to do, and in the evening I am in the opera, what makes me a little jolly, but yet there is a kind of stupidity about me. I don't know what it is." From Galle he wrote at length, and with his old ease, describing his voyage in detail, and his fellow-passengers, of whom one was a wholesome annoyance to him. "When you are talking with somebody he always will put his nose between it, and the rest of the day he whistle tunes out of operas." In Ceylon he made a sporting expedition into the country, and "after you have seen so long the miserable Bush of Australia is this beautiful." He had some delightful shooting, in spite of the fact that, in consequence of having cut his feet against a "coral riff" while swimming, "the only way I could go shooting was on a pair of slippers." Then, with the Dutch mail from Singapore to Batavia:—"it was very pleasant for me, as you understand, to hear the Dutch again. Everything was so as it was at home, no more puddings on table, but delicious vegetables, and the bitterjes like the home ones." And he had once more that first thing necessary to a happy life, his dog; not one of those mentioned, which remained with us, but a new one. On landing at Batavia, "I give my hondtje a walk. This is a beautiful creature, and came all the way good over. From Melbourne to Singapore was it expensive. I had to pay five pounds for him." Here he met Leyden friends, with whom he "passed the time jolly," and who led him to a place where he "had to get a ticket to be able to stop in this country;" and "the last days," he writes, "I feel me quite different, more as I was at home, surely in better spirits as on our road to Melbourne."

His brother shepherded him for a short time—took him to a place or two, from which, when they left, were "fired from shore canons"—but, unfortunately, the resident was ordered home by his doctor, and Dik was left once more to his own guidance. He presently reported himself from Deli, where he was learning the business of a "nutmace" planter. But his teacher, he was sorry to say, had turned out an "offel snob," and he (Dik) had "little to make with him. I have my room and everything I want and pay him monthly, and when he is in a bad humour he can go his way and don't talk to him." When this gentleman "used one of his rough expressions to me," wrote Dik, "I got offel angry"—I can imagine it!—"and told him if he did so again he would know me better. You understand a fellow who stand that in his own house what he is. So you see I am not all right yet. But I am practising patience, fine thing, but offel tiresome." Incidentally he remarks, "I see you think I am sitting on Java, but am a good distance away from there;" and he gives much interesting information about Dutch colonial government and customs, which I have not space to reproduce. He wishes he had an Australian horse again. "These little things I am tired of; they are very pretty, but I am too heavy for them." He promises me a tiger skin, and mentions the ever-to-be-regretted fact that he had found "no occasion" to have his likeness taken.

The next letter (Deli, March 20th, 1873) was all unclouded joy. He had left "that fellow" and was now "as jolly as possible," settled down in partnership with four other gentlemen of his own class, one Dutch and three English—"so you see there is no fear I will forget my English the first time." They had 250 "culies." "I have a field where 100 are working, and go there and see them work every day, with Victor my dog, named after Victoria ... so you see at last I come to a good place, and hope to stick to this ... if I don't get along will be my own fault."

Glad indeed were we to read those words! We wrote to tell him so. And the letter containing our congratulations came back to us long months afterwards, with this message scrawled across the envelope:—"Dead. Mr van K—— died in Deli."

The last document of the little bundle from which these extracts are taken is as graceful a piece of composition as was ever penned. The handwriting is Dutch, but the words are English, and I have never read an English letter that was more faultlessly expressed. It is his family's acknowledgment of what we did—little enough, but made much of in his home letters—for their beloved son, "to support his energies in his days of trial." From this we learned that he had been "seized with typhus fever, to which he succumbed on the 4th of June 1873, after ten or twelve days' illness."

CHAPTER VI[ToC]

THE SECOND HOME

On the 26th of July 1871 we moved into our second home—not more than a mile or so from the first—Dik again helping us. The chance to get a little more breathing-space and elbow-room, much needed since we had become a family, fell to us through the death of our friend the police magistrate. That sad event left his widow with means too small to permit of her retaining her pretty home for a day after she was able to leave it. We took it from her, and lived in it for about four months—until G. was appointed to his first parish; after which our house was provided for us, with no rent to pay any more.

Distance lends enchantment to it, of course, but it is impossible that "Como" could have been other than charming, with its then surroundings. It had been the dwelling of two police magistrates, and the first and longest occupier had made the place, while his wife had been a gardener. My journal reeks of that garden. In the prime of the spring season (October 12th) there is an entry which credits it with "innumerable varieties of everything," including, naturally, "roses all over the house" and "our own asparagus for dinner every other day." The (even then) old house, masked with shrubs and hedges, surrounded by beds and borders full of sweets, turned its face upon a wooded paddock, through which a path led out to the road; the ground behind fell steeply to the "lake" so ambitiously named—a large backwater of the river, preserved by the landlord (who allowed only himself and his tenant to shoot over it), and therefore the sanctuary of native aquatic fowl.

That lake was the region of romance to me. The sunrises out of its mists and shimmers, the moonbeams on its breast at night, that I used to step out upon the terrace-like verandah to feast upon—they are pictures of memory that can never fade. Flocks of black swans used to sail past the kitchen door within reach not of a stone, but of a potatoe peeling; early and late the air was full of the quick beat and rush of wings—wild duck in hundreds and thousands going out or coming home. They quacked and scuffled in the thick reeds at night, as we walked near them. The two sportsmen could not resist the temptation to shoot more than we could eat. I have it down in my diary that on the 28th of July 1871 G. killed three teal with one shot. I saw it done, and it was no great feat, seeing that the little birds were so thick that their flight at the moment was like the flutter of silver cloth. In that watery time the lake was generally brimming. One night we were called up by the bellowing of the cow, and Dik and G. rode naked into the inclosure where her calf had been submerged to its nose by a sudden rise; they were only just in time to save it. We had a roomy boat, in almost constant use. A friend or two would come out to dine, and after dinner we would paddle them about in the moonlight—explore the "North-West Passage," which reminded me of a "fleet" in the Broads at home. We fished sometimes for next day's breakfast; I believe they were catfish and other coarse things, but we seem to have eaten them contentedly; I remember how we used to light a candle to see to bait our hooks. And it was, of course, a very paradise for 'possums. So near the water they swarmed—water being no less attractive to trees, which crowd upon it wherever they can find footing. Under the trees around Como we and the dogs enjoyed such 'possum hunts as we never had elsewhere. It was mostly dark, and on warm nights dangerous—though we never thought of that—snakes being as partial to the water-side as 'possums and trees; many an one did we encounter when looking for something else, and we have seen them undulating in mid-stream like miniature sea-serpents.

But a greater danger than snakes attended these expeditions, as we discovered on a certain night (August 28th). The sportsmen were too well trained to be careless with firearms, but when you carry them in the dark through a thicket of saplings and stumps and prostrate logs, accidents are liable to happen. On this night we were proceeding Indian file, Dik leading, I next, G. protecting my rear, when Dik's gun, carried muzzle down, touched an invisible snag, which jerked it from his arm. In falling forward the trigger was struck or jagged with sufficient force to explode the charge. I saw down the barrel as the flame leaped out, apparently at my breast; and then we all stood still for some seconds, expecting horrors. When nothing more happened, and each was proved unhurt, we returned home very soberly, Dik himself much shaken. I then went to my room, took off the thick shawl in which I had wrapped myself against the night air, and held it up before a light. It was riddled with little holes. I took it back to the sitting-room, and spread it between Dik's eyes and the lamp, and made some joke about his having tried to kill me. I never joked that way again. He could not have felt it more deeply if he had really injured me and done so on purpose. I don't think he ever got over it.

It was at Como that I had my first private snake adventure. I was giving my baby an airing in the garden when a call from the maid-of-all-work sent me hurrying into the backyard. A deadly six-footer (carefully measured afterwards) sat upon a few rings of its tail near the wall of the little dairy—a most enticing place to snakes—the rest of its body upreared to about the level of my waist, its head, with the flickering tongue, distractedly darting to and fro. I often worried about snakes when I could not see them; having this one in the open before me, I was not in the least afraid of it.

"You keep it there," said the girl—for there was no man on the place at the time—"while I go and get the clothes' prop."

For some minutes I stood within a few feet of it, the baby in my arms, cutting it off from its lakeside lair; and it must have been my formidable calmness which kept it from flinging itself upon me, as I have seen other snakes do when thus desperately at bay, although they will always wriggle out of a difficulty if a loop-hole is left to them. We killed it with the clothes' prop and put it under an inverted wash-tub, whence I proudly drew it in the evening when the doctor came to dinner. I gave him the history of the execution, and he read me a serious lecture. I promised him never to "hold up" a cornered snake again.

But if I let myself go with snake stories I shall not know where to stop, so I will only tell one more, which has some features out of the common. This snake lived in the church of G.'s first parish. Its hole was visible to the congregation, and it used to show its head to them in service time (during the sermon, probably) and make them nervous. So it was sought to entice it to its destruction with saucers of milk. The parson used to lay the bait over-night, and go to look for results in the morning. Always the saucer was found empty, but for a long time the snake was not found. At last he saw it coiled asleep upon the white cloth laid over the chancel carpet, where the sun from the east window poured warmly down upon it. So he hewed it in pieces before the altar, as Samuel hewed Agag.

What alarmed me much more, though with less cause, than snakes were the blacks, which at that time wandered into one's life as they never did afterwards. Some remnants of the river tribes remained about their old haunts, apparently in their old state of independence. I had seen them from the deck of the steamer, squatting on the banks in their 'possum skins, or fishing naked from a boat that was simply a sheet of bark as torn from the tree; in W—— they trailed about the streets in some of the garments of civilisation, grinning amiably at the white residents, on the look-out for any trifles of tobacco or coppers that a kindly eye might give hope of. They are hideous creatures, poor things, and their attempts at European costume did not improve their appearance. The most extraordinary human figure that I ever saw was a black gin in a bird-cage crinoline. She had something else on, but not much—only what would drape a small part of the lattice-work of steels and tapes, through which her broad-footed spindle legs were visible, strutting proudly. When I, being alone in the house, saw a black fellow evidently making for it, I used to think of all the horrible tales I had read in missionary magazines as a child, and wonder where Dik's revolver was. He only wanted bacca, or an old rag of clothes, or a penny, or a bit of meat—bacca first, always; and there was nothing savage about him except his looks. Some of the stations in that district made a point of protecting and showing kindness to the blacks. On these they made their camps, and swarmed like the dogs about the homesteads, bringing offerings of fish, and receiving all sorts of indulgences in return. I visited at the one of those places which was most notoriously benevolent in this direction. The gins whose husbands had used the waddy to them used to come to the house to have their wounds plastered; the nursing mothers got milk and other privileges; some of the least lazy and dirty young ones were put into the family's cast-off clothes and taken into a sort of service—given little jobs of dish-washing and wood-chopping, for which they were overpaid in such luxuries as they most valued. I was deeply interested in seeing them at such close quarters, and studying their strange habits and customs; it was a valuable and picturesque experience. But there was not a lock or bolt on any door, and a half-witted black woman who was a particular pet used to roam into my bedroom in the middle of the night, to examine me, my baby, my clothes, my trinkets on the dressing-table—which was too much of a good thing. When I hinted as much to the hospitable family, they used to say easily, "Oh, she's quite harmless." But I never could get used to it. After leaving W—— I saw little more of these disinherited ones, until many years later a few visited us in the Western District. These were refugees or escapees from a neighbouring Mission Settlement. Theirs was a tale of tyranny and injustice to melt a heart of stone. They had been compelled to sing and pray without getting any remuneration for it. "Not a farden!" said one black man, solemnly, with a dramatic lift and fall of the hands. "Not a farden!" I remember wondering how he had come by the phrase, since I do not recollect ever seeing a farthing in this country. The Australian despises a coin so petty. He treats it as though it were not in the currency. To be sure, the tradesman charges elevenpence three-farthings for many things, but an odd farthing on the total of his bill always becomes a halfpenny.

It was while living at Como that I "went to town" for the first and last time in many years. There is a gap in my diary where the happenings of November and December (1871) should have included this, but memory easily retains the correct impression of such a sharply-cut event.

We made the trip in a ramshackle little open buggy, consisting of a floor and two movable seats—a most useful country vehicle, upon which you could cart firewood or potatoes, when it was not wanted to cart human beings. We took a girl friend with us (the baby was left with the visiting sister-in-law), and our three portmanteaux; and one poor horse managed the journey in four or five days. We jogged along easily, as near the making railway as we could get, because the scrub had been cleared from that track more or less; camping in the shade at mid-day to lunch and rest the horse, and putting up for the night in a convenient township, taking our chances in the way of hotel accommodation, which was of all sorts. Rarely could we bring ourselves to make full use of the beds provided for us; we slept, as a rule, outside of them, in blankets of our own improvising.

When not far from Melbourne we fell in, towards evening, with the most ferocious thunder-storm of my experience—and that is saying a great deal. All we could do was to get ourselves and the horse away from the trees and the buggy, over the tyres and metal work of which the lightning ran like lighted spirit, and then stand doggedly—the horse with head and tail between his legs, we three tightly clasped together, our faces turned inward and hidden—and silently endure until the fury of the elements was past. When it was passed, and we drove drenched and dripping to the nearest hotel, which fussed over us with fires and hot drinks, it was found that my little portmanteau (frocks folded close in those days) had been put into the buggy that morning wrong side up. The deluging rain, running inside the flap, had saturated all my best clothes! My wedding-dress was done for; my next best gory all over with the dye from cerise ribbons that had lain next it; muslins and laces a flimsy pulp. And the ruin was irremediable, except in the case of the latter (I sent the two silks to be dyed black, and they were returned after some months stiff and crackly, so obviously dyed that they were no use as frocks again). Literally, I had not a stitch to wear. My companion lent me clothes while my travelling things were drying, and when I got to Melbourne I could hardly put my nose out of doors. Instead of enjoying myself with my friends, I had to scheme to hide myself from them—the only thing to be done, since I could not afford to repair my losses on the spot. As soon as G. had done his necessary business, we turned round and came home again.

We brought back with us the widow of that police magistrate who had dropped dead in his dressing-room at Como, and her baby. And we had the hottest of midsummer weather, and the fiercest of north winds. The tracks were deep in dust like sea-shore sand; our faces were skinned with the sun; we wilted on the hard buggy seats under our useless umbrellas; the poor horse gave up, and had to be left by the way. But all our concern was for the unfortunate infant. Whenever we came to sheltered water we used to get down and lay him in; we carried bottles of it with us to pour over him as we drove. We spent one night in a red-hot corrugated-iron hotel, and his mother and I sat up through the whole of it, taking turns at sponging him. He came through safely, although she lost him afterwards—her only son.

That abortive expedition was, as I have said, the last I made to Melbourne for a very long time. The Bush "township" became my world. When I speak of the Bush, it is understood that I do not mean a place of bushes. The term, with us, is equivalent to "the country"—the country generally, though particularly and originally its uncultivated parts. "The miserable Bush of Australia," poor Dik called it, and it has that character with many, I know; but—save, perhaps, at the first glance—it never struck me that way. In the exquisite lights, the clear distances, the fine atmosphere of this climate, Nature has to be beautiful, whatever she wears. I love her in this grey-green gown—and I have been a bushwoman for twenty-three years in all. The trouble is, of course, that man, who does not live by bread alone, lives still less on scenery.

We did not really settle down in W——. Life there was difficult and worrying on the professional side, and with every passing week we longed more to extricate ourselves from a position that we had seen at the beginning to be without promise of comfort or success. But on the social, the secular, side, we had nothing to complain of. We had not begun to miss the things we were cut off from, and the new experiences were delightful. So also with the domestic conditions. It was here that I mastered the rudiments of Bush housekeeping, and no lessons were ever more interesting.

I may say, at once, of my Bush life that, from the housekeeper's point of view, it has been full of comfort—always. This is, I suppose, chiefly because I have never had that servant trouble which seems to keep families in general in constant distress and turmoil. The Irish girl who took liberties with Dik was otherwise a willing and likeable person; the vinegary widow who followed her, and who, being the mother of a boy of twelve, made me put her down in the census paper as aged twenty-five, would have been considered an excellent servant in the most proper English household; and so would her successor, a smart lady who went to church o' Sundays in silks and velvets, and drank all our spirituous liquors that she could lay her hands on. And these were the slight, very slight, mistakes at the beginning. Since then I have had virtually unbroken peace. I have never had to "look for a girl," never been to a registry office, never wanted for the best. And I have never yet met the missus who could say the same. I have my own opinions on this servant question. They may be heterodox, but they work out all right, which is the main thing. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. At the same time I know that I have had exceptional luck. The dear servants and friends who did so much to make my life happy were born good.

One devoted nurse who was with me for many years postponed a fixed wedding-day three times, rather than leave me when she thought I needed her more than usual. "No," she said, inexorably, when I remonstrated with her on behalf of her poor young man, "I am going to see you better first." On the last occasion it was:—"I am not going to let you have the trouble of moving with only strangers to help you. I shall see you settled first." She married from the house at last, so collapsed with grief over the parting that she could not touch the wedding-breakfast we had prepared. The bridegroom sat about forlornly, while I struggled to rally her with brandy and water and (when I dared not give her more of that) tea; and she drove away with the cake whole in her box, drowned in tears. She was a strong-minded woman too, who as a rule never "gave way," whatever the rest of us did.

Another long-service paragon, an Irish woman with a warm temper, could not get on with the lady-helps—sub-housekeepers during the years that I had no health to speak of. "No, ma'am," she said, when their disputes were brought before me, "I'll do anything for you, but I won't take orders from a person who's no better than I am." Although servants like her were precious rarities, and lady-helps a drug in the market, I felt bound to stand by my representative—the intermediary whose position is always difficult; and so the result would be that the other got a week's notice there and then. It made no difference. She stayed on just the same, although I did not ask her. They all stayed on—only leaving us to be married, or owing to family circumstances over which they had no control. The present incumbent of the kitchen has occupied it for nearly nine years.

Living, i.e., feeding, in Australia is proverbially good, although the cooking is often unworthy of the material. Few in the land are, perhaps I should say were, they who do (or did) not sit down to a meat meal three times a day. Fruit that in England was nursed in orchard-houses and counted on south walls we could batten on now; a few pence would heap the sideboard with grapes or apricots, but all was so plentiful that it generally cost us nothing. Wine was not what it is now, and we could not at once break ourselves of our English beer; but it was not long before we learned to prefer the product of the local vineyards, to which we shall remain faithful to our lives' end. We got it, as we do still, in large stone jars, at less than the price of Bass or Guinness. With a poultry yard and a cow, and John Chinaman's vegetables, even a poor parson could live like a prince.

Two or three times a week, regular as clockwork, "John" came to the back door with his loaded baskets of the vegetables in season, fresh and good, various and cheap. Europeans had not the patience to grow them where they had so many enemies; it did not pay to do it, while he did it for us on such terms; it has been so all these years, and is so still. You will hardly find a private kitchen garden, except on the isolated stations, where the gardener is nearly always a Chinaman. Every little township depends, for the food it can least afford to do without, on the industry of this man who, of all others, is the most despised in the community, and of all others—tradesmen, at any rate—is the most reliable. I never was cheated, or in any way "let in," by a Chinaman, and never found him discourteous or disobliging. Those who clamour for his extinction from amongst us do not realise what country folk would miss if he were gone.

Poor John Chinaman! so industrious, so frugal, so inoffensive and law-abiding—an example to the white citizen of his class—if ever I feel ashamed of Australia it is on his account. Its treatment of him, who seems to have no friend amongst the nations, is indeed a strange satire upon the traditions of the British race. One can see a certain reasonableness in the poll tax of £50, hard as it seems that one only of the various aliens amongst us should be thus penalised (and for his industry too); it is, doubtless, advisable that we should prevent ourselves from being over-run (seeing that the earth is not for all); but the law which constitutes one Chinaman a factory is worthy of the Dark Ages, simply. Here is a sample of the sort of thing that Englishmen, with the Union Jack over their heads, can read in their newspapers of a morning as calmly as they read reports on the weather:—

"Hop Lee, who keeps a laundry in Gertrude Street, was charged at the Fitzroy Police Court this morning with having worked after hours on Saturday, the 26th January, contrary to the provisions of the Shops and Factories Act. Constable P—— deposed that about 5.30 P.M. on the day named he went into defendant's premises and found him ironing collars. In September 1899 the defendant was fined for a similar offence. As £5 is the minimum penalty for a second conviction, Hop Lee was mulcted in that amount and ordered to pay £1, 1s. costs.

"Sam Pittee, who also keeps a laundry in Gertrude Street, was then charged with a similar offence, also on the afternoon of the 26th January. The defendant having pleaded guilty, the Bench inflicted a fine of £1, with £1, 1s. costs."

These are not men employing hands, but poor cottage workers "on their own"; and the police—who cannot take them up for brawling, or thieving, or woman-beating—because they don't do such things—watch and spy, as perhaps is their duty, to see that they sit with their hands before them through all the cool hours, while the wash that customers may be clamouring for lies about them undone. One poor Chinaman was arrested and fined for—according to his defence in court, which it appeared was not listened to—ironing his own shirt out of factory hours. And when candidates for the Federal Senate and House of Representatives were making their stump speeches, a "Reverend" gentleman amongst them, now a M.H.R., shouted these words to his electors (to be quoted almost without comment in the papers next morning):—"Chinese should be either pole-axed or poll-taxed in such a manner as would make the country too hot for them."

Ah, poor country! By the mouths of dozens of her most patriotic children I have heard her sigh for the old days (before my time) when a deputy of the Crown and a few soldiers and policemen were all her Government. And no wonder.

CHAPTER VII[ToC]

THE THIRD HOME

On the 1st of January 1872 G. ceased to be a curate. On the 4th—and with thankfulness, I must confess—we left W—— for our own first parish.

It comes back to me, as if it were yesterday, the departure from Como. One of the numerous kind friends who seemed sorry to part with us lent us a roomy buggy, into which we packed many things besides ourselves—the small treasures of the house that we did not like to entrust to the waggons sent on before us with our modest stock of furniture. The last offerings of fruit and flowers being stowed on the top of these, the last good-byes said, we set off at a quiet pace, and took the whole day to the journey. It was all Bush track amongst the hills, and the weather, for midsummer, was kind. Twice we made a camp in a shady spot, sprawled on the grass while the horse grazed and the billy boiled, and ate our picnic meal luxuriously; and for miles we walked beside and around the buggy, fern hunting and curiosity gathering on behalf of the sister-in-law, whose main interest in Australia was centred in these things. It was our intention to make a holiday of the occasion, and we carried the intention out. But, oh, how tired we were when at last we sighted our destination! That is the moment that I remember best, when we crawled down that break-neck "gap" which was the gateway to our valley, and saw across it on the other side, sitting on a soft slope, with a great blue mountain behind it, the little stone church and parsonage-house which were our bourne. In pity for our worn-out horse, we three elders were afoot, hobbling stiffly and uttering involuntary moans of exhaustion; only the dear baby, from whom we had not had a cry, lay fast asleep in the bottom of the buggy, in no way upset by his adventures.

The picture is before me now, bathed in the last lights of the summer day. It is one of the most beautiful that Australia can show. A newly-arrived bishop, being in the same spot as we were, and also for the first time, said he could not understand how we, having been privileged to live in such a place, had voluntarily left it! for we had left it then, because, as we reminded him, man needs more than scenery to satisfy him in this world. The little township nests in its fertile valley, and from the top of the gap you look down upon it and see no prosaic details, only that it is in itself a detail, completing the charm of the natural scene, the scheme of colour of which the lovely mountain blue is the dominant note—that blue which flames celestial pink in parts when the sun goes down. An awful trap to the amateur Jehu was that gap in those days; we realise it now far better than we did then. A metalled road, cut out of the hillsides and fenced, now winds through it, but it still calls for a good driver and a strong brake. We used to blunder down it, as down a wrecked staircase, in the darkest nights, and think nothing of it; no, although we were shown the spot where a coach, whose horses missed their footing, was hurled down the ravine to utter smithereens with all hands. The fact was that in those days and in that part of the country we had to do these foolhardy things all the time, or we should never have got about at all. When confronted with a tight place—a gully almost as steep as a house wall, or a river which was continually changing its soon-washed-out crossing-place, without putting up a guide post—we just "started in" and chanced it. It was the custom of the country, and the custom which made its drivers what they are, skilful and fearless beyond any in the world, unless we except the Americans, who built the vehicles that we used, the only sort capable of such use as we put them to. I do not remember that we worried in the least over the dangers to life and limb that we saw quite plainly before us; we were too well used to them. Now, when we recall our exploits, we tell each other that nothing would induce us to repeat them.

Descending the Gap for the first time G. led the Bush-horse, which was an old stager if we were not, calmly taking things as they came; and the Bush harness, on which life so often depends, was equal to its responsibilities (the owner was to be trusted to see to that). So we arrived safely at the door of what looked like the principal inn—the place and we were as yet strangers to each other—and there we camped for the night. Beds were our crying need. Everything else had to wait until sleep had recruited us. We were fairly dead beat.

But next morning we were all alive and vigorous again, in a fever of impatience to get home—completely home. The vans with our furniture had not arrived; the parsonage was shut and empty; we had designedly kept ourselves and our movements unannounced, so there was no one to show us the way about. Still, we lost not a moment after breakfast in getting the buggy re-packed, getting the keys of the house and church, and driving thither—through the tiny town, over the bridge spanning the willowy creek, and up the hilly road—firmly resolved to sit down by our own hearthstone forthwith, for good and all. But we always did that. In all our movings and re-furnishings, the first proceeding was to go in ourselves; a shakedown and something to eat, and we set to work from the centre and not from the outside. It is far the best way. And if there is one thing I love more than another it is the whole process of shifting camp—odd as I am sure it must appear: I grudge to miss a bit of it.

What a morning we had! Although the vans had not come, there was plenty to do in examining the premises, planning out rooms, and utilising the contents of the buggy, now put up, with the horse, in our own good brick stables. We were charmed with our house, which was nearly new and very complete in its appointments. Its walls of dressed granite made it very sound and cool; it was papered and painted as well as it could be, and the garden and young orchard were laid out with the same care to have all of the best; while its situation was almost unmatchable. The outlook from the French windows and the verandah outside them down the valley of the town to the Gap beyond, and backwards to the blue range behind, was one of ever-changing but constant beauty; none of our eight Australian homes had a lovelier setting. The brilliance and purity of the mountain air enhanced the complexion of it all, as well as the healthful capacity of the seeing eye. Down that grassy slope to the front gate big bushes of spiræa billowed in the spring; their overlapping wreaths were enormous; their masses of white gleamed right across the valley, visible from the Gap road. Everything one planted seemed to flourish there, and particularly the vineyards on some of the hillsides. Fine wines went out from that little town, to win medals and honourable mentions at the industrial exhibitions of the world. The manufacturer combined the professions of vigneron and doctor—in our time the only doctor for many miles around. He was a German gentleman who had left his country to escape some difficulty connected with military service, and was debarred from returning thither by the knowledge that he would thereby land himself in a fortress. Not that he had any hankerings for the Fatherland; he might have been born where we found him, so attached was he to his little town and the interests he had gathered about him; he lived there for over forty years, I believe, and is buried there, in the hill cemetery above our old home. Cut off as he seemed to be from the intellectual world, he yet kept touch with it; with all the work of his practice and his wine-making, he found time for scientific studies, not reading only, but writing for magazines and newspapers; and his active mind was absolutely free and fearless. Of course he never came to church—his English wife did—but that made no difference in the relations between us. No one was more welcome to the house than he, and his company was the salt that gave savour to the social life of the out-of-the-way little place. In his old age he became an ardent spiritualist, much to my surprise and puzzlement, and he died in that faith. His death was described to me by the doctor who attended him, a mutual friend. The good old man was seized with something which his medical knowledge told him must prove fatal within a given number of hours. He made no fuss or bother about it, and allowed no one else to do so, but chatted cheerfully with his colleague until speech failed him, with no more emotion than if he was preparing to go to bed and to sleep as usual.

His vineyards—doubled and quadrupled as time went on—were carved out of virgin Bush, and that Bush was a paradise for wild flowers and ferns. From creek gullies close by I used to gather armfuls of maiden-hair for church decoration, some fronds of which, measured on the dining-room table, spanned the whole width from side to side. One Christmas Eve I made the church a bower of it; every window was veiled in the green lace. Unfortunately, it was withered by morning—the usual condition of church decorations, on the actual day of festival, in this country.

The church, which we also rummaged over without loss of time, was of a piece with the house. Here we found the same careful arrangements and completeness of equipment, the lack of which in other colonial churches had so much surprised us, coming to them with our English eyes and notions; the stamp of the mind and quality of the first incumbent was plain in every direction (he was an Oxford man, expatriated for his health). A year or two ago I was there again; it and the house had faded and been neglected, and I was struck by the unexpected smallness of them both; but even then they were a pleasant contrast to those at W——, as they were in '72. And regarding the beauty of their situation, I found that memory had played no tricks with the records.

In the middle of our rummagings we realised that we were starving. That air was the hungriest we had ever breathed, and we had no food with us except the baby's. G. was despatched on a foraging expedition to the town, and presently returned with bread, butter, cheese, beer, meat, and a frying pan, together with smaller trifles, all in his own arms and pockets—for he never minds what he carries or where he carries it—the sister-in-law and I having prepared a fire in his absence. Shortly afterwards we enjoyed the meal which stands out amid the records of the past as the meal of my life—my only excuse for mentioning it. Soon the parish woke up to the fact of our presence in its midst, and invitations and offers of assistance poured in upon us; but I am always pleased to think that we got that wonderful scratch lunch first. It is a delicious memory.

The vans came, and we settled ourselves. I find an entry in my journal for February 10th (1873), "G. and I making a dining-table." And, three days later, "G. and I making a sideboard." We must have done these things, or they would not be set down, but how we did them, and with what result, I have no recollection, although the two sofas, also made for this house, are as plain to the mind's eye as they ever were. We could buy furniture at the shops—"stores" we called them—of our little town; bullock drays, that took weeks to do the journey from Melbourne, kept us regularly supplied with all necessary goods; so that the explanation of our various dabblings in the art of cabinet making will at once occur to the reader. We had expended the capital of £50 with which we started housekeeping, and, if I remember rightly, the parson's stipend did not exceed £250 per annum. In a parish of the dimensions of this one, horses (as distinct from a horse) were indispensable, and they had to be fed and shod. A buggy (second hand) and a piano (on time payment) were here added to the establishment; likewise a second baby and a nurse-girl. To make ends meet, and at the same time to have things as one wished—nay, as one was determined—to have them, considerable ingenuity and invention were required. I flatter myself that we did well, considering our youth, and that we were new to the conditions in which we found ourselves; but still we had to learn experience in many directions at an unexpected cost in cash. It is extraordinary how quickly money melts in Australia, compared with what it does at home. The reason is not that living is dearer, but that the ways of this country are so lavish and free-handed.

It was about this year (1873) that I began to write for the Australasian—trifling little papers, at long intervals—not because I found any fascination in such work to dispute the claims of the house and family, but to add something to the family resources when they threatened to give out. I had no time for more, until one day the editor of the Australasian wrote to inquire what had become of me and my contributions, when it occurred to me that it might be worth while to make time.

The Sunday school was at the further end of the township—it was the common school on week-days—and I used to rush thither morning and afternoon on Sundays, and return breathless to attend to my baby and play the (American) organ in church. I trained the choir, visited every parishioner within reach, did all that hard work unfairly demanded of the parson's wife under these democratic systems of church government; besides the multifarious work at home—making and mending, cooking and nursing, and, as it appears, building sideboards and dining-tables. Moreover, the Free and Compulsory Education Act had come into force (January 1873), and as the State had to be satisfied that our little nursemaid, who was within school age, was being educated according to law, I charged myself with this job also, rather than lose her services for the greater part of the day. And I may add that the baby in arms was rarely trusted to this functionary, except for airings in the garden under my eye. All other attentions that it required I gave myself. So there was enough occupation for one not-over-robust woman, without the addition of literary work.

Touching upon this matter, I am reminded of a conversation that I had with Bishop Perry soon after our arrival. It was not the hardships of the clergy that troubled him, he said, but the killing strain upon their wives—literally killing, for he quoted figures to show the disproportionately high rate of sickness and untimely death amongst them. I rather think I have heard Bishop Moorhouse express himself to the same effect. Certainly my own long and intimate acquaintance with the subject leaves me in no doubt as to which of the clerical pair is in the shafts and which in the lead. It is not the parson who, to use the phrase so often in his mouth, bears the burden and heat of the day, but the uncomplaining drudge who backs him at all points, and too often makes him selfish and idle by her readiness to do his work as well as her own. Under colonial and "disestablished" conditions, he is not largely representative of the class from which our home clergy are drawn; as a general rule he comes from that which, while as good as another in many ways, and perhaps better in some, is not bred to the chivalrous view of women and wives—regards them, that is to say, as intended for no other purpose than to wait upon men and husbands. The customs of the profession accord so well with this idea that it is not surprising to find a pious man killing his wife by inches without having the slightest notion that he is doing so.

Amongst my colleagues of those days was a lady of exceptional culture and refinement. Her husband, a Bush clergyman like my own, was poor, of course, and they averaged a baby a year until the baker's dozen was reached, if not passed. The way she "kept" this family was such that I never saw a dirty child or a soiled table-cloth or a slatternly touch of any sort in her house. She taught the children as they grew old enough; I know that she did scrubbing and washing with her own hands. In addition, she did "the parish work."

One day, when she was run down and worn out, her husband told her that the organist, from some cause, was not forthcoming, and there was no time to procure a substitute. "So, my dear, you will have to play for us." He knew that she could do it, for she had often done it before; it was the merest trifle of a task, compared with those she hourly struggled with; but it was the one straw too many that breaks the over-loaded back. She looked at him in silence for a moment, flung out her arms wildly, and, exclaiming "I can do no more!" went mad upon the spot. She had to be put into an asylum, and the parish and the husband and the growing young ones had to do the best they could without her. The husband, I may say, was—apart from being the inadvertent accomplice of the parish in her destruction—one of the very best of husbands and of men.

Only the other day I attended a gathering of the friends of a lady to whose loved memory it was desired to raise some public monument. She, lately dead, had been our bishop's wife, and so the meeting was appropriately presided over by dignitaries of the Church. They stood up, one after another, to air their views. "I propose," said a worthy canon, with the most matter-of-fact air in the world, "that every clergyman's wife be a collector for the fund"—of course. I heard a sigh and a sotto-voce ejaculation behind me—"the poor clergymen's wives!"—and the incident exactly shows how their male belongings treat them.

I, however, have not been a victim. Before I was willing myself to lighten the double strain, I was compelled to do so, and the parish—as well as all succeeding parishes—had to put up with it. But very early in the day I evolved opinions of my own as to the right of parishes to exact tributes of service from private individuals in no way bound to give them. And I came to a conclusion, which I have never since seen reason to alter, that the less a clergyman's wife meddles with her husband's business (except between themselves) the better, not only for her but for all parties. After I could plead the claims of a profession of my own, my position in the scheme of things was finally and comfortably defined. Parishes, like clerical husbands, when they tyrannise, do it unconsciously, from want of thought, and not from want of heart. At any rate, my parish, for the time being, never, so far as I can see, bears me any malice for my desertion of the female-curate's post, but quite the contrary. For whereas we should be sure to chafe each other if forced into an unnatural and uncongenial relationship, we are now the best of neighbours and mutually-respecting friends.

Having been a fervid young churchwoman at home, where I district-visited in the most exemplary manner, with tracts and soup-tickets and all the rest of it, for my own pleasure, parish work, when it became my business, was not at all irksome as such. And there was one part of it which was a source of great enjoyment during the three years that we lived in Y——.

It was the training of the choir. At first, with much nervousness and diffidence, I taught hymns and chants for an hour a week, and played them at the Sunday services in the midst of my little band, which had never conceived of higher flights. But ambition was generated in us as we warmed to our work. Recruits arrived from far and near, some of whom could read music, and we spread ourselves in an occasional anthem. There have been, and are, many thousands of choirs as pleased with themselves as we were, but never was there one more harmonious, in every sense of the word. To the best of my recollection we never had a tiff, and such was the attraction of our meetings that no weather—rain, storm, mud, darkness—could keep away the men (some of them quite elderly), who had to tramp miles through the Bush, after a hard day's work, to attend them. Especially in the winter.

For when winter came, and the church was cold, I had the practices in the house, with piano accompaniment. The bright log fire—firewood is the one thing we have always been extravagant in, on principle—and the much-pillowed amateur sofa, and the chairs collected from the general stock and grouped invitingly, made the homely drawing-room a good, thawing sort of place for the storm-buffeted to come to and to sing in. Most carefully were wet wraps and umbrellas left outside, and boots rubbed and scrubbed on door-mats; and never did an evening-party show itself better bred. For that is what the choir practice came to—a "musical evening" once a week. We fell into the habit of clearing off the chants and hymns rather hastily, and devoting the bulk of our ever-extending time to experiments in the higher forms of part-singing. We were not experts, any of us, but we made up in enthusiasm what we lacked in knowledge, and ended by so distinguishing ourselves that the fame of our performances has not died out in the district yet. For although on pleasure bent, we kept an eye to business, and selected music with the secondary view of getting anthems out of it eventually. Our great achievement was Mozart's Twelfth Mass. It took us a long time, but we fumbled through it from beginning to end. And then we astonished the congregation with "Glorious is Thy Name," and "Praise the Lord, for He is Gracious," and other classic gems, as we got them perfectly.

It was my first attempt at choir-leading and—which I am sure is a very good thing for my reputation—the last. Thenceforth the parson wielded the baton. The choir that now is, which could sing the Twelfth Mass straight off as easily as look at it, if it had never seen the thing before, would feel insulted at any comparison between their work and ours; but often, when I am listening to the evening anthem, the notes of those old voices, so fervid and sincere, float back upon the tide of memory from those old days, with a heart-melting power that these finished performances will never possess, for me.

A year or two ago G. was escorting me to my seat in the cathedral through a crowd pressing into the building to some special function—I forget what—and he was accosted by a fine-looking grey-bearded gentleman, with a lady on his arm. "You don't know who that is," said G., turning to me. I looked, and knew—one of those men who used to walk so far o' nights to attend choir practice, after working at his mine all day—seven-or eight-and-twenty years before. We clasped hands with some emotion and looked at each other, and the question that sprang to our eyes was, "Do you remember the Twelfth Mass?" It was as plain as print to both of us. Then we were swept apart before I could learn where he was living, or anything about him, except that the lady on his arm was his daughter.

I hope many more have survived and prospered, and that they will read these words so as to know how I remember them.

CHAPTER VIII[ToC]

THE MURRAY JOURNEY

This parish, although sparsely populated, was enormous in size; it stretched out in one direction more than a hundred miles as the crow flies. And when G. went that way he rode with a fat valise on the saddle and did not return under a fortnight, during which time we were unable to communicate with each other. It was the nearest thing to being a missionary that he ever came to. There are roads and thriving townships along that route now; in our time it was the wildest Bush-track, about which lay the homesteads of the pioneer squatters, at a day's journey one from another. These good men used to welcome warmly the infrequent parson, round up their hands for service in dining-room or wool-shed, fetch in the babies born since the last visitation, and any candidates for matrimony anxious to seize a golden chance. In the case of the latter it was not unusual for the whole process of proposal, engagement, and marriage to take place during the few hours that the clergyman was available.

We called this expedition "the Murray Journey," and once I took it with him. It was soon after we arrived in the district—the 24th of March. That morning his horse, with the long-distance bolster on its back, was saddled and he in his Bush riding costume of short coat, tough trousers, and leather leggings, ready to set forth in the usual way. But I was ill just then, and when it came to saying good-bye he felt unable to leave me. At the same time, placards posted on trees and fences and school-house doors had made engagements for him which he could do nothing to cancel.

"Suppose you come too?" he suggested, as the best way out of the difficulty. "The change of air and the outing may be just what you need."

It seemed a good idea, and was acted upon at once. With a hopeful effort I prepared a portmanteau for myself, and another for my little boy, whom we proposed to leave at a friend's house (the sister-in-law having left us) until our return; and G. went down to the township to find a buggy. We had not yet provided ourselves with a vehicle of our own, although we owned a horse. Practically we owned dozens of horses, because the squatters were always pressing loans of them upon us, exchanging fresh for stale, paddocking any that needed to be turned out; and on this occasion the doctor, whom I have already spoken of, hearing of our enterprise and approving it, made an offer of a good animal which G. accepted. It was understood that relays, if needed, would not be wanting on the road. The buggy he hired at hotel stables for £5 the trip.

We started after luncheon, and in the evening reached a place where we were very much at home. It was one of the newer two-storey brick houses, with a double girdle of wide verandahs outside, and any amount of solid British furniture within—an imposing mansion for the times. It had enormous willow trees about it, which the owner had planted—he white-haired and a grandfather, but Australian born, as also was his wife. They were the oldest of old families, their history interwoven with the very foundations of the State. Her father was killed by bushrangers, his father was almost killed by them, or by blacks—I forget which; and he showed me dinted gun-barrels and other trophies that implied a battle for existence on his own part in the stirring days gone by. He was one of the finest men I ever met. The never-ending—unless South African battle-fields have ended it—argument that the British type of physique degenerates in her colonial-born sons was made short work of in his neighbourhood. "Look at Mr B." the defender of his country would remark, and the abashed opponent was left without a word to say.

I had a day's rest under his wide, warm roof, which it was hoped would recuperate my strength for further efforts. On the 26th we started again, leaving behind us our little son and his nurse—leaving also the doctor's horse, which Mr B. pronounced inadequate. He had the shafts removed from our buggy, and a pole substituted, and gave us a pair of strong, staunch, sweet-tempered horses, which I have no doubt saved our lives on one occasion, if not on two. There was no discussion about it. They were simply ordered, and brought round when we were ready. And I do not remember that my mortal hatred of debts and favours stood in the way at all. The idea of being "under an obligation" to these men did not occur to one, somehow. The pleasure was theirs.

At 9 A.M. we set out, calculating to make the next stage by nightfall. The autumnal days were such that I could not describe them without rhapsodising, but the nights were dark, and closed in at about seven o'clock. Mrs B. stuffed luncheon basket and invalid comforts under the buggy seat. Everybody did that when seeing us off. It was a pity I could not do justice to the good things we turned out upon the grass when we made our noontide halts. If I had been well, what feasts I should have had, in that wholesome, hungry air. A normal picnic always finds me ravenous. As it was, my main support was milk, with a dash of brandy in it. Nothing heavier would "stay."

Now began the struggles which I know were so painful at the time, but which were so amply paid for. Our track was through the wild Bush, sparely bisected by the primitive bush-fence—two or three a day, perhaps—brush, dog-leg, chock-and-log, the post-and-rail reserved for the stockyards and home enclosures; and it soon began to climb rough hills and fall into abrupt ravines such as no sane driver would attempt to negotiate nowadays. Not we, at any rate. The hills crowded upon the river, and to get past them you either had to make a long and uninteresting detour inland or clamber over the shoulders that sloped sheer into the swiftly-running stream. We chose this left-hand route, and thus put the splendid mettle of our horses to full proof for the first time. Some of those "sidings" were so steep that while the staunch creatures clung to the track, digging their toes in at every step, the buggy hung at right angles to them down the hill; the least jib would have run us plump into the water beneath. I walked while I had the strength to do so; at the sharpest pinches we both walked; but there was too much of it. I had to mount when I could crawl no more, and tucking myself under the seat and covering my eyes, give myself up into the hands of fate. "Tell me when it is all over," I said to G.

G. had the good character in the Bush of being "so unlike a parson," which meant he could ride and drive (accomplishments acquired at home, fortunately), and go anywhere without losing himself. In those endless miles of wilderness, faintly scratched with crossing and re-crossing bridle-tracks, nothing to guide him that was visible to me, he was, from the first, as good a Bushman as those to the manner born, as sure of his course as a sailor on the sea. Nevertheless, we fell into the disgrace (to an Australian Jehu) of being "bushed" that night.

In mere miles it was a long day's journey; the difficult country made it a slow one, and it was necessary to "out span" for an hour in the middle of it, to feed and rest the horses. We started in the afternoon, watch in hand. "We shall do it," said G.; and then, "We shall just do it;" and then, "We've got our work cut out to do it." We counted minutes, and watched the glooming sky. The horses raced in and out amongst the trees and scrub while any shadow of trunk or stump could be discerned by the straining eye; then they slackened, checked, stumbled; branches broke under their feet and in the buggy wheels and swished our hands and faces; and we had to recognise that we were off the track, and that the darkest of dark nights had untimely caught us. We were not lost, because we could hear the dogs barking at the homestead that was our goal, but we were as good as lost—"bushed" for the night, although for some time we would not acknowledge it. If the reader asks what carriage-lamps were made for, I reply, not for Bushmen in those days. People living in and about the towns used them, in obedience to by-laws, and the coaches travelled at night with grand hoods of light around their faces, top and sides; but country-folks despised such artificial aids, such enervating luxuries. They used to say they could see better without lamps than with, and we, being Bush persons, thought so too. On any ordinary night and fairly open track, we could manage to get along, but this night was not only moonless but starless, and thick with gathering rain. "Black as a wolf's mouth" well describes it. And we were in riverside scrub, which is always dense and confusing, traversing it, moreover (since it was not G.'s riding route, a still rougher one) for the first time.

G. got down and hunted with lighted matches for the lost track. When he thought he had discovered it he backed the horses and ran the buggy into a worse fix than before. This manœuvre was repeated several times. While I held the reins, he made little excursions by himself, and with the greatest difficulty found me again. The horses stood quiet and patient, just snuffing and jingling a little, and we tied them up and crept around the immediate neighbourhood together, hand in hand, until they in turn were lost—lost for many agonising minutes. Reminding ourselves of our responsibility for their welfare, and that we should have to pay goodness only knew what for the buggy if harm came to it, we decided, when reunited once more, not to part again. Bushed we were, and had to make up our minds to it.

So we unharnessed the gentle animals and haltered them, and let them graze and rustle round within safe reach and the limit of their tether, and we did what we could to ease the situation for ourselves. I was deadly sick and tired, and had to lie down somewhere. The floor of the buggy being too short for a bed, we were driven to seek rest on the bosom of Mother Earth. We spread our one rug thereon, and covered ourselves with the shawl that had Dik's shot-holes in it. That shawl—a wedding present—was a dream of a shawl for softness, thickness, cosiness, a family treasure for ever so many years. Babies were rolled in it, and little invalids sitting up, and anybody who was shivery or ailing (disease germs and such things not being in fashion then); nothing was ever woven that gave so much comfort to so many people. It was in constant demand—"the grey shawl"—as the last safeguard against damps and chills, and so, as a matter of course, I took it with me on the Murray Journey. But it was wofully insufficient for the requirements of that cold March night.

A mouthful from G.'s pocket-flask warmed me for a while, and there was a romantic hour during which I lay and listened to the strange undertones of the Bush, charmed to have fallen in with so interesting an experience. It was, by the way, the only time that I ever "camped out," although I have wished ever since to do it again, when well in health and otherwise properly equipped. About two years ago I returned (for the first time since '73) to that neighbourhood, and arrangements were made for me and another enterprising matron to camp out with a party of engineers surveying a proposed road through a wild jumble of hills and glens, at what would have been an ideal spot. They were taking tents and beds, and nice things to cook at the glorious fire they would keep us warm with; nothing they could think of to enhance our enjoyment had been forgotten. Alas! the rain came, and extinguished that project and my joy. On the afternoon of the expected happy night, a host-that-should-have-been drove me over one of the old-time break-neck roads—but a real road now—and showed me the scene of the camp that never was. Peeping from the mackintoshes that he had heaped over me, I saw, through the driving rain and across a thickly-wooded gorge, a high, dim hill. There it was, more than half-way up—the loneliest eyrie. What a place to look down from at nightfall, at daybreak, and in the dead waste and middle of the dark! And not only the camp fire to make magic of it, but a moon!

On the occasion of our involuntary camp-out in '73 there was neither. I fancy we had used all our matches, but if not, we dared not have made a fire. Grass and dead leaves were still tinder to a spark, and a Bushman knows when he must respect that state of things. A Bush fire is more easily started than put out. So we lay and listened to the trampling and munching of the invisible horses, the scratchings and runnings and snoring growls of the opossums, and those imaginary footsteps that, to ears at the ground, were more distinct than either, until we ached with the hardness of our bed and our teeth chattered with cold. And then it began to rain.

We sought the shelter of the buggy, and covered ourselves with the rug and the grey shawl. We sat in the vehicle, where there was no room to lie down, leaning one against the other, dropping this way and that, sighing from our very boots, watching for a glint of dawn. It seemed a thousand hours before it came. As soon as we could find our way we went to the river to wash. How starvingly raw and cold that early morning was! And to this day I am sorry for myself when I remember how I felt, after the sleepless, supperless, wet, sick night. I would have been glad to lie down and die, rather than face a pack of strangers. However, we harnessed up, and set out for the house for which we were bound. We seemed to have hardly started before we got there—a good "Cooee" might have rescued us over-night—and nobody was stirring, except a servant beginning to sweep.

A new baby had recently arrived—it appears to me, looking back, that in those days there was always a new baby in every house—so that the mistress was invisible for a time; but I was soon in kind hands of some sort, which helped me to tumble straightway into bed. For it was useless to attempt to observe any of the usages of polite society, under the circumstances. Daily, through that trip, I arrived in this condition, more or less, at some new strange house—an uninvited guest, too ill to talk to anyone, thrown at once upon the charity of the family, and of course filled with the shame of so ignominious a position; but I should have lost much more than I did lose if I had been well.

I slept till noon, while G. mended what he could of his broken engagements (there should have been a service over-night, and now the congregation had dispersed to its work); and after an early lunch we took the road again. I was firm in insisting upon keeping a tight hold of my husband, though I should die for it, rather than be left behind to be nursed, which he and everyone deemed the proper thing to do with me.

In the evening we came to the place that, of all places visited at this time, is the one I remember best and with most pleasure. A fine day, after the rain, was closing with a finer sunset when we saw the house, so effectively situated on a hill-side sloping to the river, its pretty garden dropping down before, its neat vineyard and orchard climbing behind, that as a picture I hung it "on the line," there and then, and the gallery of memory holds nothing of the same age that has worn so well. It was a bachelor establishment—an awkward circumstance, at the first blush, but soon perceived to lack no advantage on that account. One young partner was away; the one at home came forth to receive us, with his nice, frank, gentlemanly air, that made such an impression upon me. I don't know who he was; I never saw or heard of him again; I have forgotten his name; but him I shall never forget.

He had made the most careful and graceful preparations for us. A dinner-party had been arranged, the guests to meet us being a squatter and his wife, of the same good class as himself, from the New South Wales side of the river, which they crossed in their private boat—evidently a voyage often taken—at the due hour. Sad to relate, I could not join that party, much to the host's concern and my own disappointment. The housekeeper bore me off to bed, and coddled me with arrowroot or beef-tea or something, while at the same time she supervised the serving of a meal which was described to me afterwards in tantalising terms. I was glad that my bedroom was close to the dining-room—probably opened out of it, like so many guest-chambers of the period. I could hear the pleasant, cultivated voices, the bright chat, broken by little silences during which the master of the house waited to hear how I was, and whether I could fancy this or that; and later in the evening I could follow the whole course of the service that was held in the same apartment, and for which he had diligently gathered in every stray sheep within his reach.

As soon as dinner was over the other lady guest came in to sit with me, and stayed with me until it was time for her to re-cross the dark river to her own home and bed. We talked of our children, in low tones, not to disturb the adjacent worshippers. She, too, I never saw before or since—it was indeed a case of ships that pass in the night—but I have loved her always, and thought of her as a life-long friend. We promised to meet again. If she is alive now, I am sure she regrets, as I do, that Fate declined to give us another chance.

Refreshed by a night's rest, I rose early, and enjoyed my host's companionship for perhaps half an hour. He took me for a gentle stroll about the garden while breakfast was preparing, and I was sorry the half hour could not be lengthened to a day—or a week. But the exigencies of G.'s time-table drove us on. We had another day-long journey before us to the next port of call, and it was necessary to start betimes if we were not to be bushed again.

We travelled beside the river for some hours, and my recollections are of particularly lovely views. Doubtless the radiant morning gave them much of their charm—Australian scenery is really a matter of light and atmosphere—and allowance must be made for that enchantment which distance lends; still, it was a pretty country. The Murray wriggles through its two colonies like a length of waved dress braid, and here it curved between hilly banks and woods whose fringes dipped into the stream. Primeval forest it was, too (except for that daily rarer brush fence), the free home of beautiful birds that may now be sought in vain within the boundaries of the state; and a stream still populous with wild-fowl of many kinds. By noon we must have worked a little inland, for my journal says it was a creek we camped by for lunch; and in the afternoon, during which we skirted a little hamlet that is now a considerable town, we descended to country called "Plains" in the title of its presiding station—the house we reached safely just as night closed in. Here there was the usual new baby (which G. christened next day), and no hostess immediately visible; the governess received me—in the inevitable condition—and put me to bed.

Speaking of those Bush babies, I would point out that medical attendance was in the category of non-essential luxuries that are now necessaries of life in every class. When it cost a little fortune and the waste of days to get a doctor, the struggling Bushman's wife, as a rule, took her chance without him. Occasionally she was conveyed to a township which possessed one, and there awaited in lodgings the opportunity to profit by his services; but the majority of Bush women preferred to stay at home and make shift with the peripatetic Gamp, old and unscientific as she always was. There was no fuss made over these affairs. The wives took after their husbands, who could drive without gig-lamps in the darkest night. I remember, however, that the mistress of this last house had all but lost her life in her recent confinement. She was a beautiful woman, delicate in every way—not of the ordinary type of squatter's wife.

With her I rested for a day, while G. made business excursions on horseback, and we spent a second night under that roof. This brought us to Sunday—a typical Bush Sunday.

A large family party loaded the waggonette which took us to morning service some miles distant. The place of worship, as usual in such parts, was the district school-house, called the Common School (the title "State" was substituted for "Common" when the Compulsory Education Act came into force, after which these buildings, enormously multiplied, were not so readily obtainable for what are called "sectarian" purposes). The school-house was utilised by the denominations in turn, all having been placed on the same footing by the withdrawal of State aid from the originally established (English) church, only the Roman Catholics standing out from the miscellaneous company. This seemed a sad "come-down" to us at first, with our hereditary reserve and exclusiveness in relation to "dissenters"—a word long eliminated from our vocabulary. The miner who, being invited to church, replied affably, "Ay, ay, I'll give ye all a turn," showed us our place in the colonial scheme of things, and we did not like it a bit. But we soon adapted ourselves. And G. and the current Presbyterian parson of the parish, that he could not call his own, used to study their mutual convenience in arranging country services, and give each other a lift when on the road together. A pity it was that the "dissidence of dissent" could not have been further modified—a pity it is, and must continue to be—for the existence of half a score of little conventicles struggling one against the other for the suffrages of one poor little town—the money question in each case dominating and determining every other—is not good for their common cause.

In the simple seventies and these remote outskirts of the world, one could still cherish the ideals of that English prelate who said of Disestablishment that "it will nearly drown us, but at least it will kill the fleas," one could survey the Church purified, before the new vermin hatched. It was charming to see the country carts gathered round the lowly wooden building, the horses unharnessed, feeding under the trees; they had brought worshippers from many miles away, their sincerity as such proved by the trouble they had taken to reach the rendezvous, and by the heartiness of their demeanour while service was going on. The school forms, made for children, would bend, and sometimes break, under the heavy men, close-packed along them; the mothers peacefully suckled their babes as they listened to the sermon; the dogs strolled in, and up and down. Sometimes a dog had a difference with another dog and disturbed the proceedings, but unless this happened no one thought of driving the dear creatures out. They were the sheep and cattle dogs of the congregation, each inseparable from his master.

This sort of function it was that I attended on the morning of the one Sunday of that Murray Journey. A family present then convoyed us to their home—another solitary station—whence, after a good meal, they drove us to the second service of the day, similar to the first. We then drove ourselves to a third station (a delightful place, G.'s favourite camping-ground on every Murray trip), where, of course, I went at once to bed, G. "having church" for the last time in the evening, in the dining-room of the house.

Monday was a rest-day here. On Tuesday morning we made the necessary early departure, and a few hours later met with the first of our two serious adventures.

It was soon after our picnic lunch, early in the afternoon. We were trundling through the eternal solitude, refreshed and content, enjoying our conversation and the brilliant weather, when we saw a Bush fire far ahead. Since we were not responsible for starting it, we hailed it as a welcome variation in the monotony of our drive. We hoped to skirt it near enough to see what it was doing. Bush fires were pleasing novelties in those days; now the faintest distant scent of them gives me a "turn" like a qualm of sickness. I shall explain why later on. This incident does not explain it, although it well might.

As we advanced, the area of conflagration opened out. It was an extensive fire, and in thick country. Not grass, but trees were roaring to the sky. Our anxiety to get close to it gradually gave place to a wish that it were further away. Misgivings deepened as we drew near; alarm supervened. "It is right across the track," said G. at last; and so it was, and far to right and left.

The last thing we wanted to do was to turn back, and indeed the wings of flame curved in behind us even as we drew rein to discuss our chances—not until we had driven quite up to the blazing wall, in the hope of seeing through to the other side, and finding a crossing-place. To go into the unburnt scrub on either hand would have been madness, for nothing could have saved us had the fire caught us there. Every inch of earth provided fuel for it, except the narrow, dusty buggy track. To that we knew we must stick at all hazards, and a very hurried survey of our unpleasant position showed us that there was nothing for it but to go on—to plunge into the flaming belt, and get out as best we could.

A few yards, we hopefully reckoned it: it turned out nearer half a mile. It might have been midnight, for all the daylight or sunlight that we saw during that dreadful passage: we were like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the burning fiery furnace, enveloped in a glare as of the infernal regions. The tree-torches over our heads dropped blazing leaves on us (the useful grey shawl again intervening): the grass-blades caught and curled up at the very tires of the wheels; the buggy sides blistered like our hands and cheeks. Not a word did we speak, except to urge on the horses, on which our lives depended, and which we are convinced they saved.

They shivered and jumped and snorted a little when the flames came very near, or they were touched by a spark, but never for a moment gave way to the panic which would have been natural, and which would have destroyed us all. Digging their heads into their chests, obeying voice, whip, and rein, they strained along doggedly, keeping the track as they had done on the steep sidings, until they brought us out at last into light and safety. Such nerve and courage I never saw or heard of in horses, which can stand almost anything better than fire at close quarters. But this pair were unmatchable.

We staggered into port, and tried, with our parched tongues, to tell the tale. Never shall I forget the shock I received from the behaviour of the person interviewed. The thin veneer of his sympathy for us was as glass over his solid and shining satisfaction at hearing how his waste land was getting cleared—at no expense to him. I thought I had never met a more heartless man.

Then, after a night in the humble chalet of two young fellows, just starting squatting for themselves in a romantic nook of the hills—who ought not to have been asked to entertain a lady, but did it most hospitably with the best at their command, we passed on to our next adventure.

It was another lovely morning, and the usual bottle of new milk and private spirit-flask compensated somewhat for the chops I had not been able to eat at breakfast. It was a beautiful if rough drive down the hills to the river-flats and another little hamlet that is now a full-grown town, with a railway to it. On the way we stopped to watch the evolutions of an eagle-hawk, which had caught up an opossum (stupid as an owl in daylight), and was sailing through the ether with it, fiercely chased by all the other birds of the neighbourhood. They call these great creatures eagle-hawks, but they are wholly eagles, to all intents and purposes. I have seen one swoop over a terrified flock, claw up a good-sized lamb, and soar away with it as if it were a mouse.

Leaving the township, we came presently to a river—the Mitta, in flood. And here our incomparable horses, which had saved us from a fiery, saved us from a watery, grave—possibly. G., it is true, was a good swimmer, but I was not, and the worst might have happened. Drownings of venturesome travellers, under the same circumstances, were frequently reported in those days.

That river had to be crossed. There was no bridge, of course, and not a soul within miles of whom to make inquiries as to the fording-place. The only thing to do, therefore, was to take the last one known, while anticipating—rightly as it proved—that it would be found washed out and gone. "Oh, you can't cross there now," they told us, after we had done it.

I and all our belongings were gathered upon the buggy seat, skirts tucked round me, railing and portmanteau tightly clutched; G. knelt on the cushion of the driver's seat, and we plunged in. Deeper, deeper, deeper, until we swayed and rocked and swung round upon our axis, and the current took the horses off their feet and began to drift them down. But their heads still pointed to the old landing-place: with all their strength they held back against the stream; and swimming steadily, got us ashore without an upset, and, with a tremendous spurt and scramble, up a bank that would have tried the mettle of a South African bullock team.

It was the last "pinch." By noon we reached the wide-spreading roofs of a house which was simply a free hotel for every passer-by—that house where even the blacks were made welcome, one of them having the run of visitors' bedrooms in the night. There G. left me, returning after a few hours with our little boy and his nurse and the doctor's horse. And the following day we were at home.

CHAPTER IX[ToC]

LOCAL COLOUR

I often wonder what G. would have done if he had been a weakly man or an indifferent rider. There were lengthy periods during which he practically lived in the saddle, getting out of it merely for meals and sleep. For a time we kept records of the totals of miles covered per week or per year, but, these matters ceasing to be notable, we lost them long ago. And it is better not to trust even to his memory to reproduce them, for I am certain that no figure near the truth would be credited by the English reader.

The following is the programme for a monthly Sunday in W——, where the breaking-in began:—Up at 4 A.M. Breakfast at a station twenty-five miles distant. Morning service five miles further distant (in an open shed, the congregation sitting on wheat-sacks or what not). Dinner near by, and ride of twelve miles to afternoon service. Tea, and ride of five miles to evening service. Ride of seventeen miles home. Of course he could have started on Saturday and returned on Monday, but he never spent a night away from his own house unless absolutely compelled. I used to wake from my first sleep at the sound of the cantering hoofs, pop on my dressing-gown, and go and hold the lantern for him while he made his horse comfortable, and then join him at his well-earned supper. He was always fresh at the end of this tremendous day, or, at anyrate, not more than pleasantly tired—generally more disposed to sit up and gossip than to go to bed. The horse, too, which had carried him all day, though glad to reach his journey's end, was undistressed. It was by no means an exceptional day's work for an Australian horse.

Only once do I remember seeing G., at the end of one of these Bush excursions, thoroughly knocked up. That was in furnace-hot midsummer weather, when he had been out all day in a north wind. He had been sent for to take a burial service, and was first driven twenty-five miles to the station where the body was lying. Hence the funeral party, on horseback and in black clothes and hats, proceeded at a slow foot-pace another twenty-five miles to the station where the family burying-ground was situated. Here, at the grave, one mourner fell, sun-struck; the rest were more or less prostrated. G. rode those terrible twenty-five miles, and the same distance back to the first station; there he had a meal and a short rest, and then rode home in the night, which was pitchy dark. The temperature was still over 100° and the wind in the north, and the whole thing proved too much even for his strength. He was really tired out, for once. But that was the only time that I remember him being so (from riding) in all the years that I have known him.

I may mention another funeral with some old-time features about it. The summons came one evening, from a long distance, and the man bringing it left directions for G. to follow in riding to the appointed spot next day—for he had but just arrived in the district, which was all unknown land to him. The man promised to meet him at a certain swamp of some miles in extent; the funeral would have to skirt round this swamp, but there was a track through it, known to the initiated, by which a rider could save much distance; he had, however, to be a good rider, on a good horse, because it was a quicksandy sort of ground, and a guide was necessary. G. managed to find this place and duly met his guide, who upbraided him for not being there earlier. The man then led the way through the swamp, at a pace as near to flying as possible, to avoid being sucked in; if a horse rested his weight on the ground for a moment, he began to sink. They were awful places, those. I once saw G. (I was riding behind him) caught by one unawares. The instant he knew it he rolled off the saddle and back to terra firma like a streak of lightning, and eventually he got his horse out too; but it gave me cold shivers to think what might have happened. Though, as I never heard of anyone being engulfed entirely, I suppose there were bottoms somewhere.

On this occasion the guide tore along at the pace I have mentioned, kicking up the sticky stuff behind him; G., obliged to ride in his tracks and close at his heels, was smothered in the shower, and when he joined the funeral procession was a cake of black mud from head to foot. Arrived at the cemetery, it was found that the grave had not been dug—not begun to be dug—and the party had to sit around for three hours while this necessary business was transacted. A hospitable soul amongst the mourners took G. to his neighbouring shanty, cleaned him down a bit, and gave him eggs and chops and tea and all the usual kindness. Word was brought to them when the grave was ready, and they returned to finish the proceedings.

This cemetery, although remote and small, was a public one; that of the other funeral was private. I have known several of these family burying-places, made in the first instance for the pioneers who "took up" the land—crown land, become freehold and virtually entailed—now occupied by their descendants; some of them are used still. Only a short time ago I was visiting one of the old homes, a wealthy station, administered by the third generation of its possessors; and, walking about the grounds after luncheon, I was shown the cemetery, with its rows of head-stones and monuments and its fence and gate, like a section cut out of any well kept municipal burial-ground; only this lay amongst garden-beds and orange-groves, in full view of the windows on one side of the house. Hither had been brought back the daughters who had married and gone away. "And here," said my white-haired host, "we," indicating the family group of which he was the centre, "shall all come, I hope." I trust there will be no law made to prevent it. Technically unconsecrated, as I suppose they are, these little family burying-places have a peculiar sacredness, to my thinking, not belonging to the common gathering-places of the dead; the difference is as between a bed at home and a bed in a hotel.

One friend of ours, bachelor-owner of one of the finest properties in the wealthy Western District, ordered that he should be interred on the top of a hill on his estate, and that no monument was to be erected over him. His wishes were carried out. G. read the burial service at the lonely grave, which is marked only by a cairn of stones.

Some of the Bush weddings of those early times were as unconventional as the Bush funerals. Our verger and odd man about the church at Y—— (we took him over from our predecessor) could not read. G. called upon him one day to say the responses at a marriage service, there being no other congregation, and he pleaded this disability. "Well, at least," said G., "you can say 'Amen' can't you?" Oh, yes, he could do that. And he did—with a vengeance. Every time G. paused to take a breath, no matter where, a loud "Amen!" was shot into the breach. Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?—"Amen!" There was nothing for it but to race through the ceremony, and "Old Jimmy" was not required to officiate again.

G. was often nonplussed in this way, by finding ignorance where he expected knowledge as a matter of course. Once he started to read the Litany in a strange place for the first time. Dead silence followed the opening sentence. In a low voice he directed the congregation what to do, but nothing would make them do it; evidently they had never had the Litany before, and did not know what to make of it. In the end he had to read the whole alone. I myself came upon a crowded class of Sunday-school children who did not know who Noah was. I was trying to stuff them with that legend of a submerged world, and I put the question encouragingly: "Now, who was the good man whom God spared when all the rest were drowned?" Rows and rows, dozens and dozens (they filled that flower-stand-like arrangement of stair-seats running up the wall, which the village school provides for the infant scholars) of blank little faces were interrogated one by one. "Can't you tell me? Can't you?" No, none of them could. At last one bright little boy spoke up. "I know, teacher!" "Ah, then you tell these other little boys and girls. Who was it?" He shouted triumphantly, "Robinson Crusoe!"

There was a Bush wedding that would have made quite a romantic story, if I had thought to write it. G. was on the Murray Journey, and it was one of his engagements for the outward route. Cantering along through the Bush, he was met and accosted by a drunken old man, who asked him whether he was not the parson and on the way to marry So-and-so. G. informed him that he was. "Well, don't you do it," said the man. "I'm the girl's father, and she's under age, and she can't marry without my consent, and I won't give it." G. rode on, and at the appointed rendezvous met the young couple, a nice modest girl and a respectable-looking young man. Documents were produced for filling up and signing, and G. asked for that necessary one which he feared would not be forthcoming. It was not. The bridegroom-elect pretended that it had been mislaid—"bluffed" all he knew, poor fellow—but he could not produce it, and without it there could be no marriage. The bride, being in her teens, must have her father's written consent, and this father had refused it. They tried to persuade G. to marry them without it, but, as he told them, it was more than his place was worth; the law was plain and had to be obeyed. They retired for a while to discuss the unhappy situation, and then the bride came back alone, weeping, to renew the useless appeal. She had a wretched life with her drunken father, who ill-used her, and her lover had prepared for her a good and happy home, and oh, couldn't G., for once and in consideration of the hard circumstances, stretch a point? He was sorry enough that he could not. All he could do was to promise to see them again on his homeward journey, and to marry them then if in the meantime they had been able to soften the father's heart. But when he returned he found the situation unchanged; the old ruffian's heart was flint. The end of it all was that the poor young things, using the legal knowledge acquired from G., went off to another colony and another clergyman who knew them not, to whom the bride gave her age as over twenty-one. G., when he heard of this, did not make it his business to denounce the desperate young criminals.

He celebrated another Bush wedding—and there was a wedding party to it—in the destined home of the happy pair. It was a bark hut, with a mud floor and as yet without a shred of furniture in it. The papers were filled up and signed on an up-ended cask. At another marriage feast all the guests were drunk to start with. They offered him a glass of neat brandy in which to drink the health of the contracting parties. In all sorts of places, and at all hours of the day and night, he has been called upon to weld the bands of holy matrimony; the evening—after dark—is the time preferred by those casual couples who do not bother about wedding garments and the other conventional displays.

I once got a pathetic glimpse of one of these belated functions; it was performed for G. by a locum tenens in one of our country parishes. "Why," said he to me, before going into church, "why do these people make a point of being married in the vestry and not before the altar?" They had pressed this point with such earnestness that he had yielded to it. His idea was that they did not feel themselves smart enough for the usual observances, although there were to be no spectators; but even to him it seemed an absurd one. We knew them well—that the mother, authorising the marriage as the only surviving parent, was a highly-respected lady, and the bridegroom a steady young man, long a member of her establishment; the bride, who was very young, was her only child. The hour and the place chosen, and the secrecy of the whole affair, puzzled us, though we might easily have guessed their meaning. I happened to see the vestry door open on the conclusion of the ceremony. In the bright patch of light suddenly flung upon the screen of darkness stood mother and daughter, locked in each other's arms, apparently weeping bitterly. "Tell me," said the officiating minister, when he came in, "tell me how this business turns out," and he left us next day for his home in Melbourne. The first thing I heard was the news that the girl had been married, all unbeknown to her friends and at some distant church, several months before the date on which I knew she had been married; everybody told me this, and of course I did not contradict the statement. Four or five months later I met her in a railway carriage, and she had a bouncing baby in her arms. The strict moralist would have been horrified to see how proud of it she was, and how blooming and happy and satisfied she looked.

Strange to say, evening weddings are de rigueur in the upper circles of the place where I now live—the only place thus distinguished, so far as I know. Soon after we came here a particularly "swell" wedding took place—that may have set the fashion—the hour of which was fixed at 8 P.M. The bridal robe, with its court train, had been sent from London, the gift of a wealthy sister; it was a wonderful white brocade shot with silver threads, and certainly shimmered in the gaslight as it could not have done by day. The gorgeous costumes of the guests also "lit up" with great effectiveness, as did the elaborate decorations of the church. It was really a dramatic spectacle. And the church was almost pulled to pieces by the crowd who went to see it.

And so now all the butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers have their weddings at night. Business is over, and they can revel thoroughly while they are about it. And outsiders, being also free to enjoy themselves, come in shoals to see the fun. Gates have to be locked and defended by brute force like barricades against besiegers, and the police are welcome when they deign to grace the scene. We hate this custom, which for several reasons is not nice to think of, but cannot alter it. Fashion is always irresistible when there is no law to the contrary, and canonical hours are ignored in this country. In the Bush, in the old days, persons got married at night only because they were ashamed to do so by day, or because they had no choice.

Another more purely social function of the Church had its Australian peculiarities, so marked at times as to obscure the lines of the original model, followed with such religious care. I allude to the time-honoured tea-meeting. I shall never forget how the first one that I attended on this side of the world astonished me.

It was while we were at W——, and the occasion was the laying of the foundation stone of a church at a mining township some twelve miles off. A large party of us, headed by our archdeacon, had a pleasant drive to the spot during the afternoon; on arrival our buggies were variously disposed of amongst the local residents, who, after the business ceremony, welcomed us to the hall or schoolroom where the festive tables were spread. I had seen the festive tables at home—bread and butter, substantial whitish cake, currant buns—and expected some approximation to that immemorial bill of fare, which to me was all one with the Rubrics.

I did not know—though I soon learnt—that the poorest Sunday-school child would not look at it. For the Sunday-school treat—just so much on a lower plane than a tea-meeting as boys and girls are inferior to men and women—you must have nothing plainer than ham-sandwich; that is the basis on which to build the rich edifice of sweets. Ham it must be, and no meaner substitute. So, at least, it was when I took active part in such affairs; for I know that once, when we thought to economise with beef, an irate mother came to ask us what we meant by it. The children never had been put off with beef, and she considered it a burning shame. One year, when the "treat" food was provided, as usual, by the ladies of the congregation, each cooking to outvie the rest, I took upon myself to remonstrate with them for their cruelty—in stuffing the poor children with unlimited cream-cakes and meringues. Yes, actually meringues, on my word of honour. But that, I must admit, was an exceptional circumstance.

Nowadays, as I am informed, things are not quite the same. For instance, the current Sunday-school attached to this establishment makes its annual sandwiches of ham, beef, and German sausage, in about equal parts, and I do not hear of any complaints. It is a large Sunday-school, and therefore not so much all one family as those little ones of the past: and ham is something like a shilling a pound; and town ways are not as Bush ways. In town it is a common thing to employ a caterer at so much per head. So that we may say the times have changed. But the children, wherever they are and whoever makes it for them, still pack rich puff pastry on the top of their sandwiches, and rich plum cake on the top of that, and miscellaneous "lollies" on the top of all, until there is no room for a crumb more; and what happens to them next day, and the day after, is a question that yearly agitates my mind. Quite unnecessarily, I suppose. Their little stomachs are hardened to it.

So the aspect of my Bush feast—the tea-meeting tea—may be inferred. Chickens and turkeys, hams and tongues, pies and sucking-pigs, jellies and trifles—in short, all the features of an old-fashioned wedding breakfast or a ball supper were there, except the wine. You had, naturally, to drink tea at a tea-meeting—if you wanted to drink anything with such oceans of whipped cream. But the tea is the only remaining link between the Australian tea-meeting and the English one, unless the English one has changed greatly since my time.

A purely social function, did I call it? It had, of course, its raison d'être if only to "draw the people together," which is its last excuse (the first always "goes without saying"). On one occasion a tea-meeting was attached to a movement for getting some parochial work done, of which part of the parish approved and part did not. Speeches for and against were made when the tables had been cleared, and G. spoke for the side that he personally espoused. The local paper, which was on the opposite side, reported his speech in the following ingenious manner: "The reverend gentleman was understood to say" so and so (substantially what he actually did say), "but what he meant to say was" so and so (what the local paper and its party thought he ought to have said).

The great tea-meeting of all is what is called the Diocesan Festival. It is held annually, at the time of the sitting of the Church Assembly, which is our House of Convocation; and all the leading (English) Churchmen of the diocese, lay and clerical, take their part in "running the show." The Melbourne Town Hall is filled with tea-tables, individually donated by parishes or private families; Church of England people, and many besides, flock thither and pack the place to suffocation before six o'clock, at which hour they sit down to eat and drink, having paid eighteen pence per head for the privilege. When tea is over there is a great struggle for room to remove the tables and their furnishings, but it is done somehow, and only benches and chairs left for the evening assembly, augmented by many not present at the tea. During this interval the cathedral organist gives selections on the great instrument that was the city's pride in the seventies and eighties, but now needs more money than City fathers care to give (for mere artistic purposes) to bring it up to the requirements of these times and of a self-respecting performer; then, when all is ready, the orchestra platform fills with big-wigs—governor, bishops, "special attractions" bespoken long before—and stirring speeches fill the rest of the bill. It is a great carnival for pious folk, and not without interest for mere ordinary beings like myself; and the substantial profit resulting from it is one of the mainstays of the "Bishop of Melbourne's Fund," which is the general fund in aid of general diocesan distress.

Substantial profit, it is needless to remark, is the first object of the promoters of all these entertainments, so many and various—tea-meetings, bazaars, "sales of gifts," Bruce auctions, cake fairs, concerts, etc., etc.—and has to be so while the voluntary system and poor human nature exist together. Each event is contrived "for the benefit of the Church," a term well understood by all its members, who will contribute pounds of money and endless time and trouble to such affairs sooner than lay an extra shilling or two in the offertory plate. Every parish is running its little money-making enterprise at short intervals, the other denominations, whose parish it is also, doing the same. Sometimes there is an unfriendly competition between the churches, smart dodges to take the wind out of a rival's sails; more often they have a tacit fraternal arrangement to aid each other, or at anyrate not get into each other's way. You will hear it said at a ladies' working party, "What a shame of the Catholics to take our conversazione night for their concert!" Or, "The Presbyterians sent a lot of things to our bazaar, so it is only right we should help them with theirs."

The concert is the commonest of these events. It costs, in money, time, and trouble, less to get up than the others. Domestically, this is a musical country, and local performers are never hard to find. My natural impulse is to stay at home when the miscellaneous amateur is abroad, but sometimes, when I have steeled myself to endure him or her, I have been rewarded beyond my expectations or deserts. One thing stands out from my experiences in this line that is worthy of note—the high average of excellence in the quality of the amateur voice. I am convinced there are as good fish in the sea as the Melbas and Crossleys that have come out of it, judging by the number of little girls, hardly past childhood, whom I have seen come upon the stage in parish schoolrooms and rural shire-halls, and proceed to give forth full, ringing notes that, for power, would do justice to the Albert Hall or the Crystal Palace, and with the right training (as I think) might do anything. I believe it is the climate that accounts for it—the air that throat and lungs have grown on; and if so, this is the place for the speculator in such wares to come to. Expert fossicking might reveal a new Kimberley to the world.

Still, in spite of these occasional surprises, the parish concert—after so many of them—is apt to pall upon the too-accustomed ear. One looks to the human interest for entertainment, rather than to art. In what I believe was the very first parish concert that I went to, this element largely predominated.

It was held at a hamlet some eight or ten miles from head-quarters, and we drove to it in a party, taking several of the performers with us. Before business began, our prima donna, a young married lady, confessed to not feeling very well; she said she had been eating fruit, which had disagreed with her. However, she went through the two hours' programme unflinchingly, and so acquitted herself as to rouse no suspicion of the fact that she herself was perfectly aware of. She was a tall, handsome, resolute sort of woman, who, finding herself in a horrible dilemma, determined to brave it out. "I had to do it," she said to us afterwards, "or else upset everything and make a disgraceful exhibition of myself. And I thought there would be plenty of time." But she had miscalculated in this respect, as it is so easy to do, and the situation had grown desperate before she was nearly through with her last number; I noted her damp brow and deeply flushed face, and wondered at the unsmiling look in her eyes when they met mine; her accompanist also was put about a little here and there; nevertheless, she made a finish of her song before she bowed to our applause and bowed herself off the stage. Then a word went round amongst the matrons which filled us with dismay and concern. The doctor's horses were put to his buggy, and the doctor and his wife and Mrs T. were gone ere "God Save the Queen" was finished. When the rest of us got home afterwards, it was to hear that our prima donna had become a mother rather less than two minutes after gaining the shelter of her own house.

I think that was the most interesting concert I was ever at. Others who were there, remembering it with equal vividness, say the same.

CHAPTER X[ToC]

THE FOURTH HOME

Sad indeed was the breaking-up of that pleasant home at Y——. It followed upon, and was a consequence of, the death of our little daughter, when she was nearly a year old.

These are the times when the Bush dweller feels his geographical position most keenly—when he needs the best medical advice and cannot get it. I do not say that our dear old German doctor was not a good doctor in his way, for he was; but practically nothing had been added to his knowledge since he was young, and in this case he confessed frankly that he was altogether at fault. He had never met with a similar one—nor have I; and after looking up all the authorities at his command, even to the papers and notes of lectures of his student days, his honest mind would not pretend to have made itself up. His professional credit was not so dear to that man as truth. "I don't know," he said in so many words. And how often I have wondered whether, if we had been rich, we could have found someone else who did! Would a special train and a thousand guinea fee have saved her?

These are questions that shock some of my clerical friends, mothers amongst them. "It was the Lord's will," they say, and seem to think that settles it. A few months ago I was spending an evening with a young curate and his wife, whom I had not met before; they were ardently religious people, in their own line, and they had recently lost their only son. The mother gave me the history. He had had an internal tumour or something of the sort, a growth that steadily increased, and which the doctors had plainly said must be removed if his life was to be saved. The parents replied—and they repeated the words with such proud confidence that they were right words—"No, if the Lord intends him to get well, he will get well without that." And instead of the operation—urged by their incumbent, who also gave me these facts, as well as by other friends—they had prayer-meetings at the bed-side. The little sufferer, described as a bright boy of nine, swelled and swelled until he died. "The Lord needed him," said the mother to me. And "We feel so honoured to have a child in Heaven." She made my blood run cold. I can never have shocked the "good" people more than that ultra "good" woman shocked me.

We left nothing to these chances. When whooping-cough came to the township, I took extraordinary precautions to keep my children from catching it. The epidemic was nearly over when the little boy fell a victim, and then I watched day and night to prevent contact with the baby. Quite at the last (the lady I have spoken of would have some remarks to make on this) my efforts were defeated; the baby took it in spite of me. She was a healthy and happy little soul, and at first her case seemed just an ordinary one. But after coughing for a week or two, she ceased to cough suddenly, and fell into strange fainting-fits; they seized her so silently and swiftly that I hardly once saw her go into one, although she was in the room with me, and my eye, as I thought, never off her. A cry from her nurse or somebody would cause me to jump as if I had been shot, and there lay my little one, wherever she happened to have been sitting or crawling, exactly like one dead—grey, limp, eyes sunk, lips drawn back, neither breath nor heart-beat discoverable. We would snatch her up and rub her and give her brandy; and after some minutes, more or less, she would struggle painfully back to life, and as soon as respiration returned begin to shriek in the most terrible manner, and keep it up until completely exhausted; then she would drop asleep, remain asleep for a whole day, perhaps, and awake placid and cooing, ready to be fed and played with, apparently as well as ever. At intervals of a day, or two days, she had perhaps half a dozen of these fits; then she had one that lasted nearly three hours. All the while that she lay in our arms, we having no hope that she would revive again, a thin stream of what looked like grey water trickled from one nostril; it was the only sign of life. The old doctor, having done all he knew, sat looking on, as helpless as we. However, again she struggled back, and, getting breath, began that quick, agonising shriek which was so maddening to hear and impossible to stop. The doctor put his hands to his ears. "I can't stand it," he said; "I must go outside. Call me if you want me." After awhile he went home, but the shrieks lasted the greater part of the night, gradually, as her strength wore out, dying into hoarse wails and moaning off at last into exhausted sleep.

She slept the entire day, and I sat by the cradle and watched her, sopping several handkerchiefs with those foolish tears which I am supposed to weep for the pleasure of it and could help shedding if I liked. Then, towards evening, a little hand began playing with the cradle-frills, and the happy little coo that used to wake me of a morning broke the silence of the room. I could not believe my eyes and ears. We sent post-haste for the doctor. Well, there she was, looking as if nothing had happened. And for three weeks thereafter she had no more fits, but ate and played, and throve and fattened, apparently better than she had ever done in her life.

"Whatever it was," said the doctor, "that last attack has carried it off. You will see she will be all right now."

At the end of the three happy weeks that seemed to prove him right, I gave a little musical party. He brought his flute, and we were in the middle of a more or less orchestral performance, when I fancied I heard a cry from the next room—a cry with that peculiar sharp edge to it that I had so learned to dread. I rushed to the cradle, the doctor after me, and we lifted the child up and examined her. "Oh, she's all right," we said, with long breaths of relief; "it was only our noisy music that disturbed her." We placed the nursemaid on guard, and went back to the drawing-room, and for the rest of the evening made less noise, while she made none, but slumbered peacefully.

In the morning she woke up as usual; that is, I did not know when she woke. She hardly ever cried to be taken up, but played with her bed-clothes and her toes, and gurgled and gabbled to herself until I chose to lift her into my bed. She was in the most blooming condition. From the time that I dressed her, until breakfast was ready, she played with the cat on the dining-room floor, and a vivid memory of the day is of the smothered chuckles of the two servants while G. was reading prayers, because of the hilarious and irreverent shouts and crows with which baby enlivened the proceedings. When breakfast came in she was carried out. At the door her nurse held her up and told her to say good-bye to her father and mother. The bright little creature, perfection in my eyes, with her sunny curls and blue eyes and the little face lit up with the fun of going through her tricks, kissed her hand and waved it, and nodded and farewelled us in her baby language, and the door closed upon our last sight of her in life.

It was my habit to take her for an airing after breakfast, while the servants helped each other with the housework, and this particular morning was a glorious one, the crisp, sunny winter morning of Australian hill country, with the first hint of spring in it. I got her little cloak and hood and went to the kitchen to fetch her. The kitchen was large and airy, opening upon the garden, and her cradle was sometimes placed in a corner there, where she could be watched by the servants, who were both devoted to her. It was there now, and she was in it. "She seemed sleepy," said the elder girl, "so we laid her down."

"She must have been awake earlier than usual," I thought, and, stooping over the cradle, I saw her, as I believed—and still believe—sleeping quietly, carefully tucked up, the little golden head laid sidewise on the pillow. It was not her bed-time by an hour or two, but her habit of not telling me when she started the day seemed to explain the too early sleepiness. I told the girls they were right to put her down, and went off to the housework on my own account. Some time later the elder servant came to me where I was busy, G. being with me. "Oh, ma'am," said she, gaspingly, "I wish you'd come and look at baby. She's so pale!" G. almost flung me aside lest I should get to the door first, and dashed to the kitchen. We both knew instantly what had happened. The servants had not left her for a moment; she had not made a movement or a sound; she could not have known what had happened herself, which was something to be thankful for. One of her strange fits had seized her—the one, at last, that she would never come out of. Her father snatched her up—lying exactly as I had left her—and called for the brandy; we tried to pour it down her throat, where not a drop would go, until she grew quite cold and rigid in our arms.

It was the first of these almost insupportable bereavements, and the effect on my health was so severe that a complete change of surroundings was considered necessary—to get me away from the house whose every nook and corner was haunted by such agonising visions of what had been. G., for his part, could no longer stand the Murray journeys, involving such long and complete separation at a time when we needed so much to be together. So he cast about for a more compact parish, and one offered that fulfilled the requirements—and more.

It was so far away from Y—— that we had to sell our furniture and begin at the beginning again. At this auction the amateur sofas went, and from that time I bought sofas. The new drawing-room was graced with a "suite" in green rep—such was our taste in pre-exhibition days—and the sofa was of that curly shape which prohibited repose. By filling the upper concave end with my big cushions I could make head and shoulders comfortable, but then there was no scope for legs and feet; and one had to anchor one's self with the right hand to the sloping and slippery framework of the back to keep from rolling off. I never did appreciate that ingenious design, and the suite was no sooner in its place than I found even the colour of it annoying. To improve the effect I made holland covers for every piece—pretty chintzes were unprocurable—and at least a fresher and brighter air was imparted to the room; but I was not sorry that we had to have another auction at the end of three years' companionship with the suite.

In other ways this fourth home was a great change from the other three. We were now down in the flat, settled, macadamised country, only twenty miles or so from Ballarat and fifty from the metropolis—quite "in the world." I say "down," but it was a colder, wetter, snowier place to winter in than any other that we have known on this side of the globe—seventeen hundred feet above sea-level.

Apart from the trouble I have spoken of, and a bitterer one of the same nature that was soon to follow it, and the further misfortune of a carriage accident from the results of which I suffered for many years, my life at B——, socially considered, was more to my taste than had been the case before in Australia, or than has been since. For there I first discovered the resources of the colony in its intellectually-cultivated class, and enjoyed the society and friendship of some who represented it at its best—members of a small, inter-related, highly exclusive circle of about half a dozen families, who had had time and the means to read, travel, and generally sustain the traditions of refinement to which they were born.

Chronologically, they were the first gentlefolk of the land—"Rolf Boldrewood" speaks of some of them in his Old Melbourne Memories—and they still merit the title in another sense. The clans have dwindled, indeed, but not all the original heads have fallen yet, and I have not heard of a mésalliance amongst their descendants. If they do not marry with each other, they marry with their kind. As with the Salisburys and Buccleuchs and modern London Society, they remain uncontaminated by the influences which have made our own little world of fashion a faint copy of the big one at home. Money, which "runs the show" elsewhere, is no passport to those dignified homes, dating from "before the gold," in which I have spent so many happy hours.

My own passport to it was a little tale in the Australasian—my first to run as a serial in that paper. It is gone now, and was never worth keeping, but as a story about the colony, written from within, it aroused interest in its anonymous author at the time, amongst those whose eyes were keen to note literary events, small as well as big. My friend, "Rolf Boldrewood," had not yet received the worldwide recognition that he now enjoys; he was a "Sydneysider," and supposed to belong to his own colony. Poor "Tasma" had scarcely begun her brief literary career; Mary Gaunt, and others now on the roll, were mostly in their nurseries or unborn. So that I had the advantage of a stage very much to myself, which of course accounted largely for the attention I received. And of all the pleasure and profit that I derived from my long connection with the Australian press, nothing was more valuable to me than the uplifting sympathy of those readers I have mentioned, who were also as fine critics as any in the world.

The first night at B—— gave me the key of the position. The one socially "great house" of our new parish entertained us. Its owner, an old Wykehamist and cadet of a noble Scottish family, who, having practically built the church, and being its main supporter, stood for what would have been the patron of the living at home, himself fetched us from Ballarat, driving the wonderful "four greys" that were as well known as he was. Never shall I forget my first sight of that sweet old house in its incomparable old garden—of the sunset from the plateau along which we drove to it from the lodge gates, the picture that has delighted me so many, many times. And never shall I forget my reception, the dinner, the evening, the sensation of finding myself suddenly and unexpectedly in a place where brains and good breeding alone counted, and nothing else was of any consequence. From the hour that I set foot in that house the situation, as it concerned me personally, was completely changed. I found, if not my level, the level which suited me.

Another house of the charmed circle began to help to make life interesting for us both. It lay within comfortable driving distance, and its family had recently returned to it from extensive travels about the world. The actual structure, to which I paid my first visits, was a modest relic of the fifties, but already there was arising from the crest-of a neighbouring hill the most desirable country house, in its own style, then built or a-building—to my thinking, at anyrate—the final dwelling-place of the owner of the surrounding land, who had been its owner from "before the gold." It was after this home of taste had been completed that we held our famous International Exhibition of 1880, which first taught us as a community the rudiments of modern art; and I remember the satisfaction with which the mistress of G—— wandered from court to court, and found no exhibits more pleasing, in their respective classes, than the treasures she had gathered for herself in foreign parts. Whether it were a Persian rug or a Venetian wine-glass, her specimen was, in her opinion, unsurpassed by any picked model of the like manufacture; in which I agreed with her. There is no lack now of what are generally described as artistic things; hundreds of Victorian homes, big and little, may in the tastefulness of their appointments outshine G—— to-day; but it was otherwise twenty years ago. At that date, when we stay-at-homes were all for gold and white wall-paper and grass-green suites (but the reader bears in mind that I put holland covers over mine) in our drawing-rooms, I believe G—— was unique in the colony as the first example of the new order. I may say here that we became rapidly æsthetic afterwards, because it is our constant habit to follow English fashions ardently as soon as we get an idea of what they are.

I had not been long in B—— before I heard of the flattering notice excited by my story—Up the Murray was its name—and by the discovery, on the part of our neighbours aforesaid, that the humble author was living where she was. Arrangements, unbeknown to me, were made for mutual introductions and acquaintanceship, and one day I was invited to join a driving party from our "great house"—which I wish I could describe in less vulgar terms (but to call it B—— would be confusing)—to meet half-way upon the road a driving party from the other. The day was beautiful, and I see now before my mind's eye the panorama of the spring landscape. We halted on the brow of a hill—the four greys dancing themselves into complicated knots and being dramatically disentangled with the whip-thong—and down below the carriage from G—— toiling up the stony Gap track towards us. How well we learned that road afterwards, going to and fro continually either in the vehicles of our friends or in our own. If I have ever done anything to earn a respectable place in my profession I owe it to the awakening and educating influences that surrounded me at this time. My intellectual life was never so well-fed and fortified.

Of Melbourne Society, so called, I knew little as yet. My "set" held much aloof from it, gathering only its own affinities into the charming house-parties that brought whiffs of the gay world to us from time to time. Although I was now so near to it, I do not think I paid one visit to the metropolis while we lived at B——; invitations I had, but the inclination was lacking. I was satisfied as I was. We made expeditions occasionally to Ballarat, then, as now, the second city of our state, where a small group, long since vanished, of the old families still resided, to attract our particular old family thither, and where on our own account we had a few clerical and other friends to welcome us. One of these expeditions was typical of several.

The date it stands against in my diary is September 10th, 1873—the time of budding spring. Our "squire," with a part of his family, arrived at the parsonage in the lovely morning, with the "old carriage," as it was called—a deep-seated, roomy vehicle that I can hardly give a name to, but which was the easiest and cosiest that I ever rode in. G. and I joined the party, and we started on our long drive. It took us about three hours if we did not stop by the way, but these excursions would have been very incomplete without the roadside picnic. Picnics were our joy, also our forte, and the country is made for them. So we stopped when we met the groom who had been sent ahead with fresh horses—the "old carriage" was heavy, and not built for Australian roads—and we lunched under the gum-trees with that exquisite appetite that we never know indoors. Then, at our leisure, on again until we trundled into the streets of the golden city—which, I may remark in passing, is a truly charming city, and to my mind ought to be the Federal Capital, if only because of its cool and bracing climate (although it is also almost exactly central for all the states as well). But in discussing sites for the future Washington, no one seems to take into account what an effect upon legislation a languid air and mosquitoes of a night may have.

We spent the balance of the afternoon shopping, and were then deposited, with our evening clothes, at the house of one of the historical few—perhaps the most witty and world-cultured of them all, certainly the brightest company. He had been much in France, I think; he spoke often of Paris, with the air and knowledge of a born Parisian; his singing of French songs was as un-English as it could be. It was always said of Colonel R. that he would never be old, and I met him the other day on a tram, and in the course of our ride together found him as mentally alert as ever, although he confessed to me, with a comical dolefulness, that he was some years past eighty. He still wore his smart, "well-groomed," gallant air (accent on the first syllable of this adjective, please), and was as ready as of old with his pretty compliments.

We dined with him and his wife, and then went all together to the Academy of Music (newly built) to hear Ilma de Murska. She was a small, fair-haired, glittering person, with a frilly train like a pink serpent meandering around her feet, and the way she trilled and rouladed was amazing. After the concert we had a merry supper, and then—by this time indifferent to the flight of the hours—changed our clothes and prepared for the homeward drive. We had but one pair of horses now for the whole journey, so that it was necessary to take the hills at a walk, and we reached B—— at about four in the morning. We inside the carriage could have slept almost as easily as in our beds, but we were obliged to keep awake to watch the swaying bodies on the box. It was funny to see us winding scarves round our squire's ample waist, and tying him to the low rail behind him, without disturbing his slumbers. These precautions would have been useless, however, had not one of us stood ready to clutch his sleeve at critical moments. On finding himself too sleepy for our safety, he had given the reins to his little son, who was a perfectly competent substitute. But that it was thought well to tie him into his seat to prevent them from dragging him over the dashboard, he could at nine or ten years old drive four horses so well that I preferred to trust myself to him rather than to any casual man, if I was to ride behind them.

It was upon one of the hills between B—— and Ballarat that the accident took place which impaired my health for many years; but then no member of this family was driving. We had just started after our picnic lunch on the second stage of the journey, and had come to the top of a steep bit of road that had a sharp turn at the bottom, when something went wrong with the brake. The huge, top-heavy vehicle—one we called "the caravan"—ran upon the horses, which, as usual in Bush harness, had no breeching to back against, and there was nothing for it but to send them downhill at full gallop; they did their part, but the sharp corner was too sharp for us, and as we swung round it we swung right over. It seemed an inevitable thing, yet I am convinced that our squire would not have allowed it to happen. He was taking a brief rest inside the carriage, with the ladies, and so got a broken arm and a dislocated shoulder, which, together with the disgrace of the catastrophe, much incensed him. We used to get into marvellous tight places under his devil-may-care handling of his notoriously wild, half-broken horses, but never without coming safely out of them; they were the occasions of proving what a miraculous whip he was. Once a wheel came off when the team were in mid-career, and in the twinkling of an eye he had so turned the other three wheels as to balance the waggonette upon them until its occupants could get out. One day four other horses were rushed up a broken hill track amongst trees to some mine workings on the top, and as there was no turning space here they had to come down backwards. We were showing the country to some officers of an Italian man-o'-war, and the dumb dignity with which those men went through the ordeal spoke volumes for their breeding as well as for their nerve.