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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 x% 
 
 Fastoralists' Conversazione. 
 
 LARGE number of pastoraliats, together with several other gentlemen 
 belonging to the banking, wool -broking, and shipping industries, attended 
 ^>5 a Conversazione on Tuesday evening, 27th August, at the invitation of the 
 TproprietoTS oi the AustTnlasian Pastoralists' Review. Important papers were read 
 and interspersed with selections by an orchestra. Mr. Jolin Cooke presided. 
 
 The Chairman said : — Greatly as I appreciate the honour of presiding over this 
 large gathering of gentlemen associated with the pastoral industiy and other gentle- 
 men engaged in developing the country's natural resources, I could well have wished 
 that our friend, Mr. Twopeny, had made a better choice, and in doing so had contributed 
 more to my individual pleasure, because, springing from a modest nation, and being 
 of a retiring disposition, I would rather be seated amongst one of your cheerful little 
 groups than in the prominent position in which I find myself. Doubtless, however, 
 our host, in asking me to preside, desired to pay a compliment to a friendship of 
 many years' standing, more especially as I had given him what little aid I could in 
 launching and permanently establishing his tnterprise. Two prominent reasons 
 actuated me in giving that assistance — (1) The need of a pastoralist organ ; (2) the 
 conviction that Mr. Twopeny was the " man for Gal way." (Cheers.) There is no 
 need to say that my confidence was amply justified. (Hear, hear.) The Australasian 
 Pastoralists' Review speaks for itself, Look at its scope— pastoral news of a most 
 interesting character from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Geelong, and from the beautiful 
 estancias of the Argentine Republic to the lovely meadows and rich pastures of 
 Footscray (Laughter.) fScience, literature, romance, law, and poetry find ample 
 space in its columns, while art steps in occasionally, and immortalises now a great 
 man, again a celebrated sheep — cause and effect you see judiciously blended. I find 
 the Review of great benefit to me in my business, and it .certainly is establishing a 
 permanent history of an industry that invst ever be the great national sheet anchor 
 of Australian prosperity. (Hear, hear.) 
 
 Klje Australasian "pasteralists' ^ebiefe. 
 
 Spring Street, Sydney. 475 Collins Street, Melbourne. 158 Elizabeth 
 Street, Brisbane. 31 Fleet Street, London. 
 
 SrBSCRIPTION ... $1 PER ANNUM.
 
 Tit?: (Jlobk Thoitkh.
 
   ' M "Pvi^^ /w.^ ^^^^ 
 
 /^U5traliafif^ 
 
 Qossip 
 
 SI VIUOO L/ # # 
 
 9^ 5'^^^y- 
 
 By the "GLOBE TROTTER." 
 
 'RelDfinted from the "Sydney Stock 
 and Station Journal." 
 
 WILLIAM BROOKS & CO, 
 The City Printers, Queen's Place, Sydney, 
 
 AND KLIZAJJKTH STUKKT, HUISI5ANK. 
 1895
 
 DEDICATED 
 
 with 
 
 Loving Reverence 
 
 to 
 
 My Dear One. 
 
 O'lNO
 
 
 
 o^ 
 
 -^1- PREF^T^CE.i^ 
 
 \\ BOUlv without a pi'et'ace is iiic()iii)ilrtc. Tiic 
 stories herewith were wiittcn for the pasioi ;il 
 'G)sr' readers of the Syunky Stock and Station' 
   Journal. They liave rendeied that ])apci' 
 very popular, and we now send them forth 
 with a blessing to the kindly criticism of a larger cdn- 
 stituency. They are not the children of a leisured 
 literary life, but they are the work of a busy journalist, 
 and as such, dear reader, we commend them to you. 
 
 489493 
 
 UB S^TS
 
 t € ccc ccrei 
 
 
 Oui^ Illusti^ations. 
 
 SYDNEY HARBOUR. 
 
 The most wonderful city in the woi-ld is Sydney. It is the 
 capital of New South Wales, and our colony has an area of 
 310,700 square miles, being a little over two-and-a-half times 
 the size of Great Britain and Ireland. New South Wales is, 
 roughly, 680 miles long and 760 miles wide. Our harbour has a 
 water surface 15 square miles, and a shoi'e line of 165 miles. 
 Sydney and its suburbs occupy an area of 141 square miles, and 
 the population numbers about 420,000 souls. 
 
 In 1788 the first settlement was made in Port Jackson, as 
 our harbour is called, and the city of Sydney was founded 
 January 26 of that year. 
 
 The Constitution Act was proclaimed on July 16th, 1855, 
 and the first representative Parliament was opened on May 22nd, 
 1856. Since that time the progress of the colony has Ijeen 
 enormous, and tlie views we give herewith will convey morf- 
 clearly than any words how we have advanced, and give force to 
 tlie woi'ds of William Charles Wentworth, written in the early 
 
 years of the present century, — 
 
 " Should Britain cease to ride 
 
 Despotic Empre.si of old Ocean'.s tide, 
 May this— thy last-born infant — then arise 
 To glad thy heart and greet thy parent eye ; 
 And Australasia float, witli flag uiifurl'd, 
 A new Brittania in another vvoihl." 
 
 In this volume there is an excellent photograph of Sydney 
 Harbour, taken by Mr. Bayless, and the block has been lent 
 to us by Messrs. Baker and Rouse, the well-known photo- 
 graphic supi:)ly dealers. Some of the ph(jtographs in this 
 volume have beeii taken by Messrs. Kerry and Co., and we can 
 say with consideral)le pride that Sydney can equal the best 
 photographers in tlie world. We are not in any way behind 
 the English or Americans in matters of photographic art, and 
 the reproductions as seen in this book say moi'e than 
 chapters of words could, how the world goes with us in that 
 respect. The Electric Photo Company has made nearly all 
 the blocks, and they bear witness to what skill can do under 
 the sunny skies of New South Wales.
 
 (iONTElMirS. 
 
 Sorrows of ChiMhuoil .. ... .. ... ... .. 9 
 
 Parents and ChikUen ... .. . .. .. 1"2 
 
 Courting Days ... ... ... .. .. ... ... l.l 
 
 A Sapphire Ring ... ... ... ... .. ... .. 18 
 
 Siiereefa of Wazaii ... ... ... ... ... ... 21 
 
 A Cow's Front TeaLli ... . 24 
 
 Jhe Land Question ... ... ... ... .. ... .30 
 
 The Liver Fluke 33 
 
 Man Know Thyself 4.") 
 
 Sir Henry Parkes' House ... ... ... .. •.. 4S 
 
 Professor Huxley ... ... .. ... ..   .~y2 
 
 Australian Progress ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 57 
 
 Style on Stations ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 8.5 
 
 Crabs 88 
 
 Pigs ... 94 
 
 Pearls ... ... ... ... .. ... ... ... ... 97 
 
 Oysters 100 
 
 The Riverina 103 
 
 A Riverina Station ... ... ... ... •• ... ... 107 
 
 The Mystery of Instinct Ill 
 
 Ancient Freezing Methods ... .. .. ... ... ... Ill 
 
 On the Lachlan ... . . ... ... .. ... 117 
 
 Wentworth Gorge ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 12t) 
 
 The Blue Mountains ... 123 
 
 Jennie Keen ... ... ... ... .. ... ... .. 141 
 
 Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. . ... ... ... 144 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Circular (Juay in 1S42 ... ... .. ... ... ... 25 
 
 Circular Quay in 1892 33 
 
 A Manly Steamer ... ... .. ... ... .• ... 55 
 
 Belmont Park Stud 60 61, 66, 67, 74, 75, 80, 81
 
 g..i^ 
 
 William Brooks & Co., 
 
 the city printers, 
 
 Queen's Place ; 
 
 am) elizabeth st., bkishane. 
 
 G.r^T^
 
 Sorrows of Chtldhooa. 9 
 
 SerneWs ef 6h(ilelhi80d 
 
 ^T has been well said that we are born crying, we live com- 
 plaining, and we die disappointed. One never realises 
 how bitterly true that is till a man moans, " Oh, would 
 I were a boy again." Think of the dreams we dreamed 
 in our childhood of the coming manhood ; of the time when we 
 would be able to sit up all night, if we wanted to, and l)uy 
 whatever we liked with our money. How all the world, the 
 far-off world of our manhood, was glowing with colour and 
 beauty, and our little hearts throbbed with feverish desire to 
 be " grown up." Then think of the bitter disappointment that 
 life has been to a man who says, " I would I were a boy again." 
 God help him ! The deep pathos of Thackeray's words come 
 back at such a time — " When I was a boy I wanted toifee, but 
 I hadn't a shilling ; now I'm an old man, and have a shilling, 
 but I don't want any toffee." That's what life means to many 
 of us. 
 
 It was Josh Billings who said, " Life is divided into three 
 parts : the first j^art is spent throwing stones at a mark, the 
 second part is spent in seeing if the stones have hit the mark, 
 and the third part is spent in nursing the rheumatism and 
 cursing the stone-thi^owing business altogether." That's not 
 spelled as Josh put it, but it is what he said, and plenty of 
 readers will recognise the bitterness of it all. 
 
 I don't want to be a child again ! The bitter sorrows of 
 the youthful days are far away now, but they were very bitter 
 once, and very real. In our house we had a little^ green, 
 screaming paroquet that represented to us children all the mystery 
 of the bush and all the wonder of animal life. "We were very 
 small children, and we loved the screaming of that noisy bird 
 as no adult ever loved the singing of a Patti or a Melba. It 
 was our first thought in the morning, our last thought at night. 
 One dreadful morning we came downstairs to find that Polly 
 was dead. The little thing had been twisting at the wires of 
 the cage, and had got its head through and choked itself. 
 Nobody can ever tell the woe that fell upon our child hearts 
 that day. We had never loved anything as we loved that bird, 
 and we cried over it and kissed it and mourned for it as only 
 children could do.
 
 10 Austrahan Gossip and Story, 
 
 When our grief had run its course we I'esolved on a grand 
 funeral. My little sister gave her grandest doll - rags for a 
 shroud, and I wrote the birdie's epitaph on a piece of slate — I 
 don't remerDber now what it was, but all the juvenile scholas- 
 ticism of my life was expended on it. Then we put the bird 
 into a basket with two handles, and we carried it between us, 
 w^hile the very small brother walked tearfully behind. We 
 dug a grave in a green paddock, and laid the dead one in it, 
 and raised the slate tombstone as i-everently as though it had 
 been over one of our own kin, and then, with the empty basket, 
 we toddled tearfully homewards. 
 
 Since that time the brother and sister have passed away, 
 and found rest from earth's turmoils. Since that time I have 
 laid the remains of many a comrade to rest in strange lands, 
 and have kept watch o'er the dying ones in many a weird place, 
 but never sorrow was deeper or truer than the child's sorrow ; 
 never grief was more acute than came that time, in the dawn 
 of life, when the world lay all hidden in the mists of time before 
 my childish feet. " Will the bird live again in the better 
 land T was the question that troubled our child hearts ; dare 
 you answer it now ? We dreamed dreams then, and sometimes 
 we dream now — 
 
 " And oft when the sunset is fairest, 
 
 We catch, through a rift in the blue, 
 A far-away glimpse of the glories 
 
 Of the land where our dreams come true." 
 
 Supposing you were to ask me now what was the greatest 
 grief of my life, you would never guess what it was. Once 
 upon a time, a very long time ago, my people lived in a little 
 bouse in the heart of a busy town. We had no garden, no 
 flowers, no beauty about our house. In the paved yard I 
 had dug up some stones and planted some beans. They were 
 the most wondei'ful beans that ever were planted, except those 
 of " Jack-in- the-Beanstalk." It seemed to me that all things 
 were possible to those tiny things. They were such a long, 
 long time in coming up — for they got very little sunshine — that 
 I got tired of waiting for them. Then, one day, I took a knife 
 and dug down very carefully to see what had come of them, to 
 see if they were dead or had forgotten that a little boy was 
 wearily waiting for them. There lay a bean, black and rotten, 
 with a tiny, whitish thing coming out of its side ; then I knew it 
 had not forgotten, and so covered it up very tenderly and waited. 
 
 By-and-bye a curled blade of green came out of the earth, 
 and my mother — dear soul — was so glad to see it, for her little 
 boy's sake, and he dreamed that it would grow up till it reached 
 the sky, and he would climb up it and search the land where the 
 stars glinted for the treasures that would make him happy and
 
 Sorrows of Childhood, 
 
 11 
 
 would enable him to keep his mother in a big house, for he 
 dreamed, poor child, that all who lived in big houses and wore 
 fine clothes were happy. What silly, silly notions children have ! 
 
 Then the beans grew up, and each leaf was watched and 
 each unfolding announced ; and other small children were invited 
 in, as a great favour, to see the marvellous, mystical development. 
 Then when they grew up a few inches — poor weaklings of a city 
 back-yard — they had to be propped up with sticks ; but, in the 
 eyes of the little boy gardener, they were wondrously Vjeautiful. 
 There never were such beans in the world. But one day the 
 small boy came home, and his first rush was to see his little 
 garden — and there it lay in ruins, covered with stones, utterly 
 destroyed. Some boys had climbed up the back entry wall, and, 
 in pure devilry and maliciousness, had destroyed the poor bean 
 garden. Do you understand the storm of rage and sorrow that 
 swept over that little boy 'l It was the saddest, bitterest thing 
 that had ever befallen him, and he lay down and fairly poured 
 out his heart in tears. Many a year has passed away since then, 
 many a fierce storm has swept over that boy since, but never a 
 grief like that grief. 
 
 The mountain tops of life that seemed covered with gold 
 have faded away to ashen grey, and the flower-strewn paths of 
 life have turned into ash-tracks, and the bitternesses of life have 
 overflowed their banks, but no loss has ever equalled the loss of 
 the beans. The deepest sorrows of adult life were not to be 
 compared to the bitter sorrows of helpless childhood, and I, for 
 one, never want to be a child again. When a man says that he 
 wishes he were once again a child, you know that life has been a 
 failure to him, and it is to most of us. We struggle fiercely for 
 a place in the race, in hopes of earning a brief spell of rest before 
 Ve settle into the dreary gloom of the grave, but how few of us 
 ever get it ! When we realise what life means, and love and 
 death, we grow more kindly in our ways and more tolerant of the 
 fallings of those about us, and the world grows sweeter and better 
 than ever of old, and then we can look back on some of the 
 bright spots in child life and croon, very softly — 
 
 " Backward, turn backward, O time, in j^our flight, 
 And make me a child again just for to-nigiit."
 
 12 AiLstxalian Gossip and Story. 
 
 parents aqd Children. 
 
 ^^ ITTING one flay in the train I saw a chubby little Aus- 
 tralian boy misbehaving himself. He hfid a sugar cake, 
 which he smeared on the cushioned seats. He crumbled 
 it on his mother's dress, and she said, " Don't do that, 
 Willy ;" but Willy kept on doing it all the same. She said she 
 would beat him, and he did it some more. She said she would 
 tell his father, and the young wretch didn't care. She shook 
 him, hn screamed, she kissed him, and the whole carriage was 
 rendered unhappy. That woman had no more idea of how to 
 manage a child than a stud ram has of political economy. I 
 wanted to go over and give her a licking for her ignorant 
 wickedness. We are for ever prating about the duty of children 
 to parents, but children are good to good parents ! What we want 
 is to insist a little more on the duty that parents owe to children. 
 Children didn't ask to be allowed to join the family circle. 
 They have no responsibility for being the children of ignorant 
 parents, yet all the time we talk about their being long in the land 
 if they honour their father and mother. Why, you couldn't honor 
 some parents, or if you did you'd be a fool. The wonder to me is 
 that children grow up as good as they do ! It shows that the 
 pressure of the ages makes itself felt on the child in spite of 
 parental ignorance. There are men who understand the training 
 of horses and the breeding of sheep, but they never seem to dream- 
 that children require training, or that there is anything in the 
 breeding of children. Men will pay big salaries to horse-trainers, 
 and give a governess starvation wages. We are a race of fat- 
 headed fools, and it's a wonder we pi'ogress at all. 
 
 Did you ever notice that the very worst boy in the family 
 sometimes makes the best man ? I comfort myself with that. 
 I don't quite like good childi'en ; there's something suspicious 
 about them. Good little girls are possibilities, but goocl little 
 boys are anachronisms,, anomalies — call them what you like. 
 There was a lady once said that she didn't like to have the parson 
 too good, she liked one " with the chill taken off." I'm afraid 
 there's a lot of us that way. I have a sneaking regard for the 
 very bad boy, because he has enough of the devil in him to make 
 a good man ! 
 
 There was a boy I knew once named Jo. He had red hair ;. 
 he was ragged, dirty, and vicious. We were running a ragged
 
 Parents and Children. 13 
 
 school at the time, in a back slum, for just such boys as Jo. We 
 met on Sunday nights, and the bosses of the show were quakers ; 
 real good people they were, too. The trouble with them was that 
 they had theories about human nature, and they wouldn't lick a 
 b^y under any circumstances whatever. They hung on to Gospel 
 truths until it came to " Spare the rod and spoil the child." Jo 
 was the terror of their lives ! I proposed to take all the rag-tag 
 to the public baths one morning a week and teach them how to 
 swim, on condition that they behaved themselves, and took their 
 Gospel physic nicely on Sunday nights. What a big school we 
 soon had ; but poor, little untrained wretches, it was hard work 
 for them to keep quiet at prayer times. 
 
 Soon after that Jo came to me with tears in his eyes, for we 
 were good friends, in spite of occasional outbreaks, and told 
 me that his little sister Mary had fallen down some steps and 
 broken her arm ; would I come and see her. What a foul 
 den they lived in. No wonder children grow up wicked ! It 
 was the old stoiy — a drunken father, a drunken mother, hunger, 
 misei'y, and vice. Honour thy father and thy mother, eh % I 
 got little Mary off to an hospital, and when Jo went to see her she 
 had on a red gown, and she sat in a clean white bed, such as the 
 poor little mite had never seen in all her life before, and Jo was 
 awed by the sight. He was as shy and timid as a young deer, 
 and dared hardly go near Mary, and the pair of them just 
 cried, poor little souls. Jo was tame after that. He learned 
 to read, he went to school, and the last I saw of him he was a 
 strapping, well-built young soldier rising rapidly iu the service. 
 When he bailed me up in the street one day I could hardly 
 believe that the fine-looking military man was the red-headed 
 little wretch who set the crabs adrift on the floor. But that's 
 it, small boys, who have a lot of the devil in them, may be 
 trained to make good men. 
 
 When I see how our Australian small boys are left to them- 
 selves to grow up without training, without discipline, without 
 learning how to obey, it makes me quake for the future of the 
 race. My comfort is that I know some well-trained boys ; I 
 know little fellows that it's a pleasure to be with, and I love 
 children. But I never blame them for being bad ; I blame 
 their parents every time. That's a double-barrelled statement, 
 too, and you can figure out what it means for yourselves if you 
 feel that way. Of this one thing I'm perfectly certain — it's no 
 good preaching that childi'en should honour their parents. 
 They'll do that every time if the parents are worthy of it. 
 "What we need to preach in Australia is that parents ought to 
 do their duty by their children. If they did we wouldn't have 
 so many larrikins and ne'er-do-wells in our streets, " Them's 
 my sentiments, and I'm no child !"
 
 14 Australian Gossip and Story 
 
 One Sunday Jo went down to the beach and brought home 
 a capful of crabs. That night, when a good old man was 
 praying and stillness reigned over the room, Jo launched the 
 crabs from underneath a seat. The first boy that saw a crab 
 running across the floor gave a suppressed shriek of excitement, 
 and soon the school was in a wild uproar that defied all the 
 moral suasion of the quakers. I knew Jo did it, but then what 
 was the use of saying anything ? One night he broke some 
 law or other, and after fair warning I took him out into the 
 school-yard and gave him a rare licking. That did the school 
 good, for they all heard him yell, and he w^as the chief of the 
 rag-tag villainy of the district. 
 
 Jo only did one other trick after that. One night a nice 
 old man was leading the service ; Jo was horribly quiet, so 
 were his pals, but — 
 
 '"Twas an ominous cahn, to be broken soon 
 By a storm more fierce than the dread simoon." 
 
 That young rascal had bought a pennyworth of catarrh snufF, 
 a horrible compound that titilates the nasal membranes to such 
 an extent that you nearly sneeze your head off. He had given 
 about two dozen bad boys a pinch, and told them not to take 
 it till he gave the signal. The villains waited as quiet as mice 
 all through the hymns and the preliminaries, and then, when 
 the dear old grey beard began to pray, and all was quiet, Jo 
 gave the signal, and took the first pinch himself. Such a 
 sneeze burst out as terrified the old man, and nearly froze the 
 blood in the quakers' veins, and Jo lay down on the floor and 
 sneezed wildly, helplessly, and unrestrainedly. Then the others 
 started in, till we had over a dozen ragged little scoundrels 
 sneezing as if their whole lives depended on it. Then the 
 other ragged rascals, who had no snufF, fairly screamed with 
 delight, and the service came to an untimely end.
 
 Courting Days 1& 
 
 Geupfin^ Bays. 
 
 SHE following dialogue once appeared in the London 
 Punch : — 
 
 " Say, Bill, are you goin' to the Derby T 
 "Aye." 
 
 " Are you goin' for fun, or are you goin' to take the missus 
 with you?"*^ 
 
 There are thousands of men who take that query as a sad, 
 solema piece of earnestness. They never think of their wives 
 as they used to think of the same women when they were their 
 sweethearts ; in fact, my experience goes to prove that the 
 spoonier a man is when he's courting the more unjust, selfish, 
 and tyrannical he is after he gets married A.ny man who 
 courts a girl and swears to love her, honour her, and make her 
 life a dream of happiness, and then converts her into a cook, 
 general servant, and stay-at-home slavey, is a miserable fraud. 
 He deserves to be unhappy, and he is. 
 
 Years and years ago I knew a horribly pious man who was 
 the superintendent of a Sunday-school. He used to pray over the 
 Sunday-school push and weep for them as if his soul was racked 
 with woes on account of them all ; then he'd go and wallop his 
 own children till the neighbours went for the police, and he 
 made home into a little hell for his "dear wife." His employes 
 trembled at the sound of his voice. He was a j)ious, self- 
 deceived fraud, for he actually believed in his own righteous- 
 ness. One time he went with a Sunday-school picnic, and 
 when he came back he told me his woes ! He said, " As soon 
 as lunch was over the teachers all paired off and went away 
 into the bush, leaving me alone with my wife. Oh, it was 
 dreadful !" 
 
 That same miserable, pious fraud used to court a nice girl, 
 and he was never happy when he was away from her. He was 
 no great catch in the matrimonial market, and her parents 
 didn't like him, but the girl, poor shallow soul, admired him, 
 and, taking him at his own valuation, thought him a loving, 
 whole-souled man. She married him to please herself, and 
 hell followed after. As soon as the honeymoon was over that 
 man stopped courting and put his wife into the position of 
 cook and " general," with no wages. He had no more happi- 
 ness, neither had she, and it served him right. When a maa'a
 
 16 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 idea of love only reaches as far as the honeymoon, he deserves 
 to suffer. 
 
 I knew a good man a^nd woman who got married long years 
 ago. He .vas as good a man as you could find in a big city — 
 a true, generous, noble fellow. She was as sweet a woman as 
 ever breathed, and when she was a grandmother she looked so 
 young and sweet that you couldn't believe her record. But 
 that woman's life had been a desert waste, for she would fain 
 have kept up her courting days. She would fain have loved 
 her husband in the married state as he had loved her before 
 they were married, but he was too dense to see it. He was 
 good and true, but he didn't dream that a woman's heart was 
 tender or that she had taken his lover-like vuws for Gospel 
 truth. He only courted her and whispered loving words to 
 her to win her for his wife, and once that was done all was 
 over. Then they settled down to the hum-drum of life, and 
 she to a heart-hunger that looked for ever out of her sweet 
 eyes. But she never complained. 
 
 Suppose a married woman, with a lot of. children, rose in 
 her wrath and upbraided her husband for neglecting her, the 
 world would say, " Doesn't he give you money enough to keep 
 house r 
 
 " Oh, yes !" 
 
 " Well, does he beat you, or curse you, or starve you, or 
 what ?" 
 
 " He does none of those things, but he has given up 
 courting me." 
 
 And then the blind, stupid, bestial world would laugh and 
 point the finger of scorn at the woman I The idea of an old 
 married woman wanting love and courtship and honeymoons, 
 and things like that. Why, it's ridiculous, and so we go to 
 the devil at the same rate as of old. We have desertions and 
 Divorce Court cases, and blind, awful misery and wretched 
 lives, because we fail to realise the need for keeping up our 
 courting days after we are married. If some men did one- 
 tenth of the nice things for their wives that they used to do 
 for their sweethearts they would find life a lot pleasanter than 
 they do. But then, most of us are fools, and we awaken but 
 slowly to the real needs of every-day life. 
 
 All the fault isn't with the men, though ! When I hear a 
 man abusing women, or women abusing men, I know I'm 
 listening to a fool, though I don't always say so ! We are 
 "parts of one stupendous whole;" we are one people, and every 
 man had a mother, and he owes his very existence to women, 
 just as women owe their existence to men ; and then, to hear 
 one sex abusing the other would be funny if it were not 
 pathetic. Women are just as much to blame as men. I've
 
 Courting Days. 17 
 
 tnown women who used to be nice and smart and kissable 
 when they were courting, but as soon as they were married — 
 oh, boys ! oh, boys ! They put their hair in curl-papers, wore 
 slippers down at the heel, and looked as if they had lost all 
 idea of keeping the hearts they had won. No wonder there's a 
 lot of misery in this world ! 
 
 I could go and pick up a lot of happy married people in 
 Sydney, enough to make a big picnic party, who have made a 
 success of marriage. There are some who go for a honeymoon 
 every year, who keep up their old habits, even though life is 
 not all romance. There are husbands who " bob their hats " 
 to their old wives just as they did when they were courting, 
 who carry them flowers from the shops in town, and who are 
 never seen at places of public amusement without the one they 
 swore to honour long ago. There are wives who look as pretty 
 and neat and " fetching " when they sit at the head of the 
 table now as when their lovers came a-wooing many years ago ; 
 and they are happy, and deserve to be happy. A great 
 preacher once said that " Men marry either for heaven or for 
 hell," and I believe it. If a man's home life is miserable, he 
 cannot be happy anywhere else, and I believe, with the Naza- 
 rene, that " Heaven is not far from any one of us," and that 
 we make or mar our own bliss in this little world. Do you 
 remember that yarn about " Betsy and I T The old man's 
 statement, in the making up, is worth considering. He said : 
 
 " I told her, in the future, I wouldn't speak cross or rash 
 If half the crockery in the house was broken all to smash ; 
 And she said, in regards to heaven, we'd try and learn its worth 
 By startin' a branch establishment and runnin' it here on earth."
 
 18 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 \ ^Sappl^ire \^\r\k 
 
 ^^ uTTING one day on the cool verandah of a pleasant 
 fflPlK\ home overlooking forests of gum trees and long stretches 
 rii^^J of lovely scenery, a beautiful girl stretched out her hand 
 to point to something, and all the scenery faded away from 
 my sight. On her finger was a quaint sapphire ring ! What a 
 wonderful thing is a sapphire stone ! The Persians say that 
 this globe of ours rests on a vast sapphire, and the reflection 
 from that stone colours the skies. So did the ancient men 
 weave in all manner of strange fancies with precious stones — 
 moral influences, physical influences, and occult influences of 
 many kinds. 
 
 In the olden times, far back in the world's history, before 
 the days of newspapers, or stock agents, or Houses of Parlia- 
 ment, there were strange beliefs in regard to precious stones, 
 and the sight of the sapphire on that girl's finger recalled some 
 of them. When Moses was bossing the Jews round about the 
 Red Sea he made a breast-plate for the High Priest, and this 
 was composed of precious stones, one of which was the sapphire. 
 On each of these stones was an anagram of the Name of God, 
 and the priests could foretell the future by them. When the 
 armies of Israel were going out to victory the stones glittered 
 with the prospects of slaughter ; when they were going to 
 defeat the stones were dull and dark — but the army had to go 
 all the same. 
 
 When Moses wanted to carve the precious stones he had to 
 invent a method, and, as he was the Edison of his day, he did 
 so with ease. He found a worm in the desert, the blood of 
 which softened the stones, and the carving was easy. When, 
 in a later day, Solomon wanted to work precious stones for the 
 building of the temple, he found himself short of this special 
 fluid ; but Solomon was no fool, even if he did have a lot of 
 wives. He took the chicken of an ostrich and put it under a 
 glass dish, and set his servants to watch. (Observe that 
 Solomon had glass !) When the old ostrich came round and 
 found its young one fastened up so curiously it started off to 
 the desert and brought back a peculiar worm. It dabbed the 
 blood of the worm on to the glass, and then picked the vessel 
 to pieces and got its young one out. Of course, the Wisest 
 Man saw the kind of a worm that was required, and he secured 
 all the blood he wanted for the gem business.
 
 A Sapphire Ring. 19 
 
 In the breast-plate of the High Priest each stone stood for 
 a sign and a symbol. The sapphire stood for the tribe of 
 Issachar, for the sign of Leo (the lion), and for the angel 
 Verchel (whoever he was), and this exquisite blue stone, full of 
 glory and virtue, has held its own through all the ages of the 
 world's history Not that the sapphire is always blue, or the 
 sky either ; but blue skies and blue sapphires seem to be 
 natural, ab least in New South Wales. Its name comes from 
 the old Arabic word " Sappeer,'' to scratch ; hence the name 
 has no relation to colour, but it has to hardness. The Chal- 
 dean alphabet and the writings of the olden time were also 
 called " sappeers," because they had to be scratched by a hard 
 instrument ; and this " sapphire " on the girl's finger was one of 
 the world's letter-making instruments. But life is too brief 
 and these columns too short to tell all about the sapphire, for it 
 has been interwoven with the history, mystery, and supersti- 
 tion of human beings since ever they passed the Stone Age. 
 
 There's an old book that our forefathers used to swear by, 
 called the Bible. It is not as familiar to some of us as it 
 might be, but no man's education is complete without a know- 
 ledge of it. In the last part of that mystical, powerful, little 
 understood book there is a story about the New Jerusalem — 
 "And the building of the wall of it was of jasper, and the city 
 was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of 
 the wall of the city were garnished with all n?anner of precious 
 stone". The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire," 
 etc., etc. You see, when you get the sapphire into the walls of 
 the New Jerusalem, you get it about as high as you can reach. But 
 here comes the question — what was the colour of that sapphire ? 
 Was it a New South Wales sapphire, with the glorious colour 
 of a corn flower 1 Was it a white sapphire, such as they get 
 in South Australia ? or was it a blue, Burmese sapphire ? You 
 give it up ! That's the best way with all Scriptural questions — 
 then you are sure to be safe. That Book of Revelations is a 
 poser at any time. I think it was an English bishop who said 
 that it either finds a man mad or leaves him mad. Perhaps 
 the bishop was right, and the best way is not to speculate. 
 
 The ancients never could deal easily with sapphires, 
 because they are so terribly hard, and it took Solomcn-like 
 skill to work them to perfection. However, they were used as 
 charms in the uncut state, and were supposed to possess very 
 marvellous properties, and the Greeks dedicated them to the 
 god Apollo. If any man went to the altar of Apollo without 
 having a sapphire in his possession, he was not likely to get 
 his prayers answered. But Apollo is out of fashion now. 
 Ancient gods have risen to world-wide power and waned to 
 utter forgetfulness, while the sapphire has held its sway over
 
 20 
 
 Aiistrqlian Gossip and Story. 
 
 the hearts of women. Many nations and faiths have vanished for 
 ever, but the sapphire endurcth, and the sight of the deep 
 corn-flower blue on that girl's finger the other day set me to 
 wondering and thinking. 
 
 Later ages dedicated the corn flower - coloured stone to 
 fresh gods. When the month of April was invented, in the 
 Northern Hemisphere, and sapphire skies came after the dull 
 grey of winter months, what more natural than that this lovely 
 stone should become interwoven with the legends of April and 
 the spring-time 1 Then the world's old wives wove around it, 
 for modern days, new powers to suit the new times. For the 
 days of steam and electricity the lovely sapphire has new uses 
 and fresh virtues — it heals boils, restores impaired sight, 
 extinguishes fires, and mends the manners of the wearer. But 
 the girl who wore it had no boils, had good eyesight, and 
 excellent manners ; so, unless the sapphire could extinguish her 
 fiery ambitions, it would have no business except to adorn her. 
 When you get gossiping on a simple subject like that — of a 
 sapphire in a girl's ring — you find a lot in the subject, don't 
 you 1 Herbert Spencer says that " The simj)lest phenomena, 
 in their ultimate essence, are unknowable." M'yes !
 
 Shereefa of Wazan. 21 
 
 ^Sh^epeefa ef Wazan, 
 
 ^NE day, sitting at a restaurant table in Sydney, my ear 
 caught the words " Hill, Clark," and I listened. Three 
 young men were sitting at the same table discussing 
 the characters of the men in the employ of Messi's. 
 Hill, Clark and Co., of Sydney. They took no heed of me, for 
 I'm an innocent-looking little man, but I was intensely interested 
 in that subject. They chatted away as though no stranger were 
 present, and anyone listening to them would have assumed that 
 the feet of Hill, Clark's young men did not take hold on 
 Jacob's ladder. I knew better than that, but I held my peace. 
 We are terribly in the habit, some of us, of talking aloud in 
 public places, forgetful of the fact that the stolid looking people 
 beside us may know more about the subject matter of our 
 discourse than we think for. 
 
 An incident occurred once on board a Mediterranean steamer 
 that has made me careful ever since, and as it is a story with a 
 moral, it is exactly suited for the pages of the Sydney Stock and 
 Station Jonrnal. 
 
 I was on the way from Oran, in Algeria, to Gibraltar, in a 
 French steamer. We had a small crowd of passengers, most of 
 whom were under that mysterious influence of the sea, known in 
 French as rnal dc mer. In a little cabin at the head of the saloon 
 stairs thsre lay tw-o Yankee girls and a dark -faced, stout, strange 
 woman. The girls were fair types of the class of Americans who 
 have a rich father, and nothing else. They were shallow, nasal, 
 giggly girls who were doing " Yurupp." When they were able 
 to sit up they asked me who the dark-faced woman was on the 
 opposite lounge. I didn't know, but we guessed she was the 
 widow of a German storekeeper, and was unable to speak 
 English, so we chatted on, and the dark woman never smiled. 
 
 We anchored in the port of Nemours, and when the Arabs 
 came on board they all seemed to know the dark woman, and 
 she talked Arabic to them, a thing that you would never expect 
 a self-respecting Christian woman to understa)id. Then Ave were 
 sure that she was a storekeeper's wife. That night most of the 
 passengers sat down to dinner. The new-rich Yankee father sat 
 at the end of the table to my right. The girls were at his end 
 of the table. Opposite to me sat a quiet little English Major-
 
 22 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 General. He was a gentleman, with nothing of the soldier about 
 him at all. The dark woman sat at the opposite end of the table 
 amongst the French officers, with whom she chatted gaily in 
 French. A woman who talks French and Arabic is past praying 
 for. 
 
 As the dinner proceeded, we, at our end, discussed the 
 wonders of the Mediterranean coasts, and somehow the conversa- 
 tion drifted on to the critical condition of affairs in Morocco. 
 Then we discussed the marriage of the Grand Shereef of Wazan. 
 He was a kind of spiritual ruler in Morocco, and about sixteen 
 years before he had married an English governess, who had 
 become the Shereefa of Wazan and a Moslem. After sixteen 
 years of married life, and the birth of two sons, the Shereef had 
 divorced his English wife, and had married a pretty young 
 Jewess in Tangier. I was present at the wedding festivities, and 
 the Yankee girls were greatly interested in the details. The 
 Moorish bride is put into a little cage, a sort of bee-hive box, and 
 strapped on to a mule, with all the wedding presents piled on the 
 cage. Then the mule is driven round the town. Arabs on 
 horseback rush about and fire off their muskets and yell like 
 mad, and the town goes crazy over an affair like the Shereef's 
 wedding, The Major, in a quiet tone, said that the Shereef was 
 a " little nigger," and he didn't know how an English woman 
 could go so fai" as to marry a man like him. 
 
 The Yankee girls were deeply interested, and the conversa- 
 tion grew exceedingly animated. I said that the Shereef was 
 not very tall and he was rather dark, but he was a grand, kingly 
 little man. The Major stuck to his own idea, however, and the 
 Yankee girls made terrible remarks. One of them, the most 
 nasal, the most self-assertive and loud-voiced, said, in tones that 
 rang through all the saloon, " I don't know how an English- 
 woman could go and marry a man like that. I wouldn't marry 
 a nigger, anyhow." In the midst of a warm discussion the French 
 purser who sat not far from me suddenly reached over, and, 
 laying his hand on my arm, said, " Vill you kindly cease de con- 
 versation, as de Shereefa is at de table T Great Cfesar's ghost ! 
 I glanced down to the other end of the taVjle, and there sat the 
 dark, strange woman glaring at me, poor little me, with her face 
 all aflame, I never felt so bad in my life, I felt as if I would 
 choke. I heard the Yankee girls say, " What's the matter T 
 " Say, mister, what's happened T But I was dumb. Then the 
 Shereefa arose Avith eyes gleaming like live coals and said, in 
 clear-cut, forceful English, " I object to your conversation. I am 
 the Shereefa of Wazan !" There was such a silence fell on that 
 table as you might have cut with a knife. It was a ghastly, 
 wordless blank, a creepy, chilly, never-to-be-forgotten interval. 
 Then the Yankee man at the head of the table wanted to change
 
 Shereefa of Wazan. 23 
 
 the subject, as it were, and he said, in an awful, nasal tone, '' It's 
 very warm to-night !" " Warm, eh % It was suffocating, it was 
 excruciating. How we got away from that table has never been 
 very clear to me, but we did get away, somehow, and then we 
 gathered together on deck and whispered like guilty conspirators. 
 The Major said to me, in solemn tones, " You should never say 
 anything about anybody, to anybody, before anybody." No, 
 indeed. 
 
 The Shereefa turned out to be a regular " brick," and when 
 she found I was a newspaper correspondent out for the war, she 
 told me her whole bitter story, and we met again in Morocco, 
 when the war-clouds were growing dai'k, and I learned to admire 
 her greatly for her solid womanliness. But when I heard the 
 men in a Sydney restaurant talking about Hill, Clark's, it 
 brought it all back to me, and I would like to say to my readers, 
 and this is the moral of my story, "You should never say any- 
 thing about anybody, to anybody, before anybody."
 
 24 Aii,straUan Gossip and Story, 
 
 \ eeWs prer^t Jeeth 
 
 ^#^SRI[^ popular lecturer recently startled a fashionable 
 audience with the statement that a cow was "gummy,'' 
 having no teeth in Ihe front on the upper jaw. 
 Familiar though this statement may appear to readers of 
 the Stock and Station Journal, it is yet a startling novelty to 
 the average reader. A cow twists its tongue round the grass, and 
 cuts it off with its lower teeth against the hard palate on the 
 upper jaw. Very few people know much about teeth, except 
 this : they are troublesome to get, difficult to keep, and exceed- 
 ingly awkward to get rid of. 
 
 A young man found that his betrothed had artificial teeth 
 so he declined to marry her. Then he gave his hand, and what 
 heart he had left, to a young lady with sound teeth, and she 
 kept him av/ake five nights a week with the toothache — and he 
 mused ! That man felt there was a mistake somewhere, and 
 thousands of other people have felt the same thing. When a 
 man or woman lies moaning through the sleepless hours of a 
 weary night, cursed with an aching fang, then comes the question 
 " Why do we have teeth anyhow % " It would be much better to 
 buy our own teeth as we buy our hats, clothes and shoes ; then 
 we would escape the infantile agonies of " teething," and the more 
 mature misery of toothache. Burns had suflfered keenly when he 
 voiced the world's woe with the words — 
 
 ** Where'er that place be priests ca' hell, 
 Whence a' the tones o' misery yell 
 And ranked plagues their numbers tell 
 
 In dreadfu' raw, 
 Thou, Toothache surely bear'st the bell 
 
 Amang them a'." 
 
 Everyone who has eyes to see must have noticed the enor- 
 mous increase in the number of dentists during recent years, and 
 the fatal chloroform incidertt of a few weeks ago in Sydney, set 
 many people to discussing the question of teeth. In some parts 
 of the world, notably in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire, 
 the teeth of the people are merely the decaying remainders of 
 ancestral possessions. Nobody in the district has good teeth be- 
 cause of the iron in the water, and the bread and tea diet of a 
 
 I
 
 m- 
 
 
 55 
 
 < 
 
 o 
 a; 

 
 A Cow's Front Teeth. 27 
 
 deteriorating race. In the United States there are more dentists 
 to the thousmd inhabitants than we have here, by a long way, 
 and some of the dental peculiarities of the Americans are strik- 
 ing. The people of the eastern states eat " hash " and other soft 
 forms of food which require no mastication, and as a consequence 
 the jaws of the people are growing smaller and weaker, for any 
 organ that is not used is bound to become atrophied and useless. 
 Now, our ancestors had strong jaws and sound teeth^ because 
 they had no cooks or kettles and they didn't know what " hash " 
 meant. The ancestral ape, with the prognathus jaw, had 32 
 sound teeth to tear, cut and masticate with. We also have nor- 
 mally 32, but the jaw has grown so small that there is not room 
 for the teeth to grow, and little children have to be taken to the 
 dentist to get some extracted in order to leave the others room 
 to develop. That is so to some extent in New South Wales, but 
 it is much more so in the United States, where the national 
 dishes have tended more effectually to the ruination of the den- 
 tal arrangements of the people. The simple fact in relation to 
 teeth is that they are ilisappearing, just as the blackfellow is 
 dying out in Australia — as he has died out in Tasmania. They 
 are useless ; they are not nearly so convenient as " store teeth," 
 and they are a heavy tax on the physical development of the 
 race, so Nature, dear, passionless, implacable old Dame, means to 
 rob us of them, and, as Shakespeare says — 
 
 " What fates impose that men must needs abide ; 
 It boots not to resist both wind and tide." 
 
 Nature has played strange tricks with her children's teeth. 
 A cow has no froi)t teeth in the upper jaw, and so cannot crop 
 grass very closely. But the ancestral cow had front teeth, and a 
 calf is sometimes now born with front teeth in its upper jaw, 
 just to show, as it were, that they used to run in the blood. A 
 whale has the oddest kind of a history imaginable. It is not a fish 
 though it lives in the sea. It is, as most people know, a warm- 
 blooded, air-breathing mammal, that suckles its young in the 
 same way as any land-born quadruped. The ancestors of the 
 whale were four-legged monsters, living on ancient sea margins in 
 the " once upon a time " that the story books tell about. But 
 when a change came, the family had to take to the water to make 
 a living, and those that couldn't adopt new methods died. Nature 
 has no mercy on the unwilling or unfit. There is no maudlin 
 sentimentality about her. She keeps no benevolent asylums for 
 the propagation of the useless or inept. She is cruel, horribly 
 cruel, and never considers the individual, but sweeps all from 
 her path^ — 
 
 " From scarped cliflF and quarried stone, 
 
 She cries ' A thousand types have gone ; 
 
 I care for nothing, all shall go.' "
 
 28 Australian Gossip and Story 
 
 The coast-dwelling beasts that tried to make a living in the 
 sea, were well treated. Nature swathed them in fat (blubber) to 
 protect them from the chilly floods of the mighty deep. She 
 wrapped the fore legs in leathery tissues, and made them into 
 fins. She strengthened the useless tail until it became converted 
 into the " flukes " that the whalers dread. She abolished the 
 useless hind legs, for, like our teech, they were a tax on the race, 
 and they disappeared, and early man thought that " great 
 whales " were fish. Go up to the Museum in College-street and 
 look at the skeleton of a whale, and you will see liow the fins are 
 only covered hands. You will see, also, two little bones wired 
 to the vertebral column of a whale. They are the poor remain- 
 ders of the whale's hind legs ! Charles Darwin showed us that 
 they were the sign posts Nature had left to point to the way she 
 had come. Nature, as a great American once remarked, is "a 
 wonderful cuss." 
 
 But the way the old Dame fixed the whale's teeth was 
 humourous. The old shore teeth were of no service in the water, 
 so the Northern, or Greenland whale, lost them all together, and 
 grew whalebone instead. Now the Right Whale rushes open- 
 mouthed through the water, and raises a big mouthful of Crus- 
 tacea, then closes it mouth, squirts out the water through the 
 net of whalebone, and retains the small marine life for a meal. 
 The Sperm Whale lives on squid and large, soft-bodied things of 
 that kind, and so has retained a row of teeth in the lower jaw. In- 
 stead of having teeth in the upper jaw, it has a series of holes, into 
 which the teeth fit. Now, this dental arrangement would be of 
 small service ashore, but it serves very well at sea, and if it were 
 not for the valuable oil in the whale's jacket, the family would 
 be a great success in the world. We merciless men murder the 
 poor beast in cold blood for the sake of its oil, and Nature has 
 thus cursed the whale with what was meant for a blessing ! 
 Poor old Nature ! 
 
 The embryo whale often bears traces of its origin. We 
 were cruising off the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific Ocean, 
 when we caught a large Sperm Whale. In cutting it in, and 
 looking for ambergris, we came on a foetal whale, a tiny, shiny, 
 unborn baby whale. It was about three feet long, a perfect little 
 "fish," with a coat of black satin. It had a full set of teeth in 
 both jaws. It bore testimony in its unborn state to the fact that 
 its ancestDrs, its far-away, remote?, unknown ancestors, were very 
 difierent animals from its own parents. That is the way 
 in which Old Dame Nature points us backward at times. All 
 the Dentists' shops in Sydney are pointing the same way. 
 Civilization is dealing deadly blows at our teeth. Pots, kettles 
 and gas stoves are abolishing the necessity for teeth, and — our 
 teeth are going ! Our patient, passionless, tireless mother is 
 
 I
 
 A Cow's Front Teeth, 
 
 29 
 
 working slowly towards the abolition of teeth, and the time is 
 coming when a young wife will no more keep her husband awake 
 with the toothache. We will not lose them in a year, nor yet in 
 a generation, for the " The mills of God grind slowly," but we 
 will lose them in time, for the law is surely at work, and Nature's 
 laws need no policemen or Acts of Parliament to enforce them. 
 The laws of our soulless mother are simple and irresistible,'^and 
 it is true, as Rogers said, that — 
 
 " The very law which moulds a tear, 
 And bids it trickle from it source, 
 That law preserves the earth a sphere, 
 And guides the planets in their course."
 
 30 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 Jhe baqd ^uestien. 
 
 I HIS is the best world I ever lived in, and some kind 
 people say it is the best I ever -A-ill live in ; but 
 that's a detail? My comfort is that when I come 
 up for judgment — if ever I do — it won't be a 
 miserable sinner like myself who'll sit in judgment on me. 
 There's a deal of solid comfort in that reflection. We are 
 horribly unkind to each other in this world ; but if we could sit 
 down and figure on the facts of the case we'd creep close together 
 for comfort before we sank " into the blind cave of eternal night." 
 You see, it's this way : Very few of us have anything to figure 
 with. We have a thinking machine all right enowgh, but we 
 lack the facts that are required for correct judgment. When I 
 was a very young man I went to hear a secularist lecture, and 
 his statements made me open my eyes. But I remember saying 
 to another chap, " I'm not going to let that fellow fool me any 
 more than I'll let a parson : I'm going to think for myself." 
 Now, that was an admirable statement, but, don't you see, I 
 couldn't contradict either the one or the other because I had no 
 knowledge. That's the way with a lot of us, but the one thing 
 I've learned since then is this — there's a lot of things I don't 
 know and never will know, and there's a heap of things nobody 
 knows. You might'ut think there's much solid comfort in that, 
 but there is ! 
 
 Now, look, you know there's a lot of people in this world, 
 and some blamed mean ones amongst them ! There are^ roughly 
 speaking, about fourteen hundred million people on this earth. 
 They have armies, ironclads, cannon, alms-houses, prisons, and all 
 kinds of things, and part of the crowd lives on the other part, 
 and the underneath ones have a horribly bad time. Now, if you 
 took all the people in this world and packed them in a wooden 
 box, how big do you think that box would be? Only 1,140 
 yards wide, 1,140 yards deep, and the same in length ! Think of 
 that ! Stow all earth's miserable sinners, with their castes, 
 creeds, colours, and divisions, in one wooden box, and Megson 
 could go round it on his bicycle in little more th'in five minutes. 
 With a good hot fire — not as hot as some ought to reach — you 
 could reduce the inhabitants to a few carloads of phosphates that 
 would fertilise the world's fields, so that some would do more 
 good in death than they had ever done in life.
 
 The Land Question. 31 
 
 We don't amount to much, do we? But what a fearful 
 amount of side some of us put on ! What a lot of misery we 
 have in each generation, all of which could be easily avoided if 
 we only had sense — but that is just what we lack. We are like 
 a lot of ants on a heap for smallness, but we lack the power the 
 ants have of combination. Some clam thinks that if it had not 
 been for that little trouble at the building of the Tower of Babel, 
 we might have been brothers all over the earth \ but that is all 
 rot. You take a handful of our people and set them down in the 
 remote bush, hundreds of miles from a railway station, and see 
 how they act. As soon as they ha\ e raised a public house, a 
 blacksmith's shop, and a post-office, the miserable little sinners 
 get to fighting about " law an' order," and the name of the town, 
 and the women's dresses, and what church they'll have, and 
 who'll be the " boss." Oh, pshaw ! It's the devil that's inside of 
 us that makes us fight, and language has nothing to do with it. 
 All the nations of the earth are changed every thirty-three years, 
 there or thereabouts, and new races come with new desires, and 
 they know that the men who are dead were fools, but they go on 
 the same old tack, and so do all of us. Selah ! 
 
 There's a man in England been writing an article for the 
 Strand Magazine (February, 1895) concerning the population of 
 the world. His name is J. Holt Schooling, and we might take 
 some of his schooling to our hearts and be all the better for it. 
 He's been figuring out how many people there are in the world, 
 and how much space they have to live on, and the results are 
 curious. Belgium is a busy, little, crowded country, and every 
 man, woman, and child in it has got about an acre of land — or, 
 rather, they would have if it were shared up ; but you know how 
 it is with sandwiches — some get all the ham and some get all the 
 mustard ! 
 
 If you were to take all Europe, you would find that there 
 was land enough to give everybody seven acres each, and if you 
 throw in a cow and a sheep and a little common sense, you could 
 have them all doing fairly well ! In this grand country of ours, 
 if we divided up, we would have 589 acres each, but all that 
 most of us will ever get *vill be six feet by two feet, and they 
 sometimes double-bank them even in that small space. Land 
 would be mighty little use to me, for instance, for I would 
 probably starve to death on very fertile property, unless 1 could 
 get some fellow to do the hard graft, which I probably would. 
 
 Another curious fact is this : Thei'e are, roughly speaking, 
 about 52 million square miles of land on this mud ball, where we 
 are doing our short shift. If you scattered the people about in 
 an even way, instead of dumping them down in shovelfuls, as we 
 have them now, there would be about 22 people to the square 
 mile; but if you took Australia and scatteied our little push all
 
 32 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 over the land, we'd have about one person to each square mile, 
 and, you bet, we'd feel lonesome ! A fellow would have some 
 trouble to sell penny papers in a scattered crowd like that, 
 especially when you remember how many of our people go to 
 infant schools and Sunday-schools and things ! 
 
 But this man, Schooling, has been making some more 
 remarks that strike one as peculiar. He has been noting the 
 average increase of population. He has found out that the 
 population of the United Kingdom doubled itself in 80 years, 
 but England and Wales have doubled their push in 57 years. 
 Now, taking a very much smaller increase — that of five per 
 thousand per annum, which is very small indeed — we will have a 
 big increase iu a century or two ; that is, in 621 years from now 
 there would be as many people in the world as there are acres of 
 land, and then, my boy, where will we be % It seems a pity to 
 have to die off before the big improvement comes, doesn't it ? 
 But if we join the theosophists we may be able to come back, re- 
 incarnated, and see how the old shop gets on under the new 
 conditions. There will be no question then of shearing under 
 the P.U, agreement or the Shearers' Union agreement, or any 
 other. We will have settled all disputes long before that, and 
 will have found out new ways of living. 
 
 The men and women of that' day will look back and see us 
 as we are now, and wonder how we could ever have been such 
 idiots as we are, and we'll be mingled with the gases and the 
 grasses, the rain drops and the rivers long before that comes off, 
 so we won't worry. But we are a lot of fools now aren't we ? 
 When you come to think about subjects of that kind you want 
 to go out and kick somebody. Do it ! We need somebody to 
 wake us^up.
 
 The Liver Fluke. 33 
 
 Jlp Li\/er pi Like. 
 
 DARKEYr/iwas oace telliiio; about an awful storm that 
 visited the Gulf of Mexico. He said it blew so bard 
 that it would have blown all the hair off his head, 
 only he got another man to hold it on for him. 
 " But," said the sceptical listener, " who held his on % " 
 " Another man." " And who held his on T " Oh, a bald- 
 headed man," said the nigger, who began to realise that you 
 cannot have an infinite chain of men doing any one thing, There 
 must be a beginning somewhere, and here is a puzzle for the 
 readers of the Sydney Stock and Station Joiirnal: Where did a 
 liver fluke begin? That beats the missing word competition. 
 The proprietor of this paper might offer .£100,000 to the man 
 who could find out, and he wouldn't lose by it either. Every 
 sheep breeder in Australia knows what a liver-fluke is, and 
 thousands of sheep are dying to day on account of it ; but how 
 many men know how it is born, or how it lives ? It is, without 
 doubt, the most wonderful thing in Australia. It goes through 
 more changes than some of our Parliamentary candidates have 
 done, and its history is more unbelievable than that of " Jack 
 the Giant-Killer," or the " Seven League Boots." No first-class 
 liar on earth could invent a more wonderful story than that of a 
 liver fluke, yet how many of our people know it 1 No romance 
 ever penned is more incredible than the story of this horrible 
 little pest which is doing so much harm in Australia to-day, yet 
 no man can tell us when it was born, or evolved, or how it first 
 came to Australia. It is here, and that is all we know concerning 
 it ; but a deeper knowledge of the thing might help us in over- 
 mastering it. 
 
 Nothing produces nothing, and nothing ever dies. Lucre- 
 tius, the noble Roman, who lived long yeai's ere Christ was 
 born, said : 
 
 " Things seem to die, but die not. The spring showers 
 
 Die on the bosom of the motherly earth, 
 But rise again in fruits and leaves and flowers, * 
 
 And every death is but another birth." 
 
 When the first birth of the liver-fluke was none may say, 
 but every death seems to be but the beginning of a new life. 
 
 In the years 1879-80 there was a terrible outbreak of what 
 was known as " sheep-rot " in England. Millions of sheep died,
 
 34 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 and no man could find a reason for it. When a sheep was first 
 attacked with the " rot " it began to be tender about the loins, 
 and its backbone stuck up in a peculiar way, and it lost flesh, 
 grew weak and languid, and finally died. When men began to 
 dissect these sheep they found that the liver was fairly alive with 
 horrible, flat, fluke-like worms, which had riddled the liver of the 
 unfortunate sheep in every direction. The liver, instead of being 
 a bright, healthy, chocolate colour, had become a hard, knotted 
 mass of unhealthy matter. When cut open there tumbled forth 
 shoals of worms, flat, creepy, unnatural looking worms, some of 
 them an inch long and three-quarters of an inch wide. They 
 rolled themselves up like heated parchment ; they seemed to try 
 to hide their heads for very shame, as though they were con- 
 science-smitten at the sight of the dead sheep that had suffered 
 so much lying at their side. But they were not ashamed ! Why 
 should they be ? Nature fitted them for their work, just as the 
 same dear, motherly old dame has fitted us for ours. Mother 
 Nature fitted the liver-fluke for its deadly and abominable work, 
 with the same sweet and tender care as she exercised over the 
 birds, the bees, the flowers, and the trees. Dame Nature has 
 been quite as cai'eful and elaborate in her work on the liver-fluke 
 as over the daintiest maiden that ever smiled on man, for, as 
 one of our poets says : 
 
 " The wildest beasts that range 
 
 The inoor, our kinsmen are ; all life is 
 
 One, and all is change." 
 
 These creepy, leathery relatives of ours have no particular organs 
 of use or beauty visible to us except the mouth, a leaf-shaped, 
 sucker-like opening, by which ib holds on to its host and gets a 
 living. It has no wants of any kind, except such as are supplied 
 by the luscious liver of its host: — the sheep. I say sheep, because 
 the sheep is the chief host ; but it is not particular in any respect, 
 and can live with a cow, a horse, a man, a kangaroo, or a rabbit ; 
 but, for a simple reason, the sheep is a favourite. Not that the 
 fluke exercises any choice ! As I hope to show you, the fluke is 
 a very quiescent party. The fluke has no more say about the 
 liver it will inhabit than we have as to where we will be born. 
 There is no choice in the matter, but of that anon. The first 
 serious visits from the fluke were in 1809, 1860, and 1879 ; it 
 was alive and squirming. Strange to say, it had been described by a 
 naturalist as early as 1547, but it had attracted no great attention. 
 You see, if poor people keep still and die of starvation nobody 
 takes much notice of them, but if they turn Fenians and kill a 
 few dukes and shoot a few landlords, then there's a row, and 
 Home Rule comes into the domain of practical politics. So with 
 Nihilists and Anarchists, they are produced by a definite cause, 
 but nobody cares about the cause until the Anarchists have made
 
 The Liver Fluke. 35 
 
 life a misery, and thea — why, we do what we ought to have done 
 at first, we seek a remedy. 
 
 Now, nobody took much notice of a fluke till 1879, and then 
 millions of sheep were dying in England, and science came along 
 and had a look at the trouble It was found that the great 
 naturalist, Linnaeus, had named the little wretch of a fluke in 
 1767 — he called it Fasciola. We didn't keep FascioU's cen- 
 tenary birthday, because the little cuss hadn't become so famous 
 then, but we know Fasciola liepaticuin very well now. 
 
 Think about this ghastly, little, leather-like fluke killing 
 millions and millions of sheep. Think about the suffering of 
 those poor brutes before they lay down and died. Some men 
 want to say that sheep don't feel. That makes my blood boil. 
 I almost think I'll join the Theosophists, and believe — if I can — 
 that in the next turn of the wheel of life and death some of my 
 contemporaries will be born sheep. I'd like to be their shepherd 
 for a while. Think of the misery of the millions of sheep 
 roaming about the paddocks, while this infernal worm is eating 
 their livers. It is too horrible to think about. It makes one cry 
 out against nature, and revile the " kindly " Providence we were 
 taught to believe in as ruling the world ; but it's no good to do 
 that. We may as well take it easy, and shut our eyes to what 
 we can't help, and try and find out the history of this wretched 
 fluke, and, in doing that, we may find out how to circumvent it. 
 
 Now, here is a queer fact. Men used to believe that meat 
 went rotten from being kept, and that the maggots came in from 
 the air, or from itself. Nothing produces nothing, and worms 
 won't come without a cause. The great Italian, Redi, found that 
 out. He put a piece of meat under a fine screen, where only the 
 air got at it, and it dried up, wizened away, as it were, but it 
 didn't go " bad." He left a piece of the same meat in the open, 
 and the flies came and sat on it, and soon the meat was putrid 
 and alive with maggots. These came from the flies ! Take one 
 of those horrible " buzz-flies " that worry us in the summer. 
 Open it with a pin, and you will find it full of horrible little 
 white maggots all ready to be deposited on your beef, or fish, or 
 whatever is soft and luscious. I hate such flies ; they are hideous 
 and repulsive messengers of the devil. When Redi, the great 
 anatomist, found that out he set us on the right track. We 
 know now that nothing produces nothing ; that there must be a 
 bald-headed man somewhere. A man can never inherit con- 
 sumption — the germ of it is in the air ; a man never inherits 
 yellow fever or cholera — the germs are floating about, and they 
 alight and find a resting-place in the human system, and so we 
 have — disease. 
 
 It is just so with the liver-fluke. No sheep ever inherits 
 fluke. No sheep is born with fluke ; the germs of it are some-
 
 36 Australian Gossip and Story 
 
 where, and the sheep gets them into its system ; then comes 
 sickness, liver-eating, death, and birth, and for every sheep that 
 dies there are millions and millions and billions of flukes born. 
 They are wonderful fellows, admirably fitted for their work by 
 that power moving in the universe which passeth all under- 
 standing, that power which for ever is — 
 
 " Speeding, not sped ; no rest, no goal, no shore, 
 Still rushing on, till time shall be no more." 
 
 A post-mortem examination is one of the ghastliest amuse- 
 ments on earth, but, to a man with eyes, it is worth a great deal. 
 A good, wise man in the olden time once saw the internal 
 machinery of a human being laid bare, and he gasped out, "Isn't 
 it curious how a man can live ?" Yes, indeed, a man is a complex 
 aninial, full of curious machinery, and it's a wonder how he lives 
 at all. Death isn't half as curious as life ! But if you have eyes 
 to see, and a soul to understand, you will find a far more won- 
 derful sight in the works of a sheep that has died of liver-fluke. 
 
 A man once sat down and investigated a defunct sheep that 
 died of fluke, and the results were curious. In its gall bladder 
 he found a large number of the eggs of the deadly worm. He 
 took fair steps to arrive at the number there, and then said that 
 there were 7,400,000. Perhaps some of us think we know how 
 many that means, but we don't. If a pastoralist could say, " I 
 own 1,000,000 sovereigns," he would probably cease from worry- 
 ing about liver-fluke or drought. We bow down to a man and 
 worship him when he owns a million sovereigns. Fancy, then, 
 how proud a sheep should be when it had 7|^ million eggs in its 
 gall bladder ! Talk about a millionaire, eh ? 
 
 Each of these tiny yellow eggs contains within itself more 
 power than there is in a golden sovereign ! Each one is a little 
 miracle of life, a perfect centre for the production of further life 
 for the propagation of its own race. Now, if we could let those 
 seven million eggs loose in a favourable spot, and give them a 
 fair chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they 
 would stock Australia, and kill us, and all living things, in a 
 very short time. But Nature — dear old Dame Nature — is a 
 wasteful hussy. Some of our teachers are always talking about 
 the best way of doing things, being the " natural way." Well, 
 the natural way is blindly, stupidly wasteful. Nature has given 
 every egg in the dead sheep's gall-bladder power to — 
 
 " Take function and substance, as the snake's egg hatched 
 
 Takes scale and fang ; as feathered reed-seeds fly 
 O'er rock and loam and sand, until they find 
 Their marsh and multiply." 
 
 But nature did not give them sense, or sight, or legs ; if she had, 
 it would have been all up with us. She gave them, indeed, 
 power to work, dreadful power, but the wasteful hussy did not 
 give them locomotive ability.
 
 The Liver Fluke. 37 
 
 Every tiny yellow egg contains an embryo fluke, which lives 
 on the substance born with it in its little case. When the parent 
 fluke extrudes them, they find their way, by the weird processes of 
 nature, out of the sheep's body into the open air. If they stayed 
 in the sheep they would choke up the ducts, and in dying them- 
 selves they would kill the sheep. If the fluke passes by accident 
 out of the sheep's body it dies and putrifies ; but the baby fluke 
 are alive, only awaiting a shower of rain to open their little egg- 
 cases and come out into the light of day. If they fell on a dry 
 spot and no rain came, and no hoof of a passing beast or boot of 
 heedless man came to transport them to a better place, they 
 would perish miserably — and Nature brings millions of them to 
 birth, so that one may have a chance for existence. The larger 
 the beast the slower its powers of propagation. If a kangaroo 
 brought forth as many children as a liver-fluke, Australia would 
 be swamped with kangaroos in a year or two. 
 
 The egg of the liver-fluke must reach water, or find a con- 
 venient snail to burrow into, or die ; and here comes a queer fact. 
 Did you ever notice the cunning tricks snails have in the way of 
 shutting out the air ? That snail trick has a great and important 
 bearing on this question. I was once living on the Rock of 
 Gibraltar, and, tramping over the weird, limestone rocks, one 
 day I picked up some curious-looking dead snails that were 
 attached to the rocks. T put them in my overcoat pocket and 
 forgetting them, took them home. A few days afterwards I 
 found that the darned snails had come to life, and crawled all 
 over my coat, leaving a horrid, slimy track in many directions 
 over the shiny garment. That trick of the snail is a common 
 one. When the hot weather bails them up they exude a gummy 
 substance over their doors and go to sleep, waiting months, or 
 maybe years, for a shower of rain to resurrect them. 
 
 A sheep extrudes a lot of fluke eggs, and they lie dormant 
 in their little shell until a shower of rain comes, and then they 
 open their doors and come out into the wet. The snails that 
 have been lying dead, dry, and dormant looking also wake up, 
 and the baby fluke catches on to the snail, bores its way into its 
 little " tummy," and — his troubles are over for the present. But 
 supposing no rain comes % Well, the little cuss will be carried by 
 the wind to a waterhole by a sheep or a wallaby, or somebody, or 
 something, and he will come to life there ; and it is because of 
 this slim chance that Nature has brought so many of them to the 
 birth. When he does get to the water you will see the most 
 wonderful metamorphosis in the world. Talk about miracles t 
 Why, a waterhole in the bush is full of miracles ! Brunton 
 Stephens, the Queensland poet, sings — 
 
 " They who say the bush is dreary are not so very far astray. 
 For this eucalyptic cloisterdom is anything but gay."
 
 38 Australian Gossip and Story, 
 
 Wait till your eyes are opened to the miracles of bush life, 
 and you'll never say it is dull. There's no miracle in a bush pub, 
 and there's not much fun in blue bush stories, as a rule, but life 
 in a waterhole is full of interest and miracle to a man who has 
 eyes to see. 
 
 If these tiny eggs reach the water — and millions of them 
 do — the end of the egg opens by means of a cleverly-contrived 
 spring, and out comes the little pirate ; but he is not a bit like 
 his father or his mother, or any of his relatives. In fact, he 
 isn't a "he" at all. There is no marrying or giving in marriage 
 in the liver-fluke world. Each individual is male and female 
 mixed. It saves a lot of trouble and expense, of course, but they 
 miss a lot of fun. However, they have no churches and no 
 parsons, so they couldn't very well have marriage ceremonies. 
 But we call the little wretch " he," because the males of our race 
 are the wickedest. That's right, isn't it ? 
 
 When the egg opens in the waterhole, and the little chap 
 comes out, he is a speck of a thing, covered with tiny hairs (cilia), 
 each of which acts as a paddle, and he can boom along like an 
 electric launch. He has two tiny spots atone end, like crescents 
 placed back to back. We call those " eyes," and he can probably 
 see with them a very little bit. At the head he has a tiny instru- 
 ment fixed, which might be a sucker, or a speaking trumpet, or 
 most anything else ; but it is really a boring apparatus, a kind of 
 ramming tube. We will invent something like it for a man-o'- 
 war by-and-bye. The little pirate has a real good use for this 
 thing, and he uses it as if he had sense, too. When he meets a 
 snail he puts it into operation. He is a particular kind of a wee 
 chap, and he won't go and board with any kind of a snail. He 
 wants just one particular sort, and he swims all round the water- 
 hole in search of the special kind of a host he wants. If he 
 can't get the one he's been accustomed to, he'll take the next best, 
 for he has got to find a host or die and, like the rest of us, he 
 hates to die, if he can help it. Very sti'ange, indeed, is the 
 history of the baby liver-fluke, so unlike its sluggish ancestor, yet 
 it but works out the measure of its ancestral life, and " the new 
 life reaps what the old life sowed." 
 
 Chapter III. 
 
 When the police want a witness to identify a prisoner they 
 get a crowd of men together and put the criminal in amongst 
 them. It makes a witness terribly nervous, because it's a ticklish 
 matter to pick a man out like that, when perhaps you've only 
 seen him once before in your life. Think, then, how this mite of 
 a liver-fluke baby, only the 200th of an inch long, can go paddling 
 round a water-hole looking for the particular kind of a snail he 
 wants He never even saw it once before. He has no know-
 
 The Liver Fluke. 39 
 
 ledge of the particular snail ne wants, except what came to him 
 through his hereditary knowledge. Yet men object to a House of 
 Lords, because it's what they call an " Here litary Chamber." 
 Why, if men inherited sense the same as liver-tlukes do, that 
 would be the best kind of a chamber we could have — but it isn't. 
 We are not as cute as liver-flukes, or else our hereditary instincts 
 are n")t worth anything. They have gone astray somehow. 
 
 This speck of life in a waterhole has sense enough to select 
 its own boarding-house, and it has to break into it, bore into it, 
 make a forcible entrance, and that is where the miracle comes in. 
 Some men pretend they know a lot, and some men think they under- 
 stand everything, but there isn't a man in Australia knows as much 
 as liver-fluke's baby. This miserable mite of a thing is fitted up 
 with such special care for its particular business as no steamship 
 on the ocean can show. Nature has been kind and careful over 
 the speck, and has fitted it up marvellously. And who is Dame 
 Nature % Where does she live % How does she work ? You don't 
 know how much you don't know till you try to answer questions 
 like those. Talmage doesn't know, and he thinks he knows a lot. 
 
 If you buy a microscope — you can get one cheap — you can 
 
 fish out one of these mites, and put him under it and watch his 
 
 tricks. The strong light dazzles his eyes, and you can watch him 
 
 trying to bore into the glass. He can't tell what has happened. 
 
 He never was on a glass slide before, neither were his ancestors, 
 
 so he doesn't know what to do, and no wonder. He never gets 
 
 dazzled or led astray in the water. If he finds the right snailj he 
 
 bores into his rest, if he fails he dies despairingly, without having 
 
 fulfilled his life's mission. You never can tell what the little 
 
 beggar thinks when he makes a failure of life ; but we hope that 
 
 he has nothing of the human sense of failure, and that he recks — 
 
 " As little of the human passions, 
 As of the very latest Paris fashions, 
 Soaring not beyond his daily rations." 
 
 Once he bores his head into a snail his career is finished — 
 that is, his success in life — that is, the K. CM. G. -ship of his race ; 
 he settles down in peace. His cilia are of no further use to him ; 
 his eyes merge in with the rest of his tissues, and all his free- 
 swimming glory departs. Never more shall the ache and worry 
 of life fret him ; never more shall earth's sorrows weigh upon his 
 little soul. He has found a tomb ; he has fulfilled his destiny ; 
 and what more can any of us do? He comes near, very near, to 
 the Hindoo ideal of perfect life in death, of what the Buddhists 
 call "existent annihilation." 
 
 " Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins 
 
 Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys nor woes 
 
 Invade his safe, eternal piece 
 
 He is one with life, yet lives not ; 
 
 He is blest, ceasing to be."
 
 40 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 Yet the little cuss isn't dead — no deader than a Theosophist 
 — he has only died to come to life again in a new form. He who 
 died a beggar may next come to life as a prince, or he who died a 
 peer may awaken as a cockroach. This demon of the fluke dies, 
 and his glory passes away, until he becomes what scientific men 
 call a " Sporocyst," or a brood-sac — a nursing place for the new 
 race that is to come after him. The old man is dead, the new 
 man is slowly coming into shape, and when the new generations 
 come they are " daisies." They are born in that sae, inside of 
 the snail ; they awaken in the darkness of the snail's " tummy," 
 and they never get out. They are not " germs," or " bacilli," or 
 anything of that kind ; they are honest little liver-flukes, only 
 they have to pass through queer changes. It is the same with 
 ourselves, too, because we are almost as wonderful in our way as 
 liver-flukes. Before a man is born he is a tiny speck, and he 
 passes through a lot of strange metamorphoses in his path 
 towards sentient life. A human being passes through the fish 
 stage, with gill slits, and amphibian and quadruped and hairy 
 monkey, before he comes to be w hat he is ; but, through the dense 
 stupidity of the race, we shut our eyes to the marvels of develop- 
 ment lest it should prove that the evolution theory were true. 
 Oh, phsaw ! It makes a man tired to think about the bestial 
 ignorance of his own race. We are a lot of fat-headed fools ! 
 
 That has nothing much to do with the case, but if you stop 
 to think about it you will find it worth considering further. 
 However, these strange specks of life come out of the brood-sac in 
 the snail's inside, and they have a new name now. They are not 
 liver-flukes, or liver-flukes' eggs, or liver-flukes' babies. They are 
 now Redtce, and they got that name after the great Italian 
 anatomist, Redi, the chap who put the meat under a fine safe to 
 see if it would go bad. He started people on the track of the 
 " bald-headed man." He it was who showed us that there must 
 be a cause for everything, even for a liver-fluke, and some day 
 our people will glorify his name. At present we glorify great 
 generals, wholesale murderers, and inventors of torpedoes and 
 world-destroying explosives. In the good time that it coming — 
 date uncertain — we will glorify men like Redi and Lamarack, 
 Darwin and Bruno. 
 
 These little beggars, the children of the liver-flukes' children, 
 Redice, crawl out of the brood sac, and set up life for themselves 
 in the inside of the snail. They are not such tiny things as their 
 fathers were. They grow up to the l-20th of an inch in length, 
 and they are poor lodgers for the snail. They " pay no rint," 
 and they board on their host's liver, and have what the bad boys 
 call a " bully time." They are like boys with a rich father : they 
 are born to a soft thing, and perhaps fail to appreciate it, but it 
 is a soft thing they've got, for they never do a stroke of work, but
 
 The Liver Fluke. 41 
 
 just grow up in idle luxury, with no thought for the morrow, as 
 long as the snail's liver lasts. Of course, it's rough on the snail ; 
 but what can the snail do? Nature put 'em there ! Dear kindly 
 old Dame Nature did it, and you wouldn't like to be called an 
 " infidel " for saying unkind words about Nature. She's a real 
 nice old dame. There's no Anarchists to go blowing the poor 
 Redice up either. You don't have any tricks of that kind about 
 a snail. lb simply accepts what Fate has sent it, and makes no 
 moan, not that we hear of. 
 
 Well, the Redice have a good time, and perhaps they pro- 
 duce some more of their kind, but I wouldn't like to swear to 
 that. Anyhow, they bring forth a nQw crowd, or they look like 
 a new crowd, and then you're lost ! 
 
 You see, gentle reader, we have a proverb that refers to 
 -children being " chips of the old block." VVe naturally say about 
 a baby — if we've had any experience — "What a little darling ! 
 Isn't he like his papa !" These Redice are not a bit like their 
 pa's, nor their grandpa's, and their progeny won't be a bit like 
 them. That's where the trickery of old Dame Nature comes in, 
 bless me, here's this column full, and we are not through with 
 the family yet. Never mind, sweet reader, we'll get the next 
 generation out in the next issue and started into a sheep, and so 
 complete the family circle ; but isn't there a wonderful loc of 
 changes in a liver-fluke % It just brings to mind what 
 Shakespeare says — 
 
 " There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
 Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. " 
 
 When some of us were very small children we used to have 
 to learn Scripture lessons for punishment. Just as giving little 
 children pills hidden in jam makes them hate jam for ever after, 
 so some of us got tilled up with Scripture. This is the kind of 
 thing some of us used to have to get through with : " And Peleg 
 lived thirty years and begat Reu ; and Peleg lived after he begat 
 Rsu 209 years, and begat sons and daughters. And Reu lived 
 two-and-thirty years and begat Serug, and Serug lived thirty 
 years and begat Nalior," etc., etc., ad nauseum. Some of us 
 could tell queer tales about our Scripture lessons, couldn't we? 
 When you begin to talk about liver-flukes it all comes back like 
 a half -forgotten dream. It is pleasanter to have to talk about a 
 liver-fluke than about Peleg and Reu, about Serug and Nahor, 
 but it puts you in nind of them. This liver-fluke that we 
 followed so far is a queer chap. First we had the parent, then 
 the egg, then the free-swimming embryo, then the snail-dwelling 
 sporocyst, then the free Redite, and now we come to another 
 chap, and we think of the old days, and we siy, "And Redise 
 begat Cercaria."
 
 42 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 These new fellows are not like their fathers, or grand- 
 fathers, or great-grandfathers, or anybody that ever appeared on 
 the scene before. These Cercarians are as curious in their way 
 as any of their predecessors. If you were to sit down and watch 
 them issuing forth from the snail you wouldn't be able to tell 
 what they were. Some might look like the curious little Redife 
 that we saw in the snail at first, but they would soon chaiage 
 their shapes and grow into a new breed altogether. When a 
 Redise is going to emigrate he alters his form. When he makes 
 up his mind to leave the snail he takes on a new figure, for 
 Nature is a good deal kinder to him than to us, but — you can't 
 have everything in this world. A little boy had been rather 
 naughty, and his mother said, " Now, Johnny, if you do that 
 again you won't go to heaven." " Oh, well," said Johnnie, 
 resignedly, "I've been to the circus, and I've been to the panto- 
 mime, and you can't go everywhere." That's good philosophy ! 
 These small Rediaens can't go to the pantomime, but look at the 
 fun they have turning into Cercaria ! 
 
 The small emigrant gets to look like a little tadpole. He 
 evolves a long tail and big head, and he swims round in a lively 
 manner. Of course his tail isn't very "long" as we count 
 length, for his whole body is only about one-hundredth of an 
 inch long, but then his tail is as long again, so he has a " long 
 tail." He has no legs nor fins, but he has a pair of suckei'S for 
 his stock-in-trade, and when he leaves his Redian brethren he is 
 admirably equipped for his business. The power which has thus 
 fitted the Cercarian for his weird work is the same power which 
 is for ever moving in a mysterious way, it's wonders to perform — 
 
 " That is its painting on the glorious clouds, 
 And these its emeralds on the peacock's tram ; 
 It hath its stations in the stars ; its slaves 
 In lightning, wind, and rain." 
 
 If the snail is in a waterhole when the young Cercarian 
 begins life, the tadpole's tail comes in handy. He can swim 
 around until he finds a nice, convenient blade of grass to which 
 he can cling witli his suckers, and there he comes to anchor. 
 Once more his family instincts have been gratified. His one 
 business as a Cercarian is to find a spot to settle in. No other 
 ambition fills his little brain ; no other object rounds the horizon 
 of his little life ; he has to find a suitable blade of grass to roost 
 on, and he finds it unerringly. 
 
 If the snail happened to be crawling about in a damp pad- 
 dock when he came out, what then 1 It wouldn't inconvenience 
 him a bit. He isn't like a stupid, helpless, deaf, dumb, blind, 
 human baby. This little Cercarian comes forth from the snail 
 as Minerva came from the head of the great Jove, " full panoplied 
 for the fray." A human baby is one of the most helpless things
 
 The Liver Fiiike, 43 
 
 on earth. It has got to be fed and tended for years before it is 
 able to dig for itself, or secure its own tucker, but the Cercarian 
 comes forth all ready for business. If it begins life in a damp 
 paddock it uses its suckers, and draws itself on to a nice grassy 
 tuft, rolls up its tail, tucks in its suckers, and goes to sleep. JNo 
 need for locomotion ; no need for tail, or fins, or feet, or suckers ; 
 it is finished. It has completed the business for which it was 
 born, and now all ib has to do is to wait, and in waiting it is 
 fulfilling its end, for, as the poet has said — 
 
 " They also serve who only stand and wait." 
 
 "When the Cercarian has rolled himself up on a blade of grass 
 and gone to sleep, he is not much more than the one-hundredth 
 of an inch in diameter. He is so small that you need very keen 
 eyes to see him. He is such a speck of a thing that you would 
 wonder at Nature taking so much trouble over him ; but the 
 little wretch is smart. Diamonds   and deadly poison go into 
 bmall bulk, so do liver-flukes. Ey-and-bye a sheep comes nibbling 
 along, eating the grass very close, and it nips off the blade of 
 grass with the Cercarian on ; then begins the miracle. The 
 speck on the grass comes to life, and starts out on a new career. 
 He finds the liver of the beast that ate his resting-place, and he 
 grows up into a big, hearty liver-fluke. He is visible to the 
 naked eye now, indeed, for he grows to be an inch long, a 
 hideous, leathery, fluke-like animal. He eats the liver of his 
 host ; he induces red- water and all kinds of diseases, and he 
 curses Australia, and every other land wherein he dwells. He 
 kills millions of sheep in a year sometimes, and wet seasons are 
 the best for him. 
 
 Now, how can you exterminate the pest % Sheep are liable 
 to be troubled with the fluke because they nibble the grass so 
 closely. Tender, young lambs are more liable to fluke, because 
 they nibble even closer than their mothers ; but cows can 
 contract the disease, and wallabies, and even men. The fluke is 
 not particular. If you want to stamp the disease out, you keep 
 the paddock where the disease first appears shut up until the 
 flukes perish for want of food % Oh, pshaw ! You can't fool 
 Nature that way ! Rabbits come nibbling the grass, and they 
 get full of fluke, and carry the disease away and away all over 
 the land. A wild bird settles in your paddock, and a snail 
 sticks to its foot, and is carried far away, full of Redise, to start 
 the disease afresh in some remote field. Old Nature, in her 
 gentle care for hateful things, has so arranged that it is almost 
 Impossible, by any artificial means, to stamp out this awfui 
 disease. We must call in aid from the skilful chemist, and set 
 the forces of Nature herself, as organised by the student, to fight 
 the pest. We will come to that in time, but when we look over
 
 44 
 
 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 the genealogy of this marvellous creature we are struck dumb- 
 •ndth astonishment. We realise how little we know, even the 
 wisest of us, and how helpless we are before these microscopic 
 specks. All our skill and knowledge and wisdom fails us at 
 their approach, and we can but bow our heads in awe at the 
 revelation at the Infinite contained in the history of a liver- 
 fluke. Very wonderful are they, indeed ; but, if we only knew 
 it, very wonderful are we ourselves, and a great thinker has told 
 us that — 
 
 " \Ye are part 
 
 Of every rock and bird and beast and hill ; 
 
 One with the things that prey on us, and one 
 
 With what we kill."
 
 Alaii Know Thyself. 45 
 
 /)^al^ \\\QVJ JIiLiself. 
 
 jE were discussing the Dean case as everybody has been 
 doing of late. My friend said, " If anybody came 
 and told me that your wife was dead and you had 
 poisoned her, I wouldn't believe it." "Why?" 
 " Because," said my friend, " I know you." Then said I, " Do 
 you know me 1 " At that there fell on the room a solid patch of 
 silence that you might almost have cut with a knife. Does my 
 friend know me ? Do any of us know our friends 1 Do we 
 know ourselves ? If you sit down and think that out, you'll find 
 that it is one of the most pitiful problems in existence. You see, 
 it's this way : When we feel good and strong and happy and 
 hearty, we are onR person ; when we've eaten or drunken as we 
 ought not to have done, then we are another person 1 When the 
 world goes well with us, we are nice people, with lofty principles, 
 but when we strike a snag and are sinking in the cold wastes of a 
 heartless world, then, indeed, we are different people, and our 
 best friends wouldn't know us. 
 
 You never can figure out what a man is, simply because he 
 is not a stable quantity — he is a child of circumstance and is 
 what his circumstances make him. You don't believe that if 
 you live in the midst of a crowd, of course, and you can't under- 
 stand that the men and women about you are filled with the same 
 kind of emotions as you are yourself ; but they are. If you want 
 to figure this thing out to a dead certainty, you need to- 
 go out into the bush and sit down by yourself, with only 
 the gum trees and the sky about you and above you, and 
 think. I remember landing once on the shores of Broketk 
 Bay, at a wild sequestered spot, and going back into the 
 bush in search of flowers. I came across the ruins of i? 
 beautiful little house, standing desolate and deserted in the midst 
 of a weed-grown garden. The fruit trees were covered with fun- 
 goid growths ; tall weeds had sprung up in the rank soil higher 
 than my head ; the paths were overgrown ; the roof of the house 
 had tumbled in, and all was wreck and ruin. In that place I 
 felt a new sense of the universal brotherhood of man, of the 
 sweet kinship which should bind us all in one, and I realised, as
 
 46 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 never before, the force of what the poet said abtmt a man finding 
 a ruin thus — 
 
 As he wanders far and lone, 
 
 He is touched with a sweet and beautiful sense of something 
 
 tender and gone, 
 The sense of a struggling life in the waste, and the mark of a 
 
 soul's command, 
 The going and coming of vanished feet, the touch of a human 
 
 hand." 
 
 You come by sudden sight into communion with the failures 
 of life, and you think, you must think, of those who have gone 
 down in the strife, and you realise that the man who failed thus 
 in the bush would have done things, ere he moved out, that his 
 better nature would have recoiled from. Burns has well said 
 that we know the sin that has borne our brother down, but little 
 we know of what has been resisted. Do we know each other ? 
 Not a bit of it. We don't even know ourselves ; and if we did 
 know ourselves for a day it would only be for that day ! There 
 are those in our midst who have done things in their boyhood 
 and in their hot-blooded young manhood that their whole souls 
 revolt from now. Some of us have done things as boys that we 
 would kill boys for doing to-day. Know our friends, eh 1 We 
 don't know ourselves. 
 
 Do you think I dare sit down nort^ and tell you what would 
 prove my easel Do you dare to do that to yourself ? Mark 
 Twain once said that it's real pleasant to be able to tell about 
 roughing it, but you never tell the roughest part. That's it, 
 boys, that's it. We each have a quiet locker in our hearts where 
 we keep something locked up that we wouldn't show to our 
 dearest friend, and then when we hear folks say, " I know you," 
 we laugh. Listen to the piping of the tin-whistle crew that 
 makes our little world, and think how little we know of each 
 other, and how wise we pretend to be, and of how little all our 
 learning has taught us, and then sit alone in the bush and think 
 how — 
 
 ' ' God laughs in heaven when any man 
 Says, ' Here, I'm learned.' " 
 
 Just fancy how odd it seems to have people saying, " I've known 
 George Dean .since he was a boy, and I know he couldn't poison 
 his wife." Ah, yes, Gossips, we know a lot about each other, 
 don't we? 
 
 The humour — the bitter humour — of life lies in the fact that 
 we are so blind to the things that everybody else knows. A man 
 was talking to me the other day about the Vjlindness of some 
 people to their own faults, and he said, " My father is a stiff- 
 necked bigoted PresV^yterian, who thinks that everybody else on 
 earth is wrong except himself. He is so narrow-minded that he
 
 Man Know Thyself. 47 
 
 won't even go to church: yet he's always talking about the 
 narrow^-mindedness of people." That's the whole thing in a nut- 
 shell. We have no real idea of the weakness of our own 
 characters. We don't know what miserable little worms we are 
 ourselves; but we keep jumping on our neighbours with an 
 intense bitterness, born of ignorance. We are the creatures of 
 an hour, but we talk and act as though we were going to live for 
 •ever, and we are as bitterly unjust as though we ourselves were 
 perfect. 
 
 I know a man in New South Wales who forms the finest 
 illustration of this text that ever I met. He is a fine-looking, 
 solid, masterful man, and people think he is a fair terror. But 
 his heart is as soft as a girl's. He'd cry at a pathetic story if he 
 thought nobody saw him, and he'd give his last shilling to help 
 a poor struggling mortal. Yet he'll swear like a trooper, and 
 act as coarsely as a bullock puncher if you don't know him. I've 
 heard men curse him for a bully, for a selfish, over-bearing 
 monster; and they thought they knew him. Knew him ! Oh, 
 pshaw, it makes me tired only to think of the dense ignorance of 
 our race. That man dare not be honest, he daren't be honest to 
 himself even, and yet I'll bet he thinks he knows himself. If we 
 dared to go out into the deep, awful loneliness of the trackless 
 bush, and think this thing out for ourselves, the world would 
 soon begin to grow better. If a man only dared to take himself 
 by the back of the neck, and lift himself out of himself, and look 
 himself straight in the eyes, he'd be ashamed of himself. 
 
 Of course there are people in this world who are so shallow 
 that they have nothing hidden in their natures. There are people 
 with souls so small that they can't think a great thought, or stir 
 to a noble emotion. There are people whose feelings lie so close 
 to the surface that if you bored into them you'd strike the barren 
 fossiliferous, archaic rock ; but those are not the ones I've 
 been talking about, no, nor talking to, for the matter of that. 
 I've looked into the faces of congregations that made me want to 
 break loose and kick them ; and there are such people in the 
 world, but sorrow and suffering deepen most lives, and we've 
 mostly had some afilictions, haven't we? But I started off to 
 have a yarn with you about George Dean, and see where we've 
 got to. It's no use worrying though, is it ? If you sit down 
 and think about some of life's problems you get disgusted, and 
 the only comfort is that it's a pretty good world after all. There's 
 some good people in it, too, and the more folks I know the better 
 I like the world, and it's no use growling at it. 
 
 *' Some day philosophy, no doubt, 
 A better world will bring about ; 
 Till then this old, a little longer 
 Must blunder on through war and hunger.'
 
 48 Aiistralian Gossip and Story. 
 
 ^in HenPL) parUes' r|0use. 
 
 '^HIS is a mad world, my masters, and a sad world withal> 
 and the pattern of life is a strangely chequered one- 
 We may go out betimes to see a reed shaken with the 
 wind, and, behold, we meet a John the Baptist crying 
 in the wilderness. 'Twas but a little while since a schoolboy 
 said to me, " Come and see our school, it is the best in the 
 country, and the schoolmaster is the best in the world." It is 
 fitting that a boy should feel thus towards his school and his 
 schoolmaster, yet because I loved the boy I went to see his 
 school. But, alas, the school faded away into the mists of com- 
 monplace when I saw the ground whereon the school stood, and 
 something of the mystery of the history of New South Wales 
 enwrapped me round about as I looked abroad from the school 
 verandah. So do we come to understand how it is that — 
 
 " The massive gates of circumstance 
 
 Are turned upon the smallest hinge, 
 And there's some seeming pettiest chance 
 Oft gives our life its after tinge." 
 
 The school I went to see was at " Charindarnley," Faulcon- 
 bridge, on the Blue Mountains, 1464 feet above sea level. The 
 school is in a quaint wooden house, built on a spur of the moun- 
 tains, overlooking deep fern clad, mystical gorges and far- 
 stretching untrodden hills ; but one forgot the school in the fact 
 that it was Sir Henry Parkes who built the house, who laid out 
 the grounds, and made ample provision for a sweet and restful old 
 age. You can read a man's character — if you know how — in his 
 hand-writing, in his face, in his hand, or in the bumps of his 
 head; but, more surely than all, you can read it in his work. 
 George Eliot says that — 
 
 " Our deeds still travel with us from afar, 
 
 And what we have been makes us what we are. 
 
 We are children of circumstance after all, and " Charin- 
 darnley " reveals the magnificence and the pettiness, the nobility 
 and the childishness of the grand old man, for he is a grand old
 
 Sir Henry Parkcs' House. 4& 
 
 man, in spite of the fact that he is still living, and out of office. 
 I never realised what a grand old man he was until I had seen 
 his work on the Blue Mountains 
 
 Here, years ago, Mr. Henry Pai'kes took up a selection, for 
 with a true prophetic instinct he saw that the Blue Mountains 
 would yet become the sanatorium of New South Wales. Here he 
 built him a fine house, he made him costly roads, planted beauti- 
 ful trees, made marvellous paths, and ornamented the mountain 
 spur in a kingly way, yet in some cases in a tawdry, pitiful way. 
 He put statues on pedestals along the roadways — true, but the 
 statues were made of cast iron, " made in Germany " as it were. 
 On the lawn in front of the house was a statuette — in iron — with 
 a tin umbrella over the figure, while all around were the mighty 
 mountains, and far-stretching, soul-lifting views of blue glory. 
 
 Far away to the right of the house, along a well-built road, 
 lies a curious cemetery, about three acres in extent. It is long 
 and narrow, a piece cut out of the wild bush. The upper part is 
 fairly level, but the lower part is untamed, rocky and uneven. 
 Here the old man buried his dead, and prepared a resting place 
 for himself in that time which surely comes to all flesh. Within 
 a well-kept iron fence, in a trim little garden, stands a tall grey 
 granite obelisk, and carved on it are the words — 
 
 In Memory of 
 THOMAS PARKES, 
 
 OF 
 
 stonleigh, warwickshire, 
 
 Who Died 20th September, 1854, 
 
 Aged 73 Years. 
 
 ALSO, 
 
 MARTHA FAULCONBRIDGE, 
 
 HIS WIFE, 
 
 Who Died 22nd May, 1842, 
 Aged 64 Years. 
 
 And this is how Faulconbridge obtained its name. It bears 
 witness to the love of our veteran statesman for the mother who 
 bore hira in the old land across the sea. On the opposite side of 
 the cenotaph is graven the following inscription — 
 
 Erected By Their 
 
 youngest son, 
 
 Sir Henry Parkes, G.C.M.G., 
 
 PREMIER OF NEW SOUTH WALES.
 
 50 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 Within the same enclosure is a gray granite tombstone, looking, 
 oh, so new, bearing the inscription — 
 
 Clarinda, 
 Lady Parkes, 
 
 ONLY daughter OF ROBERT VAENEY, 
 
 Born July 20th, 1813. 
 
 Married to Henry Park.es, July 11th, 1836. 
 
 Died February 2nd, 1888. 
 
 The family history of the old aian is written in this cemetery 
 on the mountain side, for there are others of his family buried 
 there, and there are other quiet sleepers of whom the world 
 knows nothing. There rests in the Faulconbridge cemetery a 
 certain "James Evanden, died 25th January, 1881." He may 
 have had a history, who knows. We all have, someway ! Then, 
 in a quiet corner, under some sheltering trees, is a nameless 
 mound that difi'ers but little from the grass above it, save that 
 kind hands cut a rude cross of two sticks of ti-tree wood, 
 fastening the cross piece with an iron nail, and planted it at the 
 head of the nameless grave. The cross fell down, but reverent 
 hands have laid it on the mound, and there it lies while bush 
 fires rage, and droughts come, and rains and storms pass unheeded 
 by, and — who was the sleeper ? He was loved by somebody, he 
 was all the world to one. Perchance, he 
 
 " Ate, drank, laughed, loved and lived, and liked life well, 
 Then came — who knows?" 
 
 Perhaps 'tis better to sleep thus than to live as the man 
 lives who built the great house on the hill, who lives now, 
 neglected by the nation, while strangers enjoy the house he built, 
 and his very burying place is owned by others. 
 
 " Charindarnley " was a great house in its day. The poles 
 of a long-disused telegraph wire still show that the old man who 
 built it was a power in the land. The New Zealand flax that 
 grows so beautifully in the ancient garden tells of a man of large 
 ideas. The strange plants and flowers and the weird caverns, all 
 seated and prepared for guests, tell of a man with a soul above 
 huckstering. One path leads down to a beautiful gorge, where 
 it is cool in the hottest day in summer, where the notes of the 
 stockwhip bird break the silence, and the wandering stranger 
 makes acquaintance with the lyre bird. Our veteran statesman 
 made a lovely walk down that gorge, and if he had kept his 
 money to himself he would to-day have been a rich man. 
 
 To " Charindarnley " came the great ones of the earth, for 
 on the slope of a hillside, near the house, there stands a tree, 
 ■with a little tablet set beneath it, with this inscription —
 
 Sir Henry Parkes^ Hoitse. 51 
 
 Auracaria Ciinnins;hatni, 
 
 PLANTED BY 
 
 H.R.H. Prince George of Wales, 
 
 July 20th, 1881. 
 
 Poor, wearj'-looking, tired Auracaria ! It is about 12 feet high 
 and looks as if it had almost given up the attempt to grow in 
 the sandy soil of that hard hill-side. Yet a tree has been cub 
 close by to form a seat for those who desire to sit in peace, and 
 muse on the tree that was planted by a royal hand. 
 
 A little further up the hill, in kindlier soil, is another tree, 
 with a tablet beneath it — 
 
 Magnolia grandijlora, 
 
 PLANTED BY 
 
 H.R.H. Prince Edward op Wales, 
 July 20th, 1881. 
 
 The great ones came to " Charindarnley " once upon a time, 
 but Sir Henry Parkes has lost the place, and now it is a boarding 
 school for boys, under the care of Mr. R. F. Irvine, M.A., a 
 scholarly gentleman worshipped by his pupils. The old Art 
 Gallery of Sir Henry Parkes is now a school-room, and an 
 exquisite library fills one of the rooms that was once devoted to the 
 use of Premier of New South Wales. The character of the builder 
 is written all over the house and grounds, and a better place was 
 never, sure, selected for a boys' school. I went to see the school 
 and the schoolmaster, instead I saw the ghost of Sir Henry 
 stalking all over the place he had lost, crying out against an 
 ungrateful country. Ah dear, it makes one philosophise to look 
 on che house that the old man glorified as a resting place for his 
 declining years, and see how it has all ended ! It seems as though 
 he, too, might sing, with the Hindoo of old — 
 
 " Me, too, this lure hath cheated ; so it seemed 
 Lovely to live, and life a sunlit stream 
 Forever flowing in a changeless peace, 
 Whereas the foolish ripple of the flood 
 Dances so lightly down by bloom and lawn 
 Only to pour its crystal quicklier 
 Into the foul salt sea."
 
 52 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 Prefessep r|u/ley. 
 
 ^ipi^ROFESSOR HUXLEY is dead ! He was a man, and 
 taking him for all in all we shall ne'er look upon his 
 like again. Let us hope that " after life's fitful fever 
 he sleeps well." Thomas Huxley has written his name 
 deep on the pages of the book of time, and when our generation 
 has passed away he will be remembered for what he was, a man of 
 war, a scientific — theologic, popular teacher. It makes me laugh 
 to hear miserable little mole-eyed sinners say, " Huxley, Huxley. 
 Let me see, that's the man who was always pitching into the Bible, 
 wasn't he 1 " Ah, well, that's the way men get known to fame. 
 Gray wrote the " Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and that is 
 the only thing that makes us remember Gray. Defoe wrote 
 ^' Robinson Crusoe," and that is all that most of us know about 
 ihim. Huxley pitched into the Gaderene pigs, and that is about 
 all that some of the sinners of this generation know about him. 
 
 I'll tell you why I liked Huxley 1 He was a man, every 
 time. You never made any mistake about him. He struck out 
 right and left, and made his mark on a stupid age. You always 
 knew what he meant. He probably wasn't always right, but 
 who is ? He made mistakes, but who hasn't. He was one of the 
 best teachers of biology that England ever had, and you could 
 always depend on his teachings. He was a genial scholar and a 
 noble gentleman. When his name used to be bandied about in 
 England, along with those other two great men, Darwin and 
 Tyndall, the three of them stood as the trinity of evil, to the 
 average thick-skulled, so-called religious people. One night Mr. 
 Huxley distributed the prizes at a great educational institution 
 in England, and quite a number of "good people" went to hear 
 bim ; to see, perchance, if he had hoofs and horns. After the 
 lecture a pious lady said, " Is that Huxley — the Darwin Tyndall- 
 Huxleyman?" "Yes." "Well," said the pious one, "I'll 
 never hear an evil word said against him again. Why, he said 
 that no man's education was complete unless he was familiar with 
 the Bible, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Shakespeare, and he 
 put the Bible first ! " 
 
 Huxley was a man who loved all good books ; a man who 
 loved goodness and truth more than titles or honours. He was 
 one of the kindest, gentlest souls that ever lived, a whole-souled 
 full-orbed man. He was first a gentleman, then a science student,
 
 Professor Huxley. 
 
 and next a theologian. He would discuss theology with Mr. 
 Gladstone or General Booth ; he would wrestle on Bible subjects 
 with anybody ; and he was a fair terror with texts. But he was 
 honest always. What matter if we differed from him ? Queen 
 Victoria reigns over more Moslems than the Sultan of Turkey. 
 We have for our fellow-subjects all kinds of idolaters who bow 
 down to gods of wood and stone. And we have millions of white 
 fellow subjects who bow down to golden gods, and sell all that is 
 holy for yellow dross, so we can't afford to say an unkind word 
 against a good man like Huxley, even though we don't agree with 
 all his views. I despise the insular little prejudice that says we 
 are the people, and all the rest are wrong. I despise, too, those 
 narrow-chested Christians who squeak out a little protest lest 
 Huxley should hurt their special brand of truth, or their patent, 
 registered, all-sufficient creed. I am glad that — 
 
 " There is a wideness in God's goodness 
 Like the wideness of the sea ; 
 There's a kindness in God's justics 
 Which is more than liberty." 
 
 It was the saintly Faber who wrote those lines, and I hope 
 
 they're correctly quoted. The sense of them is there, anyway ! 
 
 Faber was a good Roman Catholic, and I'm prepared to back 
 
 him for all I'm worth. I don't take any stock in creeds of any 
 
 kind, for I feel like that bold, bad man who said : 
 
 " For modes of faith let graceless bigots fight, 
 He can't be wrong whose life is in the right." 
 
 There's a good deal of sense in poetry sometimes, isn't 
 there ? But I'm off the track about Huxley. You see, dear 
 gossips these lines are written for people who are not necessarily 
 dealers in stock, and there's a kind of comfortable feeling in my 
 heart that, if I don't stick to the exact text, it won't worry you. 
 If a fellow had to sit down and gossip to a crowd, twice a week, 
 with a stern task-master over him, he'd soon get pumped out, 
 don't you think so % But about Huxley ! 
 
 When Charles Darwin's book on " The Origin of Species " 
 came out first — I think it was in 1859 — the world wasn't quite 
 sure what it meant, but Thomas Huxley soon let them know. 
 He wrote a little book called " Man's Place in Nature," and 
 showed all the push that their grandfathers were monkeys. 
 Didn't he raise a stir ! Mr. Darwin was a quiet retiring student, 
 with no love for controversy, and he wouldn't have thrown a 
 stone at a cat, let alone a parson. But Huxley wasn't built that 
 way ! He would as soon fight as eat. What Darwin didn't say 
 for fear of hurting people's feelings, the Professor said right out. 
 He didn't say ''Anthropoid ancestor" when the word "monkeys" 
 would do as well. What a stir he raised 1 A man had been to 
 hear Huxley one night, and came home and told his wife that
 
 54 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 we were all descended from apes. She glared at him for a bit, 
 then folding her little girl to her bosom, she said : " You may be 
 a monkey on your papa's side, my darling, but you're not on your 
 mamma's." 
 
 While the fight over the monkey business was hottest 
 Darwin kept on the event tenor of his way, living his student 
 life, and struggling against sickness in his lovely home at Down, 
 in Kent. But Thomas Huxley was on the war-path. He fought 
 for truth as only a man with a scientific training can. The 
 parsons said that evolution would hurt religion. The fat-heads ! 
 It makes me tired to hear that yarn. Nothing hurts truth, and 
 if God is Truth who can say aught to injure ! Darwin sleeps in 
 Westminster Abbey now, and the parsons are very generally 
 evolutionists, and religion hasn't been hurt very much that I can 
 see ! Listen to Huxley's epitaph : 
 
 " And if there be no meeting past the grave, 
 If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest. 
 Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep. 
 For God still ' giveth his beloved sleep ; ' 
 And if an endless sleep he wills — so best." 
 
 Professor Huxley was a grand teacher, a clear, incisive 
 writer, a scholar, a thinker, and a good man. He is dead now, 
 and men with good hearts and clear brains will mourn for him. 
 He was, indeed, a noble soul, but his work is finished, and if 
 we can do our little turn at life's problems as bravely as he did 
 in the world will be the better for our having lived. Noble 
 Huxley ! He sleeps now beneath — 
 
 " The blossom-sprinkled turf 
 
 That floods the lonely graves, 
 When spring rolls in her sea-green surf, 
 In flowery, foaming waves."
 
 Australian Progress. 5T 
 
 Australian proQress. 
 
 ^N Belmont Park, on the banks of the Hawkesbury River, 
 about four or five miles from the sleepy little town of 
 Richmond, there stands a quaint old tombstone, shaded by 
 oleanders, a tombstone which has a story to tell. Beneath 
 that lichen-covered, shaky monumental stone, which bears no name, 
 no date, no word of earthly record, lies all that is mortal of 
 A.rchibald Bell, his old wife, and his little granddaughter. Their 
 names are but misty memories even now to the old folks about 
 the place ; but when the centuries have softened down our 
 ancestral asperities, and the years have glorified our dead, then 
 Archie Bell will shine like a meteor star above the misty ways of 
 men. " Belmont " bears record of his name, indeed, and " Bell's 
 Line," the famous cattle road which leads across the Kurrajong 
 to Wallerawang, will carry the name of his family to generations 
 yet unborn ; but Mount Bell, which towers grandly heavenwards 
 in the Blue Mountain range, will tell his name when the men of 
 our day are all forgotten. He was, indeed, a man of mark, 
 worthy of that race which has sent its branches into all the earth 
 and whose flag flies on every sea. 
 
 It was in the year 180.3 that Lieutenant Archibald Bell 
 came out with the 102nd Regiment to manage the lawless people 
 in Australia for his Majesty the King — and sore need had we in 
 those days for masterful men ! Archibald Bell was a strong, 
 true man, worthy of that race of whom Ludyard Kipling has 
 
 sung- 
 
 " There dwells a wife by the Northern march, 
 
 And a wealtliy wife is she ; 
 She breeds a breed o' roving men, 
 
 And casts them over sea. 
 And some they drown in deep water, 
 
 And some in sight of shore, 
 And word goes back to the carline wife, 
 
 And ever she sends more." 
 
 He dwelt in Sydney when life was far different from what it 
 is today, and he was in the front ranks of those who arrested 
 Governor Bligh. He was commander to the Governor's guard 
 when Major Johnston made the arrest, and he was one of the 
 first to enter the gates of Government House with the bold men 
 who dared, in that far away time, to set constituted authority at 
 defiance. How that affair ended, and how Lieutenant Bell was-
 
 58 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 three years and a half in England over the trial of Major John- 
 ston, were too long a story to tell here, but he returned to New 
 South "Wales, and attended to the land he had taken up at 
 Richmond Hill, on the Hawkesbury River. It may be that he 
 was a student of Shakespeare, and named his new " Belmont " 
 after the dwelling-place of the queenly and much-courted Portia ; 
 or it may be that Beltdont was but a corruption of Bell's hill or 
 Bell's mount ; but certain it is that he named his place a t Rich- 
 Hill " Belmont," the name it bears now, and Belmont Park is 
 likely to fill a large place in the annals of the country in the 
 hands of its present owner, Phillip Charley, Esq. 
 
 One of the curious events of Lieut. Bell's life was this : He 
 owned a piece of land beside the Tank Stream, not far from 
 where George-street is now. For some reason or other he 
 exchanged it for another block, nearer to where we now have 
 Government House. During the stormy years of the young 
 country's existence, and the arrest of Governor Bligh in 1808, 
 and the subsequent trial in England, the title to the land was 
 overlooked, and the present Parliament Houses were ei'ected on 
 Bell's land, part of which now forms Macquarie-street. It was 
 only about the year 1 870 that the heirs of Archie Bell received 
 £1000 for the land, to which they held a clear title. They 
 received no " unearned increment " at all, but purely the value 
 of the land such as it was when illegally seized. 
 
 When the Lieutenant landed in New South Wales his eldest 
 son, Archie, junr., was a toddling baby boy, and during the 
 stirring years that followed he was growing in strength and 
 stature, and acquiring the cunning craft of the bushman on the 
 wild hills of the Kurrajong, in the deep, untrodden passes of the 
 Blue Mountains, or beside the mystic waters of the Hawkesbury 
 River. Shortly after Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth had 
 discovered the Bathurst-road across the Blue Mountains, young 
 Archie discovered another path, "Bell's Line," which became the 
 cattle road of the north and west. Strange, indeed, is the fact 
 that our history book tells us little or nothing about the Bell 
 family, or " Bell's Line," even though they were one of the most 
 important families in the country ; but coming generations will 
 do them justice, and the historians of the future will curse us for 
 not having more carefully sought out their history, while there 
 still lived the contemporaries of the men who made the history of 
 our young country. 
 
 When Singleton and his party discovered the Hunter River 
 district, they had almost perished when young Archie Bell dis- 
 -covered them on Patrick's Plains, and were just in time to save 
 their lives. Young Archie received a grant of land on the 
 Hunter for his discovery of the road across the Blue Mountains, 
 and called it Corinda, after a lady member of the family, who
 
 i^t 
 
 ML. i 
 
 
   ! 
 
 ! 
 
 -^/tgS^" 
 
 •iis^ 
 
 .#■ 
 
 -/^ 
 
 i/S^ 
 
 im.. 
 
 i 
 
 O 
 
 ( - 
 
 
 
 3
 
 Australian Progress. 63 
 
 only died recently. He drove the first cattle into the district, 
 and was the tirst white man to arrive there with a team of horses. 
 The Bells of Pickering are the direct descendants (grandchildren) 
 of the Archibald Bell who founded Belmont, the grandsons of the 
 man on whose grave we sit to read the history of New South 
 Wales from the sights above us. The Bells are related to nearly 
 all the oldest families in the country, and so Belmont is indeed a 
 great centre from which radiates the history of New South Wales. 
 To sit beneath the oleanders now on Archie Bell's tombstone 
 and look abroad is one of the most startling sights imaginaljle, 
 for here we see, as nowhere else, the marvellous progress our land 
 has made in one solitary century. We have made such progress 
 as the world never saw l>efore, but being ourselves the units of 
 this mighty movement, we fail to comprehend its vast significance. 
 The generations succeeding us will see the glory thereof, and will 
 ■envy us who live to-day, for, although few of us appear to realise 
 
 it, yet— 
 
 '• We are living, we are dwelling, 
 
 In a grand, an awful time, 
 In an age on ages telling, 
 
 To be living is sublime." 
 
 It was only in the year 1788 that Governor Phillip landed 
 at Botany Bay with his little fleet, in the Terra Australis, the 
 Great South Land of the early navigators. In a few months the 
 children of the carline w-ife had coasted along the shores of the 
 new land and had found Broken Bay, Pittwater, and Earranjoey ; 
 and a little later, in 1789, the Governor found that great river 
 which the natives had called Venrubin, which he re-named after 
 a Lord of the Council in England, the Hawkesbury River. 
 Slowly they made their way up in the wintry July for nearly a 
 hundred miles of tortuous winding, till they were stopped by the 
 shallows of Richmond Hill, one of the fairest places in New South 
 Wales. On the right rose the Kurrajong Hills, in blue and 
 mystic beauty. On the left were the broad, fertile flats of v.hat 
 was yet to become the granary of Australia, for in that day, th-at 
 seems now so far away. New South Wales was Australia. 
 
 Where the Governor was stopped was where the Grose River 
 reached the Hawkesbury, and the beautiful Vale of Avoca opened 
 into the heart of the range of the mountains that shut our fatliers 
 from the fair land beyond. The black fellows abounded then, 
 and the first men who settled on the banks of the river had hard 
 times. Nature and the blacks were their foes, and Nature 
 always seems hard on new-comers, for, as Will Carleton says — 
 
 " She carries in her pockets bags of seeds, 
 As general agent of the thriftiest weeds." 
 
 There was murder, flood, and misery for those early men, 
 but they conquered all in the end, and to-day, as we sit on the- 
 tomb of Archie Bell, we see the loveliest house in all New South
 
 €4 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 Wales rising on a knoll near by. We see the broad fields, farm- 
 houses, towns, and churches in every direction. The Kurrajong 
 heights are clad to the summit with smiling orchards, and good 
 roads wind to the right and left. The hills and plains about us 
 were once waving with fields of corn for the young colony, and 
 the wealth of the land was raised on the land where Archie Bell 
 sleeps now in nameless peace. He came and wrought his little 
 day, adding to his wealth year by year. He became a police 
 magistrate, a member of the Governing Council, and a mighty 
 man in his time. But now he sleeps beside the new " Belmont." 
 Let us trust that he sleeps well. 
 
 There are some curious facts about the Hawkesbury River 
 that are worth noting here. When Archie Bell, sen., was the 
 master of the land the tides used to come up from the sea to 
 Belmont itself. All the cattle that came down Bell's Line had 
 to swim the river, but in 1857 a low-level bridge was built at 
 Richmond. To prevent the marine borers from destroying the 
 piles, they were all covered with muntz metal, but the tides 
 deserted the bridge and the borers went with the tide. Some of 
 the terrible floods — such as the one that left the bridge three 
 chains short of crossing the river — washed away the banks and 
 silted up the river till he tides could reach no higher than 
 Windsor. But the never failing, patient tide is eating its 
 way np the liver, and is coming once more as high as Richmond, 
 so tireless are the forces of nature. 
 
 When the flood left the bridge too short to cross the river, 
 and the cattle came to the end, they had to jump down about 
 14 feet and swim the rest of the distance, and the cattle men had 
 great times on the river. Then George Pitt, who, with his father 
 before him, was born on the banks of the river, acted as ferry- 
 man, and raised money enough to build a stone pier and finish 
 the bridge, even as it stands unto this day, and the northern and 
 western cattle find their way across it to the mighty city of 
 Sydney, which is about 38 miles distant from the town of 
 Richmond. 
 
 Very wonderful is it now to sit on Archie Bell's tomb and 
 look abroad thus and see the change that a century has made in 
 this district. Great houses are rising on all the fair hills about, 
 and it requires no stretch of imagination to look forward to the 
 time when grand mansions will deck the landscape, as " Bel- 
 mont" has made the beginning. The air is pure, the grass is 
 green, the sky is bright, and there is no lovelier place in all our 
 beautiful country than can be seen from the oleander-shaded grave 
 of Archie Bell. But no corn is grown there now. The broad 
 plains of the west, beyond the Blue Mountains, produce our 
 wheat. Here, however, we have the Hawkesbury Agricultural 
 ■College, and here, too, we have one of the finest stock-breeding
 
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 Australian Progress. 69 
 
 grounds in Australia. Phillip Charley, Esq., now owns Belmont 
 Park, and he erected the beautiful house in our illustration, and 
 he is devoting himself to the improvement of the stud stock in 
 the colony. The red-polled cattle which made such a display at 
 the recent Agricultural Show in Sydney came from " Belmont ;" 
 and some of the grandest horses ever seen in the land came from 
 the same place. If any man would measure the rate and the 
 value of Australian progress, let him spend a few days at Belmont 
 Park. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Red Polled Cattle. 
 
 The history of the red polled cattle lifts for us the curtain of 
 the yesterdays, and we stand face "o face with the dumb, awful 
 facts of history. If a man dares to tell the history of the beau- 
 tiful red cattle on the Belmont Park Estate, he has but to go 
 back to the year 1862, when the Royal Agricultural Society of 
 England opened classes at their show for Norfolk and Suffolk 
 polled cattle. That was the first official recognition of what are 
 now the famous breed of Norfolk red polled cattle. The breed 
 might be traced back as far as 1846, when the two breeds of 
 Norfolk and Suffolk cattle were crossed to produce the animal 
 we know to-day ; but that date marks the beginning of an epoch. 
 
 Not that red polled cattle were unknown before that, for the 
 Aryan race, that dwelt on the banks of the Oxus, in the olden, 
 far-away, pre-historic times, revered the red cows, which repre- 
 sented to them the glory of the rising sun. The deep dun colour 
 of their favourite oxen was not a mere accident. Colours stood, 
 in those days, for something more than a chance, and modern 
 scientific men have learned that black pigs can eat with impunity 
 of things that would poison white pigs. Nature gives to her 
 children different colours to denote different qualities, and the 
 milk of a red cow was, to the remote Aryan ancestor of ours, a 
 heahng, health-giving, heaven-sent liquid. The thin, poor fluid 
 from common cows was not like the rich, yellow, fat milk which 
 the red cows gave. They were a special breed, favoured of 
 heaven, in colour, in milk, and in flesh. 
 
 Times of peace develop cattle ; times of war lead to their 
 degradation. Britain, in the olden time, was the seat of con- 
 tinual war. All the races of earth seemed to centre on the sea-
 
 '70 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 girt isle, and the cattle were as much mixed in their breeds as the 
 men. Tennyson has said that — 
 
 " Norman and Saxon and Dane are we." 
 
 But who shall say what our cattle are ? Many and various are 
 the breeds that have mixed in Great Britain to give us our 
 Durhams, our Herefords, our Jerseys, and our Polled Angus. 
 Before the days of pedigrees and true knowledge men did well, 
 working by rule of thumb and by rude, hereditary experience ; 
 but modern days have added vastly to the power of men by the 
 discoveries of science. To-day we know something of the laws of 
 heredity — of the passionless, enduring, unfailing laws — which 
 have been marked by pain and sorrow over the world in all the 
 days of man's bloodstained history, the law which — 
 
 " Maketli and unmaketh, mending all ; 
 
 What it hath wrought is better than liad been ; 
 Slow grows the splendid pattern that it plans 
 
 Its wistful hands between." 
 
 That knowledge has driven us in many directions, and we 
 have wandered — all blindly it may be — into good paths. Look 
 at the I'elationship of the Noi'folk red polled cattle to the present 
 needs of Australia. Today we want a breed of cattle for 
 •exportation, and the requirements are simple : We want a 
 bullock that is small-boned, clean-limbed, and tender, one that 
 will come early to maturity and give a good supply of beef on the 
 smallest possible amount of bone. This is the beast that is 
 supplied by the latest development of modern science — the red 
 polled Norfolk breed. We want cattle that are hornless to bear 
 long railway journeys, and we want cattle that can prosper on 
 poor land, that can bear extremes of climate and travel well. 
 The red polls meet these requirements, and are the coming cattle 
 for Australia. But we are born of a conservative, thick-headed 
 race that is slow to move in new directions, and it may be some 
 years yet before we awake fully to the real value of the polls, 
 but the time must come. 
 
 The illustrations we present are drawn from living beasts at 
 Belmont Park, Richmond, New South Wales. They represent 
 the best and purest of the red polled cattle in this country. One 
 is Doris (4532, imp,), a seven-year-old polled red cow ; she is a 
 daughter of the famous champion bull Falstaff, out of the cham- 
 pion cow Dolly. To the ears of Australians these facts are not 
 of great significance, but to shose who remember these two 
 champions they are very striking. Falstaff was several times 
 Royal and County first prize-winner in England, and was at last 
 sold, at a very high price, to a breeder in the United States, 
 where he has shown the true value of his breed in the vast 
 improvements in cattle - breeding there during recent years.
 
 Australian Progress. 71 
 
 F'a I stajf come.^ of an old stock, which has been carefully bred by 
 the Norfolk tenant farmers, and is the best kind of a bull that 
 can be possibly turned out. The dam of Doris comes of a great 
 milking strain, and Dolly was the winner of first honours every 
 year at the Norwich Royal Show from the time she was a year- 
 ling. In 1886 the judge reported her a seven-year-old cow, 
 having great depth and substance, and they looked more to the 
 beef than to her milking qualifications in awarding her the Cham- 
 pion Cup that year as best in the cow and heifer red polled classes. 
 That is the strain that Doris comes from, so it is no wonder that 
 she forms now one of the finest specimens of her race in the 
 world. She is a splendid milker, round as a barrel, clean-legged, 
 bright-eyed, hornless, and compact. There is no superfluous 
 meat about her, but she has the largest amount of meat on the 
 smallest bones possible, with a magnificent milk record. 
 
 Another picture represents the famous bull Laureate (1563, 
 imp.). This splendid beast is by Falstajf ivom. the famous cow 
 Laura. In 1890 he won first honours at the Royal Show and 
 first honours at the two County shows, and was leader in the 
 collections which won both County Challenge Cups in England. 
 As a bull he stands easily first in his class in Australia. He was 
 calved January 12th, 1888, and was imported by Mr. Charley in 
 1891. Both Laureate and Dons were at the Royal Show at 
 Melbourne, and ci-eated quite a sensation, for they were unlike 
 anything ever seen there, and, as there were no classes for them, 
 they received special prizes. They were also exhibited at the 
 Sydney Royal Show in the following year, and their record here 
 is being eagerly watched. 
 
 One of the famous beasts of the herd is Prize (5077 in the 
 Herd Book), the mother of the champion of England, the world- 
 famed Red Prince, the sire being Laureate, so that in the 
 Belmont Park herd we have the father and mother of the present 
 champion of England, as well as a half-brother in the fine 
 colonial-bred bull Daimio (Lord of Japan), now 19 months old. 
 This is a pure-bred red polled bull, by Laureate (imp.) out of 
 Doris (imp.), bred and fed on the banks of the Hawkesbury. A 
 finer specimen of the breed it would be impossible to see, and it 
 is gratifying to find that our New South Wales breeders are 
 awakening to the value of the strain. 
 
 The value of the red polled cattle to our Australian herds 
 "will be amply proved at an early date, and it lies here : If a red 
 polled bull is crossed with a shorthorn cow the result is a poll, 
 for the prepotency of the breed is startling. This first cross gives 
 the very beast we need for exportation. It is a hornless, compact, 
 hardy animal, excellently suited for our climate, for its red colour 
 tells of the sunny land where it once dwelt, and its quiet, small- 
 boned, milky beefines^ fits it exactly to the requirements of
 
 72 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 Australia to-day. We have thousands of good shorthorn cattle 
 in this country, and Mr. Charley is showing what can be done 
 with them. 
 
 To obtain first-class pedigreed cows, of pure blood and clear 
 descent, to mate with the famous red polled bulls, was no easy 
 matter. The Baroona herd has long borne a famous name in 
 Australia, and at Dangar's sale, when that notable herd was 
 dispersed, Mr. Charley secured the best of them for Belmont. 
 These are being carefully mated with the polled bulls to form the 
 nucleus for the crossbred herd. The bulls will probably be sold 
 as they mature, but the heifers will be kept for breeding, and the 
 utmost care will be exercised in selecting none but the best. 
 
 There are also on the Belmont Park Estate a large number 
 of Chisholm's shorthorns (J. W. C, Goulburn), which, when 
 crossed with a Polie bull, cast a red, hornless, hardy calf, such 
 as exporters need. The prepotency of the Polls is startling. 
 More than one-half of the bull calves are quite hornless, and all 
 the female calves are Polls. There is occasionally a dash of the 
 white shorthorn colour in the calves, but, as a rule, they are 
 almost all the colour of the bull. 
 
 There are at present 29 pure-bred Polls on the Belmont 
 Park Estate, and there can be no doubt but what this herd is 
 bound to exercise a paramount influence on the herds of Aus- 
 tralia in the days to come. 
 
 We can only arrive at the best results from breeding by 
 having a clear idea of what we want. Our greatest teacher has 
 assured us that a pastoralist can chalk the figure of the animal 
 he desires on a barn door, and he can then, by careful selection, 
 breed up to it. We have a clear knowledge of the animal that 
 is required for the development of the Australian trade. We 
 must have the beast that matures early, milks well, kills well ; is 
 hornless, compact, and beefy. The red polled Angus fills these 
 needs, and all we require is the man who possesses knowledge, 
 capital, and opportunity to supply what we need. Of course, 
 most of us can say, with Portia, "I can easier teach twenty what 
 were good to be done than to be one of the twenty to follow mine 
 own teaching." Many of us know what is needed, but it is only 
 a man like the owner of Belmont who can go to work and do 
 what needs to be done.. 
 
 The standard description of a rsd polled cow is very simple. 
 The colour must be red. The tip of the tail and udder may be 
 white, and the extension of the white along the flank from the 
 udder a little way does not disqualify them from standard. 
 There must be no horns, slugs, or abortive horns. The points of 
 a superior animal are— a deep red colour, with udder of the same 
 colour, but the tip of the tail may be white, nose not dark or 
 cloudy, a neat head and throat, a full eye ; a tuft or crest of hair
 
 
 -:. !■;?•«- .
 
 Australian Pros-ress. 11 
 
 should hang over the forehead. The frontal bones should begin 
 to contract a little above the eyes, and should terminate in a 
 comparatively narrow prominence at the summit of the head. 
 
 One needs to take this standard to the cattle on the Belmont 
 Park Estate, and study the animals themselves in order to see 
 how pure they are, and how exactly this description tallies with 
 their points. The colonial born and bred bull Dainiio shows at a 
 glance how the Hawkesbury pastures agree with the Poll cattle. 
 It may be that we will be able to do with these cattle as we have 
 been able to do with some English sheep — we may Vje able to 
 improve upon them. Certainly there is no finer polled bull in 
 England than Daimio, and the efforts being made at Belmont 
 Park to keep the breed pure and up to the standard may result 
 in a decided improvement. But changes such as these come 
 slowly, and we must possess our souls in patience, for, as Shake- 
 speare hath it — 
 
 " Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace ; 
 Sweet flowers are slow, and weeds make haste " 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Stallions. 
 
 Not long ago the Stock and Station Journal published a 
 startling complaint from a good judge in regard to the deteriora- 
 tion of Australian horses. " During the last 30 or 40 years," 
 said a correspondent, " the horses of Australia have been going 
 gradually to the bad, growing weedy, scraggy, and poor." This 
 complaint is only too well founded, and has brought its own cure, 
 for men like Mr. Charley, of Belmont Park, have taken in hand 
 to remedy this trouble. In the stables at Belmont there are 
 some of the finest stallions in Australia, imported from England 
 at great expense for a definite and distinct purpose — that is, for 
 improving the breed of Australian horses. To the eye of an 
 Australian the most striking figure in the stable is that of Lord 
 Derby, jicn. (3472, imp.), a seal-brown beauty standing 16 hands 
 high. The picture of the horse, done by Mr. Percy Spence, gives 
 an excellent idea of the kind of animal he is ; but his steel-like 
 legs, bright eye. and strong flanks need to be seen to be fully 
 appreciated. As a matter of fact, that hackney stallion is 
 attractive to us, because his bone, muscle, and action are what we 
 most lack in our horses to-day. The Americans have adopted the 
 hackney stallion for breeding purposes with an enthusiasm that
 
 78 Attstraliau Gossip and Story. 
 
 we can scarcely understand, but they are not so conservative as 
 we are. The American trotter has no form to speak of, and what 
 the Americans want is a powerful horse for harness, a good 
 carriage horse, a horse with some spring, some weight, some 
 power. That is exactly the horse we want, &o Lord Derby, jim.^ 
 has been imported, and his progeny shows that no mistake has 
 been made in him. He is out of Lady of the Lake (2223 in the 
 English Herd Stud Book) by Lord Derby 2;/^ (417), and the 
 Lord Derby strain is the best in England, and that means the 
 best in the world. No hackney blood is superior, and Lord 
 Derby, jjm., is a worthy descendant of a pure and noble race. 
 One of this famous breed {Danegelt) sold recently in England 
 for 5000 guineas, not for racing purposes, but purely and simply 
 for breeding, and that shows the estimate that Englishmen put 
 on the breed. That beautiful stallion at Belmont Park is one 
 that will do much for the Australian horses, and will help to 
 remove the reproach of weediness from them. As a foal he won 
 five finst prizes and one special prize, and that amongst the best 
 exhibits of the best horse country in the world. With strong, 
 short legs, high-stepping action, and the courage of a lion, this- 
 horse represents the first type we have in this country, and Lora 
 Derby, jtin., is a horse that any man has good reason to be 
 proud of. 
 
 The other horse in our illustration is the well-known stallion 
 Freedom (^33, imp.), sired by that wonderful horse Prince 
 George (235). Freedom, as a stallion, stands in the front rank 
 of Australian horses, and his name is known all over the colonies^ 
 as well as in Great Britain. He is a rich, dark bay, standing 
 about 161 hands high, and is as fine and pure as the purest Arab. 
 Some Clevelands are coarse and uneven, but Freedom is as perfect 
 and fine as ever a horse on earth, with a kingly action that speaks 
 for itself. The illustration will show the glory of his form, but 
 to see him in action is a rich treat. As a prize-winner he holds 
 a first place, for his form and beauty would gain him a judge's 
 love on sight. Some of the two-year-old colts of this stallion are 
 running on Belmont Park just now, and they do credit to their 
 sire. They aie replicas of their father, for they are out of 
 pure stock on the mother's side, and the prepotency of their 
 magnificent sire is evidenced in every movement of their young 
 bodies. They are exceedingly graceful, with all the power and 
 force of their magnificent sire added thereto. In the same- 
 paddock are some of the progeny of the General and of Lord 
 Derby, jnn., and they make as fine a collection of young colts as 
 one couid wish to see. The attempt now being made at Belmont 
 Park to improve the breed of Australian horses is one that is- 
 being fully and generally recognised by those who are the best 
 judges of horseflesh, and the scene there now, amongst the beau-
 
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 Australian Progress. 83 
 
 'ciful progeny of these imported stallions, is worth a visit from all 
 anterested in horseflesh. 
 
 When Freedom was on the quay, leaving England for 
 Belmont, some of the best judges of horseflesh in England were 
 there. They had no idea that Freedom was to be taken out of 
 the country, and a thousand guineas were offered for him as he 
 stood by the gangway. But he had been purchased for Australia 
 by a man who had a definite plan to follow, and the ofier was 
 bluntly refused. Freedom is a credit to Australia. 
 
 In the 13th edition of " Youatt's Complete Grazier," the 
 text-book, the very bible of many British farmers, this horse 
 Freedom takes a prominent place. It is presented as an illus- 
 tration of the noblest type of a Cleveland bay stallion, and the 
 picture is admirably executed. 
 
 Accompanying it is a verse from the work of a modern poet, 
 singing the praises of the Cleveland bays, and it proves that the 
 breed has strong and poetic admirers. It says : 
 
 " All things that live have parallel, save one, 
 
 The Cleveland horse, he alone has none ; 
 Horse may with horse contend, the swift, the fleet, 
 
 As noble rivals on the course may meet. 
 Some for their shape and symmetry we prize. 
 
 Others for strength surpassing, some for size ; 
 But in the noble Cleveland are combined 
 
 All the rare qualities that grace his kind ; 
 Beauty in his strength, courage and wind and speed. 
 
 And, more than all, he claims a stainle.ss breed." 
 
 Close beside this lovely hackney there stands the great prize- 
 winner Ingmanthorpe General (imp., 1071, Cleveland Bay Stud 
 Book), a bright bay with black points, standing 16| hands high 
 This stallion is out of the famous mare Empress (47) by Ingman- 
 thorpe Bay (846), and is a lovely specimen of a Cleveland bay 
 stallion. He is such a glorious-looking horse that he recalls the 
 French General Boulanger, who used to ride down the Boule- 
 vards on a magnificent horse like this one. The sight of 
 Boulanger on such a horse led France to the very verge of 
 revolution, for French people love dramatic effect, and even we, 
 cold-blooded as we are, would be stirred by a like emotion if we 
 saw a manly-looking warrior, in full panoply, mounted on a horse 
 like Ingmanthorpe General. This grand Yorkshire stallion took 
 two first prizes in England as a yearling, and every time he has 
 appeared at a show he won the favour of the judges. He took 
 prizes wherever he was exhibited, not only in England, but in the 
 colonies, and he bore away firsts at Sydney and Hawkesbury, as 
 well as the National Prize at Wagga. The illustration we 
 publish will show the beauty and style of the horse, and one can 
 but guess from that what action, quality, and substance this 
 horse possesses. He is an ideal of strength, beauty, and grace.
 
 84 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 Amongst the mares on Belmont, the one that stands clearly 
 first is the beautiful Bnrbara (493, imp.), in our illustration. 
 She is a perfect animal in blood, breed, and action. She has a 
 startling record as an English prize-winner, for she was the 
 champion two-year-old filly at the English Royal Show of 1890. 
 She took six first prizes altogether and a silver cup during her 
 brief career in the old country. At the Royal Agricultural Show 
 of 1894 in Sydney she was champion, and deservedly so, for she 
 is one of the finest mares ever seen in Australia. 
 
 Her two-year-old colt. Barrister^ took the first and special 
 prizes this year at the Sydney Royal Agricultural Show. This 
 colt is by Freedom., and is as perfect a picture of a horse as ever 
 the eye of man looked upon. It has an eye of fire, a coat of 
 velvet, legs of steel, and such breast and flanks as are rarely seen. 
 It is a worthy descendant of noble parents. 
 
 Some of the other mares on Belmont are almost equal to 
 Barbara. There is the imported mare Beadlam Tulip, which, 
 while in England, took five first prizes, one silver cup, and was 
 the champion three-year-old filly at the Royal Show of 1890 in 
 England. Her colonial record has been equally good, for she 
 took Lord Loch's special prize of £21 at Melbourne in 1891, and 
 of the six times exhibited she has always taken first honors. 
 
 Then there is Georgiana, a champion of Sydney Royal in 
 1891, first at Melbourne Royal, 1891; and Belladonna, t'.ie 
 champion yearling of 1890 in England. She gained 16 first 
 prizes in the old country as a yearling, and has received several 
 firsts in the colonies. Then there is the graceful Queen of 
 Yetholnie, another first-prize mare in the English Royal, as well 
 as a first prize-taker here ; and Semolina, which took first six 
 pinzes in England at the only shows where she was exhibited. 
 Then there is the Aislaby Lass, also a prize-winner in England. 
 The stud mares at Belmont are worthy of the stallions, and 
 worthy of the wonderful estate from which the history of New 
 South Wales seems to radiate, The heirs and the relatives of 
 the founders of Belmont are to be found in every part of the 
 colony where skill and courage are in demand. It looks now as 
 though the stud stock of Belmont were going to exercise almost 
 as stroag an influence on our land as the men have done and are 
 doing. Whatever wealth, skill, and enthusiasm can do to 
 improve the stock of the colony is being done, and the influence 
 thereof will be far-reaching indeed. 
 
 The banks of the Hawkesbury, where our people first 
 settled, make a good place for a breeding ground. There was a 
 time when the Hawkesbury was the granary of the land. Those 
 days are over, but the stud stock of Belmont Park is in a fair 
 way to render the Hawkesbury once more a famous place in the 
 history of our colony.
 
 Style on Stations. 85 
 
 ^tijle o\\ Stations. 
 
 the great Moslem feast of Bairam the believers in 
 Mohamed keep open house. Old feuds are forgotten, 
 and all are invited to partake of the good things of 
 this life. The poorest Moslem makes a show of good 
 cheer, to which all ai-e welcome. At such a time an old and 
 and wealthy hadji entered the gates of a rich man's house and 
 sat down at his table. The hadji's clothes were poor and 
 ragged, so the servants of the rich man passed him scornfully, 
 and the old man went out hungry. He cared not to eat at the 
 table set at the gate for the poor. 
 
 The next feast of Bairam the old man clothed himself sump- 
 tuously in " purple and fine linen," and presented himself at the 
 same table. The servants bowed obsequiously to him ; the mas- 
 ter of the house waited on him, but the old gentleman put the 
 succulent ^//f?///" into his breast pocket, and distributed the good 
 things about his clothes, speaking never a word. At length the 
 host ventured to ask him the reason of this, and the wealthy old 
 Mustapha answered, " When my old clothes came last year, they 
 got nothing ; when my n.e'^ clothes come this year they receive 
 the best — I am giving them what they have obtained." 
 
 The old hadji thought he was very wise, and many other 
 people have thought so, too ; but .clothes are an index of the 
 man, just as the crab's cast-off shell is the index of the crab. No 
 man Avho is clean and neat is careless of his attire, and a due 
 respect for ourselves and our fellows will make us careful that 
 our inner selves are fairly presented in our outer selves. The 
 difference between this natural care and dandyism is as great as 
 between day and night. 
 
 We were yarning about crabs recently, you know, and I had 
 intended telling you some more about sea spiders, but a letter 
 from a " Bushman " about " Style on Stations" has set me to 
 thinking. We are a queer race, and not very patient with each 
 other, but we are just as all our forefathers were, and we're likely 
 to stay so for a long time to come. But I believe that we are 
 growing wiser as the generations come and go, and our race will 
 yet bfc a wise one, if the worlds last long enough, but it makes 
 you sad to think of what Pope said — 
 
 " Like leaves on trees the race is found, 
 Now green in youth, now withering on the ground ; 
 Another race the following Spring supplies, 
 They fall successive and successive rise."
 
 86 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 When this question of dressing for dinner arises, it makes 
 me laugh. I remember a gentleman inviting me to dinner one 
 evening to talk over a little matter of business. He asked if he 
 should invite any friends to meet me, but, as I was going for 
 business, I said, " Certainly not." His house was in a small 
 street in a big city, and it never struck me to ask if he dressed 
 for dinner, and he didn't have sense enough to tell me. It was a 
 wet day ; I was busy in the city, and, when evening came, I 
 hurried off to dinner. I called at my club and washed my face, 
 and fixed up a little bit, but that was all there was time for. 
 Arriving at the house I hung up my overcoat in the hall, and 
 was shown into an elegant little drawing-room. Then my host 
 came in — in evening dress ! I was shocked, and apologised for 
 myself, but he was the one who ought to have apologised for not 
 letting me know beforehand. We went up to dinner and met 
 his wife, also in evening dress, and we sat down to dinner in one 
 of the most elegant little dining-rooms I ever saw. The walls 
 were painted a delicate blue, the soft, sensuous hangings matched 
 the walls, the carpet was thick and soft, and the furniture was 
 dream-like and beautiful. It was simply the most elegant room 
 I ever was in, and when the well-served dinner had been cleared 
 away I found that the same room was used as a sitting room, and 
 a beautiful one it was. 
 
 That night will live for ever in my memory. My hosts were 
 cultivated, scholarly, esthetic people, who lived like sweethearts 
 in ideal luxury, on a very limited income. They made every 
 apology for not having warned me, and their welcome was warm 
 and deep ; but there I sat, with muddy boots and business suit, 
 in a place like a lady's boudoir, in a very fairy palace of delight, 
 and I was as miserable as a hen on a hot girdle. You may talk 
 as you like, but a thing of that sort fills a man with a feeling of 
 intense discomfort, and a good host will always avoid doing any- 
 thing of that kind. I want to be like my neighbours, and I'm 
 willing to confess that I like to dress for dinner. I'd change my 
 clothes as many times a day as you like, so long as my neighbours 
 do it, and I like to put on a dress coat for dinner, because I feel 
 then as though I were fitted out for the business of eating, and 
 there's a good deal of genuine enjoyment in a good dinner. 
 
 I'll never forget the young lady who went to a stylish din- 
 ner for the first time in her life. She was of a nervous tempera- 
 ment, and the style upset her a good deal. She saw the water 
 beside her plate in a chaste finger-glass. She had never seen 
 finger-glasses before, and she thought the water was to drink, and 
 the poor girl took a sip out of her glass ! Then the miserable 
 heathen about her smirked and smiled, and aired their superior 
 breeding by their uncharitableness, and the poor lassie endured 
 the torments of Hades over the dinner and then went home and
 
 Style on Stations. 87 
 
 died. She never got ovcv it ; the horror of the thing killed her. 
 Yet very few parents train their children to go out in the world, 
 and I've sat with real nice people at stylish dinners who were as 
 much at sea as if they had been brought up in the bush amongst 
 the laughing jackasses and the lyre birds. 
 
 That is a i^emark in passing, but here is what I want to say. 
 I know the " Bushman " who wrote that letter, and I like him, 
 and if I went to his place to stay I'll bet we'd have a good time, 
 and never put on " style " either ; but I'd have a dress suit in my 
 bag all the same, for I like to be as my neighbours are, and it's a 
 keen pleasure to me to live in a nice house and dress for dinner 
 every night. But I remember once, not so very long ago either, 
 going to call on a man named Bill Jones — he's living now, but he 
 won't mind me taking his nauie in vain — and his wife was out. 
 There was nobody at Penfield but himself. He had been an old 
 salt, and we had seen many a strange land under curious conditions. 
 We had been pardners for a good while. Then Bill got out the 
 fire shovel for a tambourine and I danced, and we lived the old, 
 wild life over again, and enjoyed it deeply. Then we boiled the 
 billy, and prepared our own tucker, just as in early days, and we 
 fairly revelled in the fun. When Bill's wife came home we were 
 as solemn and stately as a pair of emus, and she never dreamed 
 of the picnic Ave'd had ; but I like to dress for dinner all the 
 same. 
 
 My candid opinion is that the secret of life lies in the state- 
 ment of the great poet who said that the way to do is — 
 
 " Never to mix our pleasure or our pride, 
 
 With sorrow of the meanest thing that Hves." 
 
 The old hadji (a hadji is a man who has made the pilgrimage 
 to the Prophet's tomb at Mecca.) I was telling you about — had 
 a wrong idea about cJothes. We do judge a man by his clothes 
 till we know him, and even then we do, and we have a right to 
 do so. I wouldn't enter into the argument now going on about 
 " Style on Stations," not for a Jew's eye, but I agree with both 
 sides veiy cordially. If I invite a man to dinner I want him to 
 enjoy himself, and if he doesn't enjoy my style I'll try and adopt 
 his style till he's gone, but I'd never try to force my guests to 
 wear low vests and dress coats if they didn't take to them kindly. 
 There's an awful lot in this subject of clothes, but I think we'd 
 better have another gossip about crabs, eh 1
 
 88 Australian Gossip and Story 
 
 Grabs. 
 
 CHAPTER 1. 
 
 jiARK TWAIN has arrived in Australia, with his " soul 
 f ul eyes " and his humour and things, and we are glad 
 to see him and to hear him, for we've known him for 
 a long time. Everybody knows Mark Twain, don't 
 they % You would think so, but I can tell you a true story. 
 
 There's a very beautiful young society lady in Australia, 
 
 who was asked by a friend of mine if she was going to hear 
 Mark Twain lecture. The lovely young lady lifted her soul- 
 ful eyes and said, "Mark Twain? Who's Mark Twain?" 
 Then the band played, and my friend gasped in solemn 
 silence and reflective cynicism. But why should we worry 
 about things like that ? The moral of it is, don't assume that 
 the people you are talking to know what you're talking 
 about. There's a heap more ignorance in this world than 
 most of us are aware of. I was out in a bush town once, hun- 
 dreds of miles frorc the coast, and a friend was telling me about 
 a dramatic company that visited the place once. Amongst their 
 props, they had a splendid painting of a ship under full sail, for a 
 drop scene. The young people came from far and near to gaze 
 on that, because " they'd never seen a real ship in their lives." 
 
 The other day I was talking about crabs, and it seemed that 
 everybody must know what a crab is ; but then that society lady 
 didn't know Mai'k Twain, and the young people out in the bush 
 had never seen a ship. Perhaps everybody doesn't know what a 
 crab is ! Most of us do ; but if any man thinks he knows all 
 about a crabs he's off it. He's never fathomed the depth of his 
 own ignorance. A crab is one of the most curious things in the 
 world. As soon as I begin to think about the life history of a 
 crab it seems to me I'll have to write a book. You've all seen a 
 crab haven't you ? or at least you've all seen a picture of one ! 
 A crab is a sea spider with a hard shell and ten legs, two of them 
 being merciless nippers that can crush almost anything. You 
 watch a crab walk, and you'll see the beggar walks sideways. 
 You ask why he walks sideways, and you'll get a queer answer. 
 Nature will answer all your questions if you only ask aright, but 
 she's a hard mistress, and you've got to study a lot to find out 
 how to ask questions. If you once learn enough to enquire you'll 
 soon find out —
 
 Crabs. 89 
 
 " How headless molluscs making head 
 Against the fashions of their line, 
 On pulpy maxims turned their backa, 
 And specialized a spine." 
 
 You see, it's this way. In the olden, golden, far-off time the 
 •crabs had tails, like lobsters, and the crabs went on a straight- 
 forward way in the world. But tails are awkward things to have 
 about unless they are armed with a sting, or unless they are as 
 big as an alligator's, and as powerful. You see, an alligator 
 could earn his living with his tail, but a crab couldn't. Now, the 
 early members of the crab family took to curling up the tail, 
 under the shell, until they set the fashion, and crabs grew that 
 way with the tail tucked in under the shell. No*/, you get a 
 crab to walk, and you'll see that he only seems to walk sideways. 
 If you examine his sessile eyes (stuck on stalks) and his mouth, 
 and then think where his tail would be, if it came from under 
 his coat, you will see that he walks all right. But, having lost 
 his tail, you can't tell which is back and which is front, and you 
 think he walks sideways, but he doesn't ! 
 
 Now, here's a curious thing. You'll hear men say, " I don't 
 believe we ever descended from monkeys, as Darwin says." Well, 
 they needn't believe it. We don't curse men for unbelief. That 
 is purely a matter of accident, heredity, or environment. I'd 
 have been a good Moslem if I'd been born in a Moslem country, 
 but as I was born in a nominally Christian country I'm nominally 
 a Christian. A man doesn't believe he descended from a mon- 
 key, but if he could watch the pre-natal development of a child 
 he'd hold his tongue. That, however, is a detail. What we are 
 discussing now is a crab. When a baby crab is born he isn't a 
 bit like a crab ; he's the queerest speck of crystalline life that 
 you ever saw. He is so small that you need a microscope to see 
 him, and he's so curious looking that when you do see him you 
 don't know him. In his juvenile or larval stage he bears another 
 name, too ; but he's a larval crab all the time. And Mrs. Crab 
 doesn't have twins or triplets ; she gives birth to so many babies 
 at a time that you would need an arithmetic book to count them. 
 You see, the dangers of the deep are many and various, and 
 Nature, the dear old nurse, is terribly afraid of any species failing 
 on the earth or in the sea, so she brings millions to the birth. 
 The baby crab is plentiful in the surface waters of the sea, and 
 he sheds his coat very frequently. He has a long tail, too^ but as 
 soon as he develops far enough to be a bit like his father or his 
 mother he tucks his tail inside and the hard shell grows over it. 
 Once the shell has grown over a crab he can't grow any 
 bigger in that shell. Our bones, our skeleton is inside of us, and 
 when a baby's skeleton grows large the baby takes up more space 
 outside. Now, a crab's skeleton is outside, and he has no bones
 
 90 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 inside his body at all, so to speak. But he must grow larger, 
 because he can't stay a baby crab all his life, so a funny thing 
 takes place. "When he has grown too big for his trousers, as it 
 were, and wants a new suit, he doesn't go to a tailoi\ They 
 don't have tailors in the crab world. He turns sick. His juices 
 turn sour, his flesh grows watery, and he hides away in some 
 dark corner under water. As soon as he is sick enough and watery 
 enough, he begins to struggle inside his shelly armour, and he 
 forces up the cover of his shell. Then he hauls the legs out of 
 his trousers, and his arms out of his sleeves, and himself out of 
 his skeleton, and steps out into the roadway or the waterway, or 
 whatever you call it. A crab is one of the fiercest, most merci- 
 less little tyrants in the world, but when you see a " shedder" 
 crab standing beside his old skeleton, you'd pity him. He's the 
 most boneless, helpless little unfortunate that ever you cast your 
 eyes on. He wouldn't say "bo " to a goose, and he's as harmless 
 as a new-born baby. But soon the coating begins to grow on the 
 soft body ; the legs become hard and bony, and the old, savage 
 nature comes back with the growth of his outer skeleton. Then 
 he's a terror ! As he grows older he has to go through the same 
 old process over and over again, yet he never grows kinder or 
 better or more affectionate, for he was born a crab, he lives a 
 crab, and he dies a crab. Selah ! 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The other day a man bailed me up, and, said he, " You've 
 told us all about crabs, what are you going to tell us about next?" 
 There's something pathetic in such a statement ; but I only 
 laughed, for it's no use trying to talk seriously when you're stand- 
 ing on the kerbstone in a busy street. The idea of having told a 
 man " all about " anything is weird, wonderful, awful ! I know a 
 man who once said to me, "I know all about sheep." Now, I 
 never did have much respect for that man, but his blatant self- 
 sufficient ignorance made me almost hate him, and I wasn't happy 
 till I got a real good chance to tell him what was in my mind. 
 You see, a man can't know much about anything in this world ;. 
 he doesn't live lone; enough. Youno- men think old men are 
 fools, and wise old u.en know that young men are fools, for by 
 the time a wan has found out how much he doesn't know he's 
 got to pack up his kit and set out on the lone, long mysterious 
 journey. You may think that a sad doctrine, dear Gossips, but 
 I believe that — 
 
 " The world and friends are all more sweet 
 Because Death comes with certain feet."
 
 Crabs. 91 
 
 That hasn't much to do with crabs, has it 1 But once I get 
 off a yarn, it's not easy to find the place to stop. Many a man 
 can make a good speech, but he ruins it by his failure to find the 
 place to stop at. There are two difficulties in making a speech, 
 one is in knowing how to start, and the other is in knowing 
 when to stop, and — here comes the crab ! A crab, as I remarked 
 in a previous " Gossip," has tucked his tail under his shell 
 and grown that way, but, like all other general statements, that 
 requires a good deal of modification. Most crabs have learned 
 to do that, but one family failed to learn and yet lived. Nature 
 is a ci'uel old dame, with no mercy in her make-up. She doesn't 
 often fit square pegs into round holes, or make mistakes in the 
 way she fi.xes things. You've got to obey the old woman, or 
 away you go. With the crabs she was a bit slack, and the results 
 are laughable. On many of the world's sea-beaches you find 
 little crabs hidden in whelk shells. You know what a whelk is, 
 don't you ? One of those little coiled shells that snails wear. 
 Next time you see a little woi'led shell you sit down and examine 
 it. There's more architectural skill and beauty about a shell than 
 most people ever dream of. A man doesn't know how much he 
 doesn't know till he begins to wonder how a shell-fish learned to 
 build its shell ! Please excuse the remark about our universal 
 ignorance. It seems to come pretty often, but the fact is that a 
 man can never learn much without finding out how much he is 
 ignorant of, and that fact keeps hitting him all the time ! 
 
 AVhen you find a little crab in a whelk shell you can swear 
 that he doesn't belong there. He never built a shell in his life ; 
 but you try to get the beggar out, and you'll find that he has a 
 solid grip on his domicile. You'll be awfully clever if you can 
 evict him. He has a kind of tenant right that defies the bailiff, 
 and the reason is only revealed when you smash the shell care- 
 fully, and a curious reason it is, too. He has coiled his tail round 
 the central column of the shell. Nature — the dear old dame — 
 forgot to make his ancestors tuck their tails in, so this degenerate 
 member of the crab family has a soft, loose tail, and he has got 
 to tuck it in somewhere, so he tucks it into an empty whelk shell. 
 Instead of it being a useless little tail, it has a queer claw on the 
 end of it like a tiny pair of pincers, and he grabs the columnella 
 of the shell with that and hangs on for dear life. That is why 
 you can't pull him out. 
 
 Now, the fun of this soft-tailed crab's life comes in when he 
 wants to change his residence "When he starts life at first he is 
 a microscopic speck like his big relations, and when he first 
 develops a shell he is very, very small, and a tiny shell does him 
 for a lodging-house ; but as he moults, gets new clothes, and 
 grows bigger, he has naturally to look for a larger house. You've 
 seen squatters building additions to their houses as their families
 
 92 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 increased, haven't you 1 Well, Mr. Crab can't build extensions — 
 he's got to find a new and a larger house. He crawls along in 
 shallow water, dragging his old house about with him, looking 
 for a new residence. While he is thus on the wallaby track 
 another crab may see him and make a rush at him ; but the little 
 fellow is too smart to be caught in that way : he whips into his 
 shell with a snap like a Yale lock, leaving nothing visible except 
 one small portion of a very hard claw. His shell is too hard to 
 break, and it will roll about with him very lightly, so that he can 
 bid defiance to nearly all the world. When he finds a house it 
 would make you laugh to see hioi examining its capabilities. 
 Did you ever see a woman looking for a new house ? If you did 
 you know how a growing crab acts. He examines the domicile 
 in and out. He makes no mistake about it, because he can't 
 aflFord to move too often. His landlord is Nature, and Mr. Crab 
 has got to shift when Nature serves him with a writ of ejectment ; 
 but he's mighty careful about the new place he moves into. 
 
 Some women, driven by cruel necessity, shortness of funds, 
 lack of choice, or pui'e ignorance, move into houses that don't suit 
 them, and I have seen a Hermit crab in a house that did not suit 
 him, just as I've seen human beings in houses that they couldn't 
 pay the landlord for ; but, on the whole, I'm inclined to believe 
 that crabs make fewer mistakes than human beings. When a 
 Hermit finds a shell that suits him he hauls the two shells close 
 together and watches his chance. You never fool a crab about 
 his removal, and you'll never see him move unless you have the 
 patience of a student. He waits his chance, and slips his soft, 
 claw-pointed tail out of one shell into another as quick as 
 lightning. He knows that he has no friends in this cruel world, 
 so he acts with a sweet celerity that is born of the experience of 
 countless generations of Hermit crabs. For want of a better 
 name we call this inherited habit " instinct," but it doesn't matter 
 much what you call it. 
 
 Once the hermit is into his shell he is ready for war. He'll 
 fight anything. He has earned for himself the name of the 
 Soldier Crab, and he is certainly one of the most warlike little 
 wretches that ever was born. It is good fun to watch two soldier 
 crabs having a fight. I'm no admirer of prize-fights, but I enjoy 
 a fair stand-up fight between two Hermits. They spar like 
 human pugilists. They feint and parry like two cunning swords- 
 men, and the one who lays himself open to attack makes haste to 
 shoot into his shell ; but if he be too slow woe betide him. The 
 other chap gets his cruel claw into the shell and draws the victim 
 out, and then devours him coolly, for the soldier crabs love their 
 enemies — raw. They are wonderful little chaps, even if Nature 
 did forget to teach them how to tuck their tails in ; but they've 
 degenerated in the race for life, because they are very small and
 
 Crabs. 
 
 93 
 
 insignificant. Other things, like anemones, take up their abodes 
 on the Hermit's house, and, its a queer business altogether, and 
 there is a deal left unsaid on the subject. I haven't told you 
 "all about" crabs yet, but I daren't tell you any more jusfc 
 now for fear you get crabby about it ; but I used to wonder if 
 the little beggars felt pain as we feel pain. They act a good deal 
 like us, but I don't think they think much, and, perhaps, some 
 of us don't either, eh 1 Still, when I think about them I hope 
 they don't philosophise about life and death and time and tide 
 as we do, but that, as the poet said — 
 
 " Every unit in the uncounted sum 
 
 Of victims has its share of bliss — ita pang, 
 
 And hut a pacg, of dissolution : each 
 
 Is happy till its moment comes, and then 
 
 Its first last suffering, unforseen, unfear'd, 
 
 Ends, with one struggle, pain and life for ever." 
 
 SSf*S 
 
 « ^■.' 
 
 
 r«M%r 
 
 A'' • 
 
 m 
 
 ^ 
 
 t&^^Tks?^^ 
 
 
 
 >*S^\ 
 
 d 
 
 
 :i^<m 
 
 
 <^ '-—: 
 
 /'e- 
 
 '^s?^ 
 
 ,%_-''"''f!» 
 
 THE HERMIT CRAB WITH HIS RIDER.
 
 91 Australian Gossip and Story 
 
 pifs. 
 
 ^w^ KNOW of a very pious man who refuses to buy a Sunday 
 P|5^ newspaper, because it involves Sunday labour, but — he 
 @|^ takes the train to go to church ! He forgets that a Sunday 
 paper is printed on Saturday, and that Monday's paper is 
 printed on Sunday ! But that same sweet and gentle man is 
 chairman of a ferry company that makes most of its dividends 
 out of Sunday picnics. Now, he is a good man, as good men go, 
 but he belongs to the same silly gang as the rest of us, and we 
 are mostly of that type of whom the poet has told us, who — 
 " Compound for sins they are inclined to 
 By damning those they have no mind to." 
 
 "We are all built on much the same lines, and if I were asked 
 to lay my finger on the chief sin of the race, I'd say it was incon- 
 sistency. But you can't be consistent all the time, can you ? 
 Most of us are human, and we're not built on a consistent plan. 
 You take the average man's opinion of a pig, and you'll see what 
 a lot of inconsistent villains we are. A pig is a lazy, fat, dirty, 
 stupid animal, isn't he ? Well, if I were a pig — which I'm not — 
 and any man gave me that character, I'd have him up for slander. 
 I grew up with that notion about pigs, but I was converted at 
 an early date. When I was young and cruising round the world, 
 a lot of us were out in the bush in the Republic of Ecuador, not 
 far from the village of Kekambus (I don't know how you spell 
 it, but that's the way it was pronounced). We were chopping 
 down banana trees and otherwise enjoying our little selves. All 
 at once we heard a sound in the forest like a rushing, mighty 
 wind, and the Indian who was with us yelled " Chanchos !" and 
 skipped out. We followed him for all we were worth, and were 
 rather surprised to find that a herd of wild pigs had taken charge 
 of the bananas we had cut down. 
 
 Those Ecuadorian pigs were neither lazy, fat, dirty, nor 
 stupid. They were thin, wiry, bright-eyed, clean, and exceedingly 
 intelligent, and most of the wild pigs I have met since were of 
 the same order, They are an exceedingly awkward push to meet, 
 and a man has to be well mounted and well armed before he 
 takes in hand to clean up a party of wild pigs. The chip we 
 keep round the slaughter yards is related to the wild one, cer-
 
 Pigs. 95 
 
 tainly, but the tame pig is what we have made him ourselves. 
 He wouldn't feed himself up to grow so fat that he couldn't walk. 
 We do that for him. He wouldn't " make a pig of himself " that 
 way if he had any choice. The modern, tame pig grows bestial 
 at our command, but it is not his nature so to do. Any man 
 who abuses a pig is as inconsistent as the man who goes to church 
 in a train, a steamboat, or an omnibus. When I hear a man 
 abusing a pig for being dirty, lazy, stupid, and things like that, I 
 know that he doesn't know much, and he's likely to break the 
 law on the Sunday on his way to worship the Law-Giver. 
 
 Pigs are accused of wallowing in the mud. So they do, and 
 they learned that trick before our ancestors learned to paint 
 themselves blue. The pig comes of a very good and very ancient 
 family. He is allied to the hippopotamus. He is related to some 
 of the oldest families on earth, and he puts on no airs about it 
 either. A pig is not proud, but he has more reason to be so than 
 many of those who swear at him. I'll tell you how he learned to 
 wallow. You see, his ancestors lived about river banks, where 
 there were mosquitos, wasps, and all kinds of stingers, including 
 snakes. Now, you watch a pig go for a snake ! They are the 
 best snake-hunters we have, and they'll keep a paddock clear of 
 snakes better than any other protector you can have. A snake 
 hates a pig, too, and will clear out if it gets the chance, but the 
 pig is generally too quick for it. The pig learned how to fight 
 snakes before our babies learned to cut their teeth. 
 
 That has nothing to do with the wallowing, you say i Well, 
 maybe not, but it belongs to the same time. A pig could fight a 
 snake on the river bank and get the best of him, but neither a 
 pig nor a man can fight a mosquito. There are long-stinged 
 borers by African rivers that can make themselves felt anywhere, 
 and the pig family learned how to get ahead of them. Mr. 
 Ancestral Pig went and rolled in the clayey mud of the river 
 bank, and then came out into the open. The sun baked the 
 clay, and lo ! the pig had on a mud suit that bid defiance to the 
 stingers ! That was one of the cleverest things that any family 
 ever learned to do, and now, forsooth, he is accused of being dirty 
 on account of this ancestral trick of his. A pig is no fool ! 
 
 A pig is just exactly what we have made him We have 
 trained him to be fat and lazy in order to get the largest possible 
 amount of bacon out of him, and he accepts the position with 
 easy grace. We should be fair to him though, and never accuse 
 him unjustly; but that is where the humour of human stupidity 
 and inconsistency comes in. We are a queer race. I'll never 
 forget the old Sabbatarian looking at some lovely strawberries 
 that were on sale on a Monday. Said he, savagely, '* Were these 
 picked on Sunday?" "No, sir," said the gentle but sarcastic 
 gardener, " they were not picked on Sunday, but they growed on
 
 96 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 Sunday, sir." That's what's the matter. Nature ought to be- 
 proceeded against if we are going to be consistent ; but we are 
 not consistent, and never will be, and some of us make no 
 pretence of being so. The only thing I started out to say was,, 
 that when a man refuses to buy a Sunday newspaper he ought 
 not to go to church in a train or a steamboat, or else he ought to- 
 keep his mouth shut. Ahem !
 
 Pearls. 9T 
 
 pearls. 
 
 '^Trvcijjvu'i 
 
 jHERE is a well-known Australian sheep-buyer who wears- 
 in his scarf a large and curious-looking pearl. It is a 
 notable jewel, because it is so strangely shaped, and if 
 that pearl could talk it would tell a strange story. But 
 the trouble is, that before you can properly understand what a 
 pearl is you've got to know what an oyster is, and there are very 
 few people who do that. An oyster is one of the oddest things 
 that ever lived, and if you want to understand the nature of 
 ostrea edtilis (I think that is what it is called scientifically) 
 you've got to put your ear to the breast of the ocean and grow 
 accustomed to that — 
 
 " Sound like sobbing 
 And sighing that brings a gale, 
 A low, sad song, as a sailor's 
 That never again shall sail." 
 
 Seems to me that you never can listen to the stories the sea 
 has to tell unless your mind has been brought into harmony with 
 the pulsings of the great heart of Nature, which finds rhythmic 
 expression in the everlasting roll of the ocean. The waters of 
 the great deep are full of weird mysteries, and the sight of that 
 pearl in the sheep-buyer's scarf suggests them all to me^ and T 
 want to yarn about oysters. They are full of curious tricks. 
 Did you ever think of how it is that an oyster never opens its 
 mouth till it dies ? We don't tie up its jaws with a handkerchief 
 either. When it's dead it's done for, which makes you think of 
 the epitaph on a man, which might be used much more frequently 
 than it is — 
 
 " Here lies a man that did no good, 
 
 And if he'd lived he never would ! 
 
 But where he's gone, or how he fares, 
 
 There's nobody knows and nobody cares." 
 
 Excuse me " dropping into poetry," but when it seems to fit 
 I can't help it ! There's a good deal of resemblance between 
 some men and an oyster, and the advantages are not always with 
 the man ! Did you ever read " Handy Andy T He was told 
 that he must see that the oysters brought to table had their 
 shells closed. He did ! He brought some oysters and stood them,
 
 98 Australian Gossip and Storv- 
 
 under a water-barrel for some weeks till they were required for 
 the table. The shells were shut sure enough, but when they 
 were forced open — phew ! It reminds me of the old riddle, 
 " What is the difference between a bad oyster and an Austra- 
 lian T If you haven't heard that before you'll never guess it. 
 An Australian is a colonist, but a bad oyster is a settler. D'ye 
 see? 
 
 When I read that story about Handy Andy and the oysters 
 I was a very small — and a very bad — boy, and it never struck me 
 to ask why oysters kept their mouths shut when they were alive 
 and only opened them when they were dead. It was years and 
 years before I got sense enough to ask questions, but you can 
 take my word for this, it takes a fellovs' to learn a great lot before 
 he finds out how much he doesn't know, and he's got to know 
 that he doesn't know much before he begins to ask questions. 
 Now, honestly, did it ever occur to you to ask that question ? 
 You may have eaten oysters off the half shell, and even opened 
 them for yourself, without ever thinking of the exceedingly clever 
 device by which the oyster keeps itself shut. 
 
 The first time you get hold of a live oyster you try and open 
 it. You'll find you can't do it, except by the exercise of very 
 great force, and well directed force too ! If you break off the 
 fine edges of the shell, and then insert a knife, you can open the 
 oyster easily, if you know the trick. You move the knife about 
 rapidly until you cut a string, called the " adductor muscle, ' 
 which holds the shells together. As soon as you cut that you 
 can open the oyster and scoop out the soft-bodied, helpless 
 inhabitant. The muscle is attached to both shells, and passes 
 thi"ough the body of the oyster. So long as that animal lives he 
 bosses that muscle, and never opens his shells except for business 
 reasons. When a man comes along with a knife and cuts the 
 door string, then the poor oyster is undone. But, don't you see, 
 if there was nothing else to the animal except that string, the 
 shells wouldn't open when it was cut, but they do open, and 
 therein lies the mystery, if we thought about it. 
 
 You take an oyster shell and examine it, and you'll find a 
 pair of very curious hinges fixed at one end. In the hollow of 
 the hinge there is fitted a piece of elastic stuff that looks like 
 indiarubber. So curious is the effect of that rubber that it acts 
 as a spring, and opens the shell. If you are clever enough to get 
 an oyster out of its shell without separating the valves, you can play 
 with that hinge aud find out how curiously it works. You lay 
 the shell down, with the hollow valve underneath, and you will 
 find that the flat upper valve, or shell, will rise of its own accord. 
 Now, think of that adductor muscle in the body of the animal, 
 and you will see a very strange arrangement. The muscle keeps 
 the shells together. The oyster, being one of the laziest " fish "
 
 Pearls. 99 
 
 in the sea, always lies in bed, and when it wanted to open its 
 shell, it couldn't lift the upper valve unless it had some kind of 
 mechanical contrivance to do it with. Yon see that, don't you ? 
 Well, Nature invented the indiarubber arrangement in the hinge, 
 and as soon as the adductor muscle is relaxed the shell flies open 
 of its own accord. You can search all through the patent records 
 of New South Wales and you'll never find a simpler arrangement 
 than that anywhere ! 
 
 Nature is a weird and awful mistress. She wove the oyster's- 
 luscious body from out the salt waters of the mighty deep. She 
 made the daintiest morsel of life in the sea to dwell in those 
 shells, and she wove the wiry adductor muscle from out the great 
 sea's wave. She evolved the indiarubber hinge from out the 
 restless sea, and she built the shells from the fashion! ess water. 
 She taught the oyster all it knows, and she made the oysters to 
 lie in beds and to live at ease on the sea-shore. Nature invented 
 the exquisite hinge for the oyster shell ages and ages before she 
 invented men. She taught the stupid oyster how to make a 
 living, millions and millions of years before men argued about 
 Freetrade or Protection. You find the shells of the oyster in 
 solid rocks that were old and hoary ages and ages before the 
 pyramids were built or thought of. She made the shells from the 
 sea, and the living body of the oyster is simply gelatinised sea 
 water, and that is why it is so easily digested" by mankind. 
 Nature is a curious, mystical, awful force or law — call it what 
 you like — and — 
 
 " This is its work upon the things ye see ; 
 
 The unseen things are more ; men's hearts and minds, 
 The thoughts of peoples and their ways and wills — 
 
 These, too, the great Law binds." 
 
 But the question before the house, dear gossips, is the pearl 
 in the sheep-breeder's scarf, isn't it ? But we must have a yarn 
 about an oyster first, because that pearl was born in an oyster 
 and it's no use starting off on the pearly way before we know 
 something about an oyster, is it %
 
 UOO Atistrahaii Gossip and Story. 
 
 Oysters. 
 
 , -jN this world there is a constant strife between good and 
 % evil. The old legends say that it is between God and the 
 devil, or, as the Persians put it, between Ormzud and 
 Ahriman. If you will look abroad to-day, leaving your 
 own heart alone, you will see the struggle that is ever going on 
 between ironclads and cannons. Now we have a cannon that 
 will pierce anything ; now we have an ironclad that will resist 
 everything. To day we know a burglar who can break into any 
 kind of a safe ; to-morrow we have a safe that will resist any 
 kind of a burglar. That struggle is not new, it is as old as life 
 itself. When the first oyster was invented or evolved there was 
 some other form of life that lived on oysters, and the struggle 
 came as to which should come out on top, the oyster or the 
 oyster-eater. Now we have an oyster-shell that will resist almost 
 all enemies except a man, and we have a fish with grinding teeth 
 all over its palate that can chew even an oyster-shell, and so the 
 war goes on for ever. Even man himself, proud monarch of the 
 earth, will one day be food for the crawling worms, suggesting 
 that old statement carved on Lord Chatham's pipe — 
 
 " Of lordly man how humbly is the type, 
 A fleeting shadow, a tobacco pipe ! 
 His mind the fire, his frame the tube of clay, 
 His breath the smoke so idly puffed away ; 
 His food the herb to fill the hollow bowl ; 
 Death is the stopper ; ashes end the whole." 
 
 "We put on a good many airs in our own small way, but we 
 don't amount to much, do we ? If you come to consider how the 
 pearl was born, how the pearl in the sheep-buyer's scarf was 
 evolved, you'll come to have a difierent opinion of life from what 
 is generally held. You get an oyster, take it out of its shell of 
 lime, and drop it into a tumbler of clear water and examine it ! 
 You'll find it a marvellous creature. It is wrapped in a soft, 
 fleshy mantle, and the fringe of the mantle is made of a very fine 
 cilia or hair. Now open the mantle, take a fine needle, or any- 
 thing of the same nature, and open the oyster. You will find 
 that the body is made up of wonderfully fine layers or folds of 
 soft, silky flesh. You may think that a man is the most wonder- 
 ful animal in the world, but after you get to know an oyster 
 you'll, maybe, change your views. 
 
 Let us have a look at a baby oyster. That's the curious 
 little cuss ! When oysters are spawning, in the summer months,
 
 Oysters. 101 
 
 "they are not good to eat. Their bodies are quite watery, because 
 they are full of young oysters. You see, it's this way : An 
 oyster is both male and female in itself, and produces its own 
 young. Yet that is not exactly correct either, but it's near 
 enough for a general statement. When the spawning season 
 comes, Mrs. Oyster lies in her bed with her mouth wide open — 
 that is her shells— -and when she is ready, she gives the adductor 
 muscle a strong pull, and that drives out not only the water in 
 the shell, but a cloud of young oysters. Not the hard-shelled 
 little fellows that we see on the rocks, but a cloud of tiny free 
 swimmers like small tadpoles. A baby oyster is a queer little 
 speck of life, and he swims off as merrily as a schoolboy out for 
 fun, and looks as gay as a squatter when wool is on the rise. 
 
 When an oyster brings forth a family, she doesn't draw the 
 line at one, like an elephant, or a dozen, like a pig, but she brings 
 forth hundreds of thousands. The risk the kids have to run 
 makes it necessary. There are no life assurance offices in the 
 ocean, and old Dame Nature has to see that the family survives. 
 There's no Royal Family to give a bounty for triplets. There 
 are no French premiums on large families. Mrs. Oyster sends 
 forth an array of juvenile oysters, and the youngsters receive no 
 maternal care. They have to shift for themselves from the jump, 
 and they swim round in a frantic endeavour to find a place to 
 settle in. They want to settle on the land, and they do ! They'll 
 settle on a stone, a bottle, an old boot, or anything else that 
 comes handy, and never ask if there's a railway or a public-house 
 handy. They've got to settle or die ! 
 
 The first thing is to build a house, and the microscopic speck 
 lives on its tail, while it builds a house of lime, and it gets the 
 lime out of the sea. As soon as it has built itself a dwelling, it 
 spreads its tiny mantle over it, and the fingers on the edge of the 
 mantle are all around the doors of its house. It opens its tiny 
 shell, and sets up a current with its fingers {cilia), and the 
 microscopic specks of life in the sea float in to make food for the 
 baby oyster, for life in the sea is as life on land, and the baby 
 oyster kills tinier things that it may live, for all life lives on life, 
 and, wherein are we different, striving as we do for — 
 
 "Praise, fame, domination, conquest, love, 
 
 Rich meats and robes and fair abodes, and pride 
 
 Of ancient lines, and hist of days, and strife 
 
 To hve, and sins that flow from strife, some sweet, some bitter." 
 
 Life, dear gossips, is much the same in oysters as in men ; 
 but '"jhe chief advantage, in many cases, lies with the oyster. It 
 woi'ks no evil knowingly. We do. But let that pass. The 
 oyster builds him a house of lime, and lines it with irridescent 
 peai'l, weaving into its dwelling the glories of the sunshine and
 
 102 Australian Gossip and Story 
 
 the beauties of the sea, until it dwells in a palace more v.'onder- 
 fully glorious than ever was inhabited by the kings or princes of 
 the earth. The shell grows by slow and beautifully slender 
 accretions round the edge, and the tiny oyster grows larger and 
 larger as the house it dwells in. The ciliated mantle selects the 
 food that comes to it hour by hour ; but when any large or 
 unwelcome morsel comes along the strong muscle snaps the shell 
 together, and the oyster is safe from most of its foes. But 
 sometimes a speck of sand comes driving in unexpectedly, and 
 tlie cunning fingers miss it. Perhaps it is a speck of drifting 
 organic matter that has passed the careful fingers all unwittingly, 
 and then comes trouble, disease, and, maybe, death, for oysters 
 and men and all living things grow sick and die at times. 
 
 When a morsel of stuff" enters the oyster shell and cannot be 
 dislodged, but takes refuge under the mantle, where the ciliated 
 members cannot reach it, then the oyster does a curious thing. 
 It coats the intruder with pearly nacre, and smoothes it over 
 with the eorgeous material of which it built its own shell. A 
 lump grows on the shell ; an evil disease is manifested by a 
 beautiful mound, and the oyster lives on ; but the disease has 
 become a pearl, and the evil thing is glorified into a jewel for the 
 ornamentation of a lovely woman. That's curious, isn't it? But 
 sometimes the evil thing passes between the fingers of the oyster, 
 and enters into the delicate body, so that it cannot be dislodged. 
 Then the oyster coats that with the glorious nacre, and makes a 
 pearl of the intrudei', and the pearl that was born inside of the 
 oyster's body is lovelier, rounder, and more perfect than the one 
 that was born on the shell ; and I wonder if the pearl on that 
 man's scarfpin was born inside the body or on the shell of the 
 oyster 1 It scarcely seems smooth enough to have been born 
 inside, but it is very lovely ! 
 
 I'd like to say some more about that pearl, but the printer 
 will be calling just now. I must tell you this before I stop, 
 though. The Chinese priests found out this trick of the oyster's 
 long, long ago, and they made a curious use of it. There were 
 sceptics in China once upon a time, who refused to believe that 
 the funny little "josses " were gods. The Bonzes, or priests, cut 
 some tiny josses out of bell metal, quaint little things, like three- 
 penny bits. They watched till the oysters had their bhells open 
 and slipped them in. The shells shut to, but the metal discs 
 made their way under the oysters' mantle. By-and bye, the 
 priests brought the sceptics, opened the oysters, and showed them 
 the picture of Joss, wrought in beautiful pearl in the shell of a 
 living oyster. That settled the matter, for if a stupid oyster had 
 Joss in its shell, then a wise man ought to have Joss in his heart, 
 eh ? There's a good deal in an oyster when you come to dig it 
 out, isn't there ?
 
 The Riverina. 103- 
 
 Jhe F(i\/epii"^a. 
 
 & 
 
 HE most wonderful land iii the world is, .surely, the 
 land of the Pharaohs, the great Nile land, where 
 rain rarely ever falls, and the people depend on 
 the annual floods of the great river for their very 
 existence. Egypt, the land of the Pyramids, of the Ptolemys 
 of ancient history and of modern strife, is but a little 
 country in itself, the areable land thereof amounting to some- 
 thing like 10,000 square miles. If you include all the towns, 
 lakes, roads, and land in use, you might make out another 13,000 
 square miles, but at most Egypt proper consists of, let us say, 
 23,000 square miles, and this has a population of about 7,000,000. 
 This land was formed by the Nile floods. This land was the 
 great theatre of ancient history. Here Moses lived and moved 
 and wrote his mighty record on the page of time. Here, too, 
 were enacted the most awful episodes of human history, from the 
 time of the shepherd kings to the time of Napoleon. Egypt is 
 living yet, and the bloody record of her existence has not closed, 
 but a new Egypt, born of river-floods, is awaiting development in 
 New South Wales ! 
 
 The Riverina is a land born of river-floods ; it is a land as 
 fat as the land of the Pharaohs, and it only awaits the hand of 
 Aquarius, the water-bearer, to make it richer, greater, and 
 mightier than ever Egypt was. Our water-born Riverina has an 
 area of more than 32,000 square miles, with not a barren rood in 
 all that immensity. The land of the Pharoahs is dying, looking 
 with fading eyes on the long scroll of past glories. The glory of 
 our Riverina has not yet dawned. Men say, with Mr. Browning *. 
 
 " The earth is old, 
 Six thousand winters make her heart a-cold ; 
 The sceptre slanteth from her palsied hand." 
 
 But the wild strength of the Riverina has not yet been harnessed 
 to the car of civilisation, nor have the engineering giants of earth 
 taken thought of the way in which to do it. But so surely as 
 the Pyramids of Egypt are crumbling to decay, so surely is the 
 future of the mighty Riverina written in God's book of fate, and 
 it will be a mighty future. To-day the enquirers are trying to^ 
 arrange an irrigation scheme for Egypt, which will make the 
 barren wastes blossom as of old when the shepherd kings ruled 
 the Nile valley. They talk of building a dam at Assounan, on
 
 104 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 the Nile, and another near Cairo, at a cost of .£1,600,000, and 
 the results, they say, would repay the outlay by 40 per cent, per 
 annum. Spend that amount on the Riverina and it would repay 
 the outlay much more richly, but — the day of the Riverina is not 
 yet. The markets of the world are far distant from us, and our 
 population is very small and very foolish. We know not, most 
 of us, what the Riverina is, or whence it is, or even where it lies. 
 People say that the diocese of the Riverina extends from Junee 
 to Broken Hill, but that is not the Riverina as God made it ! 
 
 It obtained its modern name through a curious struggle. 
 The district belongs, geographically, to Victoria, because while 
 the town of Hay lies about 250 miles due north of Melbourne, it 
 is distant from Sydney about 450 miles. The Murrumbidgee 
 River, with its vast 1,300 miles of winding length, runs through 
 the Riverina, and the squatters could get their wool more cheaply 
 by water to Melbourne than to Sydney. The Murrumbidgee 
 runs into the Murray, and the wool barges easily reached Moama, 
 and the wool was trucked to Mell)Ourne. The men on the rivers 
 -wanted to secure their separation from New South Wales, and 
 excitement ran high all over the district that was known as the 
 Riverine, because it was the rivers that were the cause of the 
 trouble. But New South Wales had no idea of losing all that 
 territory, and a railway was run from Sydney to Hay, and then 
 the squatters had a choice of routes. If the river was up they 
 sent the wool to Melbourne by water, if it was down they sent it 
 to Sydney by rail, and so arose the war of differential rates. If 
 the squatters had been patriotic they would have sent it all to 
 ^Sydney, even at a loss, but being commercial men, with a desire 
 to make all they could, they allowed themselves some latitude. 
 But we own the Riverine now, and we call the big river basin 
 the Riverina. 
 
 Before the differential rate question came up, before Captain 
 Cook sailed along our coast and called it after the far-away Wales 
 that was so familiar to him, a queer thing was going on in the 
 Riverine district. Once upon a time, thousands and thousands, 
 maybe millions, of years ago, A.ustralia was a group of small 
 islands, and then, some other time, it was a great deal larger 
 continent than it is now. There was a time when Tasmania was 
 part of Australia, and there probably was a time when New 
 Zealand was connected with South America. That is a large 
 order, but nobody can deny it and prove that it was not so. 
 The place where the Riverina is now was a vast depression, 
 perhaps an inland lake, or sea. The walls around the depression 
 were granite at Wagga, and the stiff Silurian basic rock such as 
 they have at Broken Hill. When they went down at Hay for 
 artesian water they struck this basic rock and gave it best, 
 because you seldom find anything below it but inchoate world
 
 The River ina. 105 
 
 stuff. Two thousand feet down below the flood drift at Hay 
 they struck the Sikirian rock. It crops out at Broken Hill, and 
 they found silver in it. 
 
 What filled up this vast depression % There comes the 
 wonder of the story ! There are men breeding sheep on the 
 Riverina to-day who have never once enquired the why of the 
 vast plain that reaches to the sky-line on every side. There ai'e 
 men on the Riverina so busy about politics, differential rates, and 
 daily bread that they never once thought about the history of the 
 Riverina — 
 
 " Methinks we do as fretful children do, 
 Laying their faces on the window-pane 
 To sigh the glass dini with their own breath's stain. 
 
 And shut the sky and landscape from their view." 
 
 Yet if you consider on it there must be a wonderful history to 
 this flood-born Riverina of ours. If you watch the shallow 
 cuttings on the railway as you come on to the Riverina after 
 leaving Junee, you will see that there are no stones in the world- 
 stuff which makes the soil. In some places it is loamy, in some 
 clayey, in some sandy, but nowhere is it stoney. If you want a 
 stone to throw at a rabbit you cannot find it in the Riverina ; 
 it is a stoneless land. Take a boring instrument and go down 
 through the earth, and for a thousand feet or more it is always 
 the same. Whence came all this drift % 
 
 Back we come to the old point. Once upon a time there 
 was a great depression where the Riverina homestead stands 
 now. From Junee to the Darling River, from Hillston to the 
 Murray, say 320 miles one way and 120 miles the other way, 
 there was a vast valley. In it were strange old-world beasts and 
 birds. The marsu^^alian pouched animals of the kangaroo tribe 
 abounded, and the giant sauriaus of long-extinct races made it 
 their playground. In the Pleistocene time, in the yesterday of 
 geology, when the rainfall was heavier than now, the Murrum- 
 bidgee and the ]\Iurray spread far afield, as the Nile has spread 
 yearly for countless centuries. The annual floods in those olden 
 times must have been awful to contemplate, for they slowly filled 
 up the vast depression and made it what it is to-day — a mighty 
 stoneless plain of rich alluvial land, waiting for the hand of man 
 and the floods of the irrigationist. 
 
 The Murrumbidgee rolls slowly along now in the deep course 
 that the centuries have made for it through the flood-silt of its 
 own deposition. Sometimes, in flood, it creeps up over its banks, 
 making a vast inland sea on the level plain ; but these modern 
 days bring us no such floods as the olden times. Not that the 
 Riverina has probably altered much in a thousand years, or ten 
 thousand years for the matter of that, as geology asks mighty 
 periods for her miracles. Nature is slow in her methods ; she
 
 106 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 will not be bound in her days or ways by the poor little calendar- 
 makers of earth. 
 
 To-day, on the great Riverina plains, there are a few towns, 
 far, far apart. There are a few million sheep, and thei'e are many 
 millions of rabbits. There is a little cultivation, but the world 
 is not yet lacking the bread which will come some day from the 
 great, rich, deep, virgin flats of the Riverina. Round about 
 Uardry there is a garden planted on the flat plain, down by the 
 banks of the Murrumbidgee. That garden is watered as would 
 be a town garden in a scorching summer, and it shows what the 
 earth of the Riverina plains will grow. There are such flowers 
 as are scarcely seen else\A here on earth, for the soil is good, the 
 sun is strong, and the air is pure, and the Riverina gardeners will 
 yet surprise the world. In the Uardry garden there are grapes, 
 flowers, trees, lovely shrubs, and such perfumes fill the air for 
 miles around. It is a very paradise for fruit, and the soil will 
 laugh a rich harvest if l)ut supplied with water. Down on the 
 river flats there grow giant gum trees, 30 feet in circumference, 
 which tell the story of a long continuance. Up in the higher 
 lands the kangaroo and the emu still find a rich feeding ground, 
 telling their own weird story of a fauna which has been long; 
 extinct everywhere else. Once the time arrives for the engineers 
 to come to the Riverina as they have now gone to- Assounan and' 
 Cairo, on the Nile, then the great plains will produce food for 
 unborn, countless millions of human beings. At the Native Dog 
 Bore, on the road from Bourke to Barringun, they have planted 
 wheat as an experiment, and they got back from the soil 35 
 bushels to the acre of wheat, weighing 651])S. to the bushel. 
 When the Murrumbidgee is lifted up and shed over the great 
 plains by the hand of man, then the soil will give such a return 
 as even the Nile lands never gave in their palmiest days. We 
 grumble and growl at our jDOsition to-day ; we moan about hard 
 times, but we are dwelling in the midst of such undeveloped 
 wealth as the boldest dreamers have never yet dared to speculate 
 upon. The Riverina will be the world's granary, with its soil of 
 river silt that has been accumulating for ages past ; with its 
 sunshine, its rivers, and its wonderful fertility. We gi^umble,. 
 indeed, and — 
 
 "We lift a cry 
 
 Against this work-day world, this ill-spread feast, 
 
 As if ourselves were better certainly 
 
 Than what we came to."
 
 A Rivenna Station. 107 
 
 l\ f^i\/enii)a Station. 
 
 ^OME three years ago there came to Australia a young 
 English gentleman, who was bent on " roughing it " in 
 our land. He l^rought with him a pair of silver-plated 
 spurs, a bowie knife, and a brace of elegant revolv-ers. 
 Some of his fellow-passengers suggested that he should have 
 brought a dress suit and a tennis racket, but he expressed the 
 idea of millions of his fellow-countrymen when he said, " I'm not 
 going to stay in the city ; I'm going two or three hundred miles 
 into the interior." The average Englishman has an idea that if 
 you go two or three hundred miles inland you come to the black 
 fellows, the desert, the wild-waste places, and the howling wilder- 
 ness. But such ideas are wrong about an English colony. In a 
 recent newspaper article, Mr. Henry Copeland, ex-Minister for 
 Lands, in describing Noumea, said that the Frenchmen there 
 were all trying to make money in order to get l>ack to France. 
 Our people settle in a far land and try to make money in order to 
 import old England. They take their customs with them, good 
 and bad ; they keep the old feasts of the Fatherland, but they 
 forget the fasts. They eat, drink, dress, swear, and cling to the 
 old sports, just as their . forefathers did in the land beyond the 
 sea. They play cricket and football, under a blazing Southern 
 sun, just as their people do in the old land in the North. They 
 bury their dead in the new land, and their heart-strnigs weave 
 themselves around the new objects, and all desire to return home 
 dies out. The new land, under the Southern Cross, has become 
 th«ir home, even though the native-born Australian still speaks 
 of the country he never saw as " home !" We'i'e a wonderful race, 
 truly ! 
 
 Just the other day I was invited out to see a friend in the 
 Riverina, and went away from Redfern Station at nine o'clock 
 at night for a journey of about 450 miles into the south-western 
 interior. How strange it seemed to think of the young English- 
 man and his bowie knife, while I carried a dress suit and a pair 
 of white kid gloves — for the interior. At the railway station 
 there were crowds of people round the second-class carriage 
 windows kissing the migrants farewell, just as you see them 
 doing in the old lands, for the poor people are very kind to each 
 other. The poor are very piteous to the poor in all lands, and
 
 108 Aiistrahan Gossip and Story 
 
 the women and babies going away from Redfern at nine o'clock 
 at night were objects of pity and of sympathy to many. We 
 have no third-class carriages in this free land, but the increase of 
 poverty and civilisation is driving us ever towards them. When 
 Ave have grown a little richer we will have more poor, and more 
 accommodation for them, poor souls ! 
 
 We drew out of the station, and the great white moon lit 
 up the ghostly countryside, and the bright star Venus came 
 gleaming over the far hills, in spite of the lady moon. Then to 
 bed in peace, while the train tore along on its iron path towards 
 the south-west, past sleeping towns and hamlets, under 
 bridges, over bridges, through deep cuttings, with a roar, away 
 and away, past Campbelltown, Moss Vale, Goulburn, Yass, and 
 Harden, till the morning broke and we were near to Coota- 
 mundi-a, 253 miles from Sydney. What a queer little town it 
 seemed — a town that had run away from the city, and had just 
 been rounded up near the railroad track and wasn't quite settled. 
 Yet the people of Cootamundra are as self-centred, independent, 
 and self-reliant as the people in Paris or London, or anywhere 
 else, perhaps more so, and necessarily, too. 
 
 A little beyond that town we came on the village of 
 Bethungra, where some of the men who made the place were 
 standing on the platform. Perhaps they were not much to look 
 at, but if you think about their magnificent, unconscious heroism 
 you want to bow down before them and worship them, even 
 though they might kick yovi for your ignorance. They have 
 built their .square, unhappy-looking houses on the edge of the 
 bush. They have Ijuilt fences, ploughed fields, and made homes 
 for themselves hundreds of miles from the coast, where the first 
 settlement was made but a century ago. They have schools, 
 churches, hotels, and public halls, where but a generation ago the 
 kookal)urra and the wallaby reigned supreme. Yet here they 
 stood on the platform, all ignorant of their own valour, and it 
 made one think of Will Carleton's words about the farmers — 
 
 " Rough clad were they, unkempt and gray, 
 
 With lack of studied ease. 
 Yet beauty, strown with charms their own, 
 
 Like brave old forest trees." 
 
 Over the hills at Bethungra floated a few golden- white 
 clouds, touched with the glory of the rising sun, and it seemed 
 that the clouds and the men would pass away together like the 
 baseless fabric of a vision, for it looked all like a dream, of a 
 summer's morning ; but the sight of a bare little cottage made it 
 all real enough. There stood a woman at the door, gazing at the 
 thundering train. At her knees were two little children, and 
 beside her climbed the bonny flowers that her own hands had 
 planted. That was her home, those were her children, and the
 
 A River inn Station. 109' 
 
 flowers that bloomed against the unpainted, frail-looking cottage 
 was her's too. Here was wrought out the old tragedy of love, 
 life, woe and death. Such a weary round it seems to the 
 onlooker, but a glance at the woman's eyes near Bethungra made 
 life seem terribly real. 
 
 Away we sped, past Junee and Old Junee — as if anything 
 could be old in such a new land — over great stretches of drab 
 land, of long vistas of gnarly, crooked, ring-barked, dead trees, 
 between rolling hills and over broad plains, past Junee racecourse 
 and small houses like dry -goods boxes, and far-off beautiful 
 mansions. The morning sun glorified the earth and the trees, 
 and the quivering leaves and all the land looked glorious through, 
 the soft mists of the early day. A little horse-jockey from Sydney 
 came into the carriage, eji route for Hay, but he was blind to the 
 glory of the day, and thought the journey monotonous. God 
 help us in our blindness ! We came to a little wayside station, 
 where there seemed no town at all. There was but a weary- 
 looking little platform raised on the red-earth plain to meet the 
 coming train. On to that passed a man and a woman — very 
 lonely they looked, too ! As the man descended the steps of the 
 platform, leaving the woman alone, her eyes fell on one of the 
 bags they had brought, and as the train pulled away from the 
 platform she cried, " Eh, Wully, is that ma bag T God bless the 
 dear old Scottish tongue ; they are a grand race, and, as Wm. 
 Black says — 
 
 "From Hudson's Bay to the Rio Grande 
 
 The Scot is ever a Rover, 
 In New South Wales and in Newfoundland, 
 
 And all the wide world over." 
 
 Aye, man ! 
 
 When we had passed Narrandera in the noon hour, and all 
 the hills were behind us, we entered fairly on the great, wonder- 
 ful, mystical Riverina, on to the vast plain of silt which stretches 
 for hundreds and hundreds of miles from the Murray River 
 across the Murrumbidgee, away up to Hillston, almost to the 
 Lachlan, a marvellous plain indeed. Here the earth grew dry, 
 and the red earth of the stoneless river silt was laid bare to the 
 sun, crying for rain. Here, too, the rabbits appeared in vast 
 multitudes, sitting, eyeing the noisy locomotive as if it were an 
 intruder on their peace. Some day, in the years to come, the 
 millions of tbe world will find a bountiful sustenance where the 
 rabbits revel now, but that day is, as yet, afar off, though the 
 thunder of the train bears the first hollow roar of the coming 
 flood, for the fields of the Riverina are full of magnificent possi- 
 bilities, and the hordes of mankind are sorely hungered. 
 
 On we tore through the hours of the day, till the train 
 stopped at Uardry Siding, 27 miles from the town of Hay, 341
 
 110 Australian Gossip and Story, 
 
 feet above the sea level, and 427 miles from Sydney. Nineteen 
 hours it took the train to make that distance, but it was a won- 
 derful journey. Then came a drive behind a spanking team to 
 the Uardry Homestead, three and a half miles across the level 
 plain to the banks of the emerald green, swiftly-flowing Murrum- 
 l)idgee River. There, in the far, south-western interior of New 
 •South Wales, stood a beautiful house in a lovely garden, with 
 gi'avelled walks, glorious flowers, trim lawtis, cosy seats, and every 
 appearance of a charming English home. The Lady of Uardry, 
 the mistress of it all, was worthy of the setting, and she had 
 made it. In the house there were all the elegancies of a house 
 on the Thames, or the Seine, or the Hudson. There were the 
 last new books from London, the latest music, the most recent 
 magazines. The servants were as well trained and soft-footed as 
 the best in the land beyond the sea, and the entire service of the 
 house was as elegant. Strange, indeed, it seemed to stand in a 
 lovely I'oom overlooking the Murrumbidgee, and gazing past the 
 grape vines and over the flower beds to where the great gum trees 
 were growing as they were in the days when Captain Cook dis- 
 covered this new land in the southern sea. Fifty years ago this 
 was an untrodden wilderness ; now we dressed for a well-served 
 dinner in a lovely dining-room, and when the day was done we 
 gathered in an exquisite drawing-room to listen to good music by 
 the light of softly-shaded lamps, and when the singers had sung 
 their songs we all gathered round the piano, and it made the 
 heart of one, at least, thrill, as we sang together that wonderful 
 song composed by Eliza Cook — 
 
 " The Briton may traverse the Pole cr the zone, 
 
 And boldly claim his right, 
 For he calls such a vast domain his own, 
 
 That the sun never sets on his might. 
 Let the haughty stranger seek to know 
 
 The place of his home and birth, 
 And a flush will pour from cheek to brow 
 
 While he tells f)f his native earth. 
 For a glorious charter, deny it who can, 
 
 Is breatheil in the words ' I'm an Englishman.' "
 
 The Mystery of Instinct. Ill 
 
 Jl^e /)(\LjsterLj ef +nstin0t. 
 
 ^ID you ever notice the picture of George and the Dragon 
 on a sovereign % If ever you see a sovereign again you 
 take a good look at it, and see if you can figure out 
 what it means. If there was time, I'd like to have a real good 
 gossip about dragons, but we only come out twice a week, and 
 there's so many things to talk about that you can't find time for 
 them all. I'll tell you what put the dragon into my head. I saw 
 a sovereign the other day ! Our forefathers used to lie about 
 everything, just as some of our own people lie about fish. As we 
 grow more civilised we will cease to lie about fish, but that won't 
 be in your time, or mine either. A little while ago we were 
 yarning about " instinct," and I wanted to tell you a tale, and . 
 the sight of the sovereign — that belonged to another man — 
 recalled it. 
 
 You know what a "goanner" is, don't you? Well, if you 
 look at the dragon, and then look at an iguana, you'll see that 
 there's some kind of a resemblance. That Saint George (he was 
 an army contractor in Cappadocia, or somewhere) got on to the 
 sovereign through the yarns that the people used to tell about 
 " goanners." But my yarn is just as tough in its way, yet it's 
 true ! A good many years ago I was fooling round the Gala- 
 pagos Islands, in the Pacific Ocean. They lie on the equator, 
 about 500 or 600 miles from the coast of South America, in a 
 line with the little republic of Ecuador. These islands are sur- 
 rounded by deep water ; they are separated from each other by 
 deep, deep channels. They are hard, black, volcanic, and inhos- 
 pitable. There's only one of them — St. Charles' Island — that 
 €ver seems to have had much humaxi life on it. On the other islands 
 there is only such life as could come drifting from the mainland. 
 On some of the islands there dwells a big "goanner," a 
 horrid, black, frilled lizard, that reminded me of the legend of 
 the Dragon of Wantley, which had — 
 
 y *' A sting in his tayle as long as a flayle, 
 
 Which made him bolder and bolder ; 
 He had long claws, and in his jaws 
 Four-and-forty teeth of iron, 
 With a hide as tough as any buff, 
 Which did hiOi round environ." 
 
 Those lizards, or iguanas, looked horribly fierce and dan- 
 gerous, but the poor things were as harmless as lambs. If you
 
 112 Atistraitan Gossip and Stor\ 
 
 sat on a rock and looked down into the deep, clear waters of the 
 ocean, you could see them moving as gracefully as any fish, with 
 their forelegs laid closed to their bodies. If you came across one 
 on the rugged shoi'e of shoe-fretting lava it couldn't get away 
 from you very well, because it couldn't run as fast as a man, and 
 it wouldn't take to the water even to escape. Our fellows were 
 horribly cruel, and when they found that these lizards, about a 
 yard long, were harmless, they used to catch them and play 
 tricks with them. If you got one by the tail, lifted it up, and 
 flung it out into the sea, it would swim straight back to the shore, 
 landing sometimes at your very feet. Now, that was about as 
 stupid a thing, as unnatural a thing, as any beast could do, and 
 the man who explained it was Charles Darwin, the naturalist, the 
 student, the gentle scholar. 
 
 Listen I On the mainland of South America there were 
 iguanas of all sizes, colours, and descriptions. About the big 
 rivers, where the natives lived, the " goanners " were wild and 
 shy, but in places far remote from the madding crowd, I've sat on 
 a river's bank and watched them glinting about in hundreds. 
 Good eating they were, too, in a land where there were no hotels. 
 They are, in their native haunt, very largely vegetarians, but some 
 of them are carnivorous, eating insects, flies, and things of that 
 kind. When they lay eggs in their holes on the river banks, in. 
 tough, leathery skins, and cover them up, they know not what 
 will become of them If a flood comes and carries them to sea, 
 so much the worse for the eggs, that's all. Many eggs were 
 carried off with floating trees, and some of them stranded on the 
 volcanic island which we now call the Galapagos Group. When 
 the young iguanas were born they were on an unfriendly spot, 
 and fossiking round for a living was a hard business, but they 
 lived ! Life is dear tc all of us. 
 
 When an animal of any kind, from a man to a sheep- 
 tick, finds itself face to face with death, you can depend on it 
 adapting itself to circumstances if possible, and escaping what we 
 all hate, death! When it's a case of "die dog, or eat the 
 hatchet," we mostly manage to masticate the axe, or else we die. 
 The iguanas didn't die but they learned some new tricks. There 
 wasn't much tucker on the volcanic islands, but there was a good 
 deal in the water, so they took to the water ! They are nearly 
 allied to the amphibia, or animals that can live on either land or 
 water, so they adopted a marine life as a matter of business. 
 They could swim well, as a kind of family trait which belonged 
 to their near relatives, so they shifted their search for food from 
 the barren islands to the bottom of the crystal flood, where — 
 
 " The sea-flower spreads its leaves of blue, 
 That never are wet with the failing dew."
 
 The Mystery of Instinct^ 113 
 
 There's no trouble about the subject as far as we've got, is 
 there ? It's all easy and straight. You see, when they found 
 themselves in a hard world they grew up different-looking, and 
 each succeeding generation was a bit uglier, to our eyes, than the 
 preceding one. The iguanas that dwelt by the great Peruvian or 
 Ecuadorian rivers had time to grow beautiful, and they did too, 
 but a few thousand years on the volcanic shores of Chatham or 
 Albemarle Island altered that. They are black, ugly, horrific, 
 and savage looking, but it's only a matter of looks. We shouldn't 
 kill things because they're ugly, for some of us might suffer if that 
 became the law. You see, it was natural that they should grow 
 ugly and take to the water. In the water there were sharks, 
 swift, huge, merciless sharks. Some day I must tell you about 
 the Galapagos sharks ! When they saw the sweet, timid little 
 iguanas coming down into the sea, after the green laver and the 
 sea mosses, the sharks snapped them up, gladly took them in as it 
 were, and made them welcome. The lizard that failed to escape 
 the shark never left any offspring after that, but the ones that 
 escaped might have lived to rear and educate respectable families. 
 It became a habit in the iguana family to skip from the shark. 
 That is, it became an "instinct," and, as we have remarked 
 elsewhere, " instinct is inherited habit." 
 
 Now, dear gossips, keep your eye on this fact. Thousands 
 of generations have taught the South American lizards — or 
 iguanas or " goanners " — to escape from sharks at any price. If 
 one tumbles off a rock into the sea it knows there's danger, and 
 it paddles for a landing-place at once. But, don't you see, a new 
 danger has arisen. Men have been invented ! There were no 
 men about when the family learned the trick of coming to shore, 
 so they were safe ; but now that men land on the shores and 
 catch them they don't know enough to take to the water, where 
 they would be safe. They are poor, small-brained conservatives, 
 and it takes long generations to teach them a new trick. It will 
 take them ages to acquire a new " instinct," and by that time it 
 may happen that new dangers will have beset them, and they 
 will have to perish from off the face of the earth, even as superior 
 races have done before to-day. When you come to think of a 
 yarn like that, and then look at a dragon on a sovereign, you can 
 understand how the ancient liar had a large scope for his abili- 
 ties, and how strange legends grew up concerning lizards and 
 dragons, and monsters cf that description. They cling to us in 
 our stories, they cling to us everywhere — except in our sovereigns. 
 
 -OO^
 
 114 Australian Gossip ana Story. 
 
 ^r[cien+ preeziqp /y\etf]0ds. 
 
 QUESTION of great interest to Australian stockmen 
 to-day is how to transfer the mighty flocks and herds of 
 thiscontinenttothedensely-populated centres of Europe. 
 We can send frozen meat to England, and we are doing 
 it, but very few people ever think of the genesis of the trade, or 
 of the philosophy of meat freezing. The story of Nature's meat 
 freezing is one of the most wonderful ever told, and a sketch of it, 
 at this juncture, will be exceedingly appropriate.); 
 
 Freezing meat did not begin in Australia, nor yet in America, 
 btkt it began when the world was thousands of years younger than 
 it is now. The same processes which to-day we call " new " are 
 old, very old, and are but parts of that ceaseless tide of being — 
 
 " Which, ever changing, runs, linked like a river. 
 By ripples following ripples, fast or slow — 
 The same, yet not the same — from far-off fountain 
 To where its waters flow 
 Into the seas." 
 
 The name of the first man who made a drawing of the 
 monster beast which was frozen by old Dame Nature we know 
 not. We cannot tell when he lived; we cannot even guess 
 within a few thousands of years. But he was a rude, cave- 
 dwelling savage, who dwelt in the country that we now call 
 France. He spent his summer days in restless wanderings over 
 the strange and townless country, and he passed his weary winters 
 in gloomy caverns, lighted only by the fire he had learned how 
 to kindle, for, in the olden, far away times 
 
 " Men perished in winter winds till one smote fire 
 From flint-stones, coldly hiding what thay held — 
 The red spark treasured from the kindling sun." 
 
 One savage man, hiding in the gloomy cave, drew a picture upon 
 a bone, his carving tool a stone. He drew, as schoolboys draw 
 to-day, the picture of a beast he had seen. It was a monstrous 
 beast, not unlike an elephant, but it had strangely-curved tusks, 
 and it was covered with hair. That savage artist drew true to 
 nature, but his picture was lost and forgotten for countless 
 thousands of years. The man and his tribe passed away, and 
 were remembered no more among the children of earth. Civili- 
 sation sprang up ; Romans and Gauls struggled for the mastery 
 of the forest-clad land ; kings and kaisers ruled the earth, and the 
 Stone Age was never dreamed of.
 
 Ancient Freezing Methods. 115- 
 
 Then came curious men who explored ancient caverns,, 
 seeking to read the mystery of the world we live in, and they 
 found the bone that the ancient man had carved in the gloom of 
 a cavern in the midnight of the world's history. They had never 
 seen such a beast, and they laughed at the quaint conception of 
 the savage idealist, but — the cave-dweller was a realist ! He had 
 only pictured what his eyes had seen. It was in the year 1806^ 
 that a Russian found the beast pictured by the e^rly artist in the 
 rtUd banks at the mouth of the River Lena. It had been buried 
 ^the morass of an ancient day, and had been frozen solid, and 
 now, in a mighty thaw, it had been cut out of its hiding-place by 
 a sweeping river and disclosed to the eyes of man. It was,, 
 indeed, a hairy elephant, standing 13 feet high and 15 feet long, 
 with tusks about 8 feet long. Never a mortal man had seen such 
 a beast on earth before, but it must have roamed the earth when 
 the cave-dwel ers existed, else one of them could never have drawn 
 a picture of it. 
 
 Years passed away, and other hairy mammoths were laid, 
 bare, and the dogs, and wolves, and wild beasts came and fed on 
 their flesh. They ate the meat which Nature had stored up for 
 them, by a simple freezing process, for thousands of years. In 
 1846 a gigantic carcase was found, containing in its stomach the- 
 tender shoots of pine and fir trees, along with a mass of nearly 
 digested food of the same sort, and Nature had shown us how to- 
 preserve meat in this simple way, and yet we have only recently 
 " discovered " the process for ourselves. Nature froze and pre- 
 served the tender plants and the most delicate viscera of the giant 
 beasts for thousands of years, and now we are wrestling with the- 
 problem of how to do the same thing ! 
 
 One strange fact about the freezing processes of Nature lies- 
 here : Early in the tenth century there was a great trade in ivory, 
 which was found in Siberia. It went east to Persia and west to 
 Europe, but no man ever seems to have enquired very diligently 
 concerning the place of its origin. It was really fos-il ivory, and 
 came from the tusks of the frozen mammoths, which had been 
 entombed in such vast numbers that the world was supplied with 
 ivory from their tusks. Millions upon millions of the ,e mighty 
 beasts had perished, and their ivory and their flesh had been, 
 preserved by the freezing processes of Nature until modern man. 
 came in search of the hidden treasures. He found the giant 
 bones everywhere in Europe, from the shores of the German. 
 Ocean to the frozen, sea washed wastes of Siberia, and even to-day 
 there is a vast trade done in the long-hidden ivories of the 
 monster which was sketched by the cave-dwelling man. 
 
 Why did Nature destroy all these mighty beasts, so that 
 not one of them survived until modern days ? Who shall say % 
 Was it to give an object lesson to Australian meat exporters in.
 
 116 Australian Gossip and Story 
 
 the nineteenth century ? Scarcely. Nature is merciless in the 
 extreme. She has no maudlin sentimentality in her make-up. 
 She has no almshouses for the unfit ; no compassion on the 
 incompetent. If the living creatures on the earth fail to adapt 
 themselves to new conditions, they must go — 
 
 " From scarped clifl: and quarried stone 
 She cries ' A thousand types have gone : 
 I care for nothing, all shall go.' " 
 
 In the struggle for existence it is not what we call the " best 
 that survive: it is the fittest, the most adaptive, the ones that 
 can see the drift of events, and suit themselves to new conditions. 
 The law that mercilessly consigned the mammoth to Nature's 
 freezing process is at work as surely in New South Wales to-day 
 as it was in the days of the cave-dwelling artist. The conditions 
 of existence are changing and new methods must be adopted to 
 meet them. It is only by wise and effective combinations that 
 our stock-raisers M^ill be able to keep abreast of the times, for 
 there is no such thing as standing still. We must go ahead — or 
 go behind — and to lag in the race to-day means destruction, and 
 combination can only be effective by means of a manly and far- 
 seeing policy, which can sacrifice to-day for the sake of a glorious 
 to-morrow, for it is eternally true, as an ancient seer put it — 
 
 " What good gifts have iny brothers, l)ut it came 
 Froni[search and strife and loving sacrifice ?"
 
 On the Lachlan. 117 
 
 8q tf^e ba8p[lan, 
 
 ^i^T was Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, who said that 
 if you put a Frenchman into a street to live he would 
 know all his neighbours in twenty-four liours. An 
 Englishman would live there for twenty-four years and 
 never know the man next door to him. If a Frenchman were 
 cast away among savages, he would be tatooed and living like a 
 s ivage in two years ; but in two years an Englishman would be 
 the king of the country ! There's a good deal in that saying, and 
 the older I grow die more thoroughly my soul approves of it. 
 We are a stiff-necked, unregenerate, pig-headed race, that grumbles 
 and growls and swears, but we take this England of ours with us 
 wherever we go. We seize the earth and hold it with an awful 
 grip. No matter whether the former owners were Indians or 
 Chinldes, savage or civilised, it's all the same to us— we make 
 it into a British possession. 
 
 Look at Forbes — a place 300 miles from Sydney, away out 
 in the wilderness ; a place about 14,000 miles from London ; 
 a, place that was almost unknown and certainly unnamed 35 
 years ago, and now — Great Scott ! 
 
 It is a live town, a genial, aristocratic centre, where they 
 have four or five churches, over 20 " hotels," four doctors, a gaol — 
 with a big crowd in it — a hospital, a high-toned club, a School of 
 Arts, a town hall, a fashionable milliner, and several bookmakers ! 
 It has a population of about 4,000 souls, and it has a cultured 
 circle that never goes out to spend the evening without a dress 
 suit. It has hotels that are almost as comfortable as any in 
 London, and they have baths with water laid on. Think of that ; 
 and all the time you are 300 miles from Sydney. Why, the sight 
 of this colony of English, Irish, Scotch, American, Welsh, and 
 all the nations that go to make up our Australia, our English- 
 speaking colony, makes a man want to take off his hat and bow 
 down before the unthinking, unshrinking, unacknowledged 
 heroism of the race. But we just steam up into the town on the 
 train, and never dream of tLs magnificent courage of our people. 
 We find— 
 
 " Earth crammed wicn neaven, 
 And every common bush afire with God ; 
 But only he who sees takes off his shoes — 
 The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries."
 
 118 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 It is a wonderful thing to go rushing over the good, green, 
 grass lands towards Forbes ! As we come near the town of" 
 Parkes we see the ground turned up, as if into great ant heaps ; 
 but the ants were human — they were fossiking for gold. Poor- 
 little ants ! Then, at Parkes itself, we hear the gold stamping 
 mill at work, and we look round at the upturned earth on every 
 side and we realise that our people came out here driven by the- 
 irresistible yellow fever, drawn by the thirst for gold, which 
 conquers everything. If gold broke out in hell, Satan would lose 
 his kingdom, for the fossickers and speculators would take charge. 
 Our race takes the gold fever worse than any other people on 
 earth ! 
 
 As we steam along towards Forbes we pass Tichborne, and 
 old memories of the claimant come rushing across the mind. 
 Here were the Tichborne diggings, and all the way along there- 
 are ant heaps, like great red sores on bosom of Mother Earthy 
 where fevered men have been searching for gold. 
 
 Then we are in at the trucking yards and into the town — 
 and what a platform ! Just the same as a million other platforms 
 in countless other towns in countless other lands where our- 
 language is spoken. We have no original/ty about us. The 
 railway station at Little Puddlecombe is just like the station in 
 Wyoming, and the station at Wyoming is just like the one on 
 the road from Valparaiso to Santiago, and that is just like the- 
 one at Forbes. You get weary of railroad stations. You get 
 sick of the race you belong to at times, and are almost ready to- 
 wish you were an angel. John Ruskin said that when he looked 
 at the architecture of some of the railway stations it made him. 
 ashamed of being a man, and he wished he was a dog. Amen, 
 John, Amen ! 
 
 The man who drove our coach to the hotel was an aboriginal, 
 who had as keen an eye to the main chance as an Irishman, for- 
 we inoculate all the people we mingle with and make them as bad 
 as ourselves, and sometimes worse, for even a savage can see our 
 bad points; but it sometimes takes a scalpel and a microscope to- 
 find our good points. Forbes is a tine little town, with wide- 
 streets, tree-planted and pleasant-looking. All the trees are 
 young, of course, for the town is only a baby, but the white 
 cedars were in bloom, and the jackaranda, the acacia, the kurra- 
 jong, the blue gum, the pepper, and the tamarisk were growing 
 famously. By the time these trees have grown to their full 
 stature Forbes will be a mighty city, for events move rapidly,, 
 and when towns grow in Australia they grow fast. 
 
 As Aive stood at the hotel door, looking at the men in the 
 street, and laughing at their sweet similarity to all our race, there 
 came along a familiar figure. He wore a white felt hat, a light 
 coat, and a bag suspended from his shoulders by a blue band..
 
 On the Lachlnn 119 
 
 His hat was cocked on one side ; lie had a pencil in one hand and 
 a tablet in the other. As he approached the little knot of men 
 that always stand at the hotel door he said, in the sharp tones 
 rendered familiar on many a racecourse, " Now, then what's your 
 favourite for the Melbourne Cup ?" That's it, masters ! The 
 same old vices, the same old virtues, the same bad old ways. The 
 leopard cannot change his spots, and this earth-conquering, 
 masterful race is slow to change. You cannot mend them by 
 px'eaching at them, or they'd have been better long since. They 
 are an obstinate, magnificent race — justice-loving, rascally^ 
 egotistic, and hard to live with. You can't change them — 
 
 " As easy pluck 
 The golden stars from h« aven's embroidered stole 
 To pin them on the gray side of the earth." 
 
 But they are a good lot for all that, and I'll tell you why I 
 like Forbes and Forbes people. It was a little thing that opened 
 my eyes ; but I'm as human as a man, and as easily pleased as a 
 baby. I was going up the street on which the Town Hall stands 
 when we met a couple of Forbes men, and I was introduced. 
 Now, mind, I hadn't been away from my hotel door before. This 
 was my first walk out. When my chaperon mentioned that I 
 was representing the Sydney Stock and Station J-onrnal this 
 man said, " I'm glad to meet you, sir ! That's getting to be a 
 real good papei^, and I want to help it. It's sent to me free, but 
 I'd rather pay for it. What's your subscription ?" I humbly 
 mentioned that it was only 7s. 6d. a year. " Here you are then," 
 said he. " Send it along ; " and he handed out his 7s. 6d. like an 
 Englishman ! He said he had often thought of doing that lately, 
 but it was too much trouble to write. Now, a man like that in 
 a community is enough to save it from a multitude of sins. The 
 kindly thoughtfulness of that man just filled me right up, and if 
 I saw the little town in a kindlier light than I would otherwise 
 have done who could blame me ? We are a queer lot, aren't 
 we? AflPected by trifles like that! We laugh or weep as the 
 spirit moves us, and we are very kind to each other, or we are 
 very harsh, just as it happens, and it makes you think of that 
 great Irishman, John Boyle O'Reilly, who said — 
 
 " Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings 
 And tones and symphonies ; but our poor skill 
 Some shallow notes from its great music brings ; 
 We know it's there, but vainly wish and will."
 
 120 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 wentWepthi Qerpe. 
 
 ^HERE was a lady oace who was paying compliments to 
 Scotland, and the intelligence of all her sons, who had 
 wandered o'er the world. The Scot she was gushing to 
 was but a dullard, yet he managed to say that all Scotch- 
 men leaving their own land had to pass examination at the borders 
 before they were permitted to depart. A cynic said, " I suppose, 
 then, that you were smuggled out ?" There should be some kind 
 of examination before we allow shallow pates and fools to go home 
 and misrepresent us. Fancy an Australian gushing over the 
 beauties of Derbyshire when he had never seen the Jenolan 
 Caves ! Imagine a New South Wales man going into ecstacies 
 over the glories of the Upper Thames, or of Windermere, when 
 he had never seen the glories of the Blue Mountains. It makes 
 you tired to think of such wretches, doesn't it 1 
 
 They've got a new gorge to show at Wentworth Falls that 
 is more gorgeous than anything else in the mountains. It is 
 Govett's Leap, Nellie's Glen, Leura Falls, and the Narrow Neck, 
 all thrown into one. It is brand new, and the tourist has not 
 yet taken the bloom off it, but it has one of the most curious 
 stories attached to it that I ever heard in the mountains. The 
 way I came to find the place out was odd. A friend said, " You 
 must come and see our new gorge this afternoon." Before I 
 had time to reply a small boy, aged nine, said, " Can't I go, 
 father?" and a bright-eyed girl, not much older, said, " Please 
 may I go again, too T That settled it. If children like that 
 wanted to go again there couldn't be much trouble about it, so 
 we went, on the bright, blessed, blue-skyed, sunny Sabbath day. 
 It was a pleasant path we took through the tangles of the 
 gum-bush, which led us to the verge of the Jamieson Valley, 
 where old Mount Solitary raised its stately mass skywards from 
 the midst of a tree-clad, far-reaching hollow. There is no place 
 in all the world more deceptive than the blue, hazy depth of these 
 mountains of ours. After you have tried a little bit of exploring 
 on your own account, you come to have a profound reverence for 
 such pioneers as Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth. We found 
 our way through the silent bush, when there came but one 
 solitary buzz fly to tell us of the life that slept a winter's sleep, 
 waiting the resurrection morn with the spring sun. It was so 
 silent that had it not been for the cheery chatter of the children 
 it would have grown oppressive. But young hearts and young 
 tongues are the salt of the earth, and they keep us from all hours 
 of dulness.
 
 Wentworth Gorge. 121 
 
 We descended slowly towards the gorge, Wentworth Falls a 
 mile or two on our left, Katoomba Falls two or three miles 
 distant on our right. There were patches of snow still on the 
 shady hillsides to tell of the hard winter, but with the bright 
 sunshine above it was difficult to understand the snow. Down 
 we passed, to where a path was cut along the rugged face of the 
 cliff, and a sti'ong, economic, wire rope rail guarded the way. 
 Down lower and lower, into what seemed a deep chasm in the 
 heart of the rocks, where the voice of many waters was heard 
 sinsing the sons; of the infinite to the everlastinsr silence. Down 
 and down, and still down, over deep depths, bridged by strong 
 .adders, along the face of awful cliffs, which had been once over- 
 hanging the gorge below, but had now been quarried away to 
 make room for rails and paths and lovers' walks. The sun above 
 was lost to us, and the mournful waters came singing sadly 
 amongst the icicles, the moss, the ferns, and the sleeping flowers, 
 and all the poetry of life wakes up as we listen to the falling 
 
 waters — 
 
 " For ever thy theme, mournful stream, 
 
 Is life and the drifting soul ; 
 Thy day but a gleam, thy song a dream, 
 
 And drear thy far-off goal !" 
 
 Down we went, until, through a rift in the rocks, we saw 
 the great green slopes of the Jamieson Valley, with the sun lying 
 gloriously on them all. We saw the tall, weathei'-worn crags 
 rising high above the green, and the blue sky over all ; and still 
 the waters sang, and we crept downwards, and ever downwards. 
 The cold breath of the ice-king had glorified every twig near the 
 falling water, had beautified with chrystal every jutting crag 
 where the waters crept. There were wonderful stretches of 
 falling water such as put all mountain waterfalls into the shade. 
 There were deep, mystical pools in unexpected corners, and there 
 were such glimpses of Nature's methods as made the heart stand 
 still. In the path of the singing waters lay giant boulders, big 
 as mansions, which must have crashed their way from somewhere 
 some time. So long had they lain where they were that all the 
 jagged corners had been weathered off, and soft mosses dressed 
 their sides, and lovely ferns waved about them. How long since 
 there was a cataclysm in the Wentworth Gorge 1 Let him that 
 inows answer ! let him that knows not meditate ! When you 
 stand thus face to face with old Dame Nature in a deep gorge in 
 the Blue Mountains, you realise how little you are, how puny you 
 are, how insignificant you are, and you know, in some sort, what 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning meant when she wrote about — 
 
 ' ' Deep calms of space, where my soul inay right 
 Her nature — shoot large sail on lengthening cord, 
 And rush exultant on the Infinite."
 
 122 Aiistrahan Gossip and Story. 
 
 Down we went, lower and lower, till the giant tree ferns 
 filled the gorge with their graceful fronds, and the tall sassafrass 
 tree rose taper and stately as a palm for 150 feet in search of the 
 sun and air of a higher realm. Down we went, amid boulders 
 and creepers, amid glorious ferns and giant lianas, like the hose 
 of firemen clinging amid the trees. Down we went, over new 
 paths, till we reached a tunnel in the rocks 4| feet high, and 
 about the same in width. Here, some time, men had tunnelled 
 for coal. I would fain have tarried, but the small boy cried,. 
 " Come on, I'll show you a better one ;" and still we travelled 
 downwards. Then we came to another tuunel, all shored up, in 
 good mining style, with timber, which was old, mossy, lichen- 
 covered, and rotten. In the mouth of that tunnel was a pool of 
 iron-rusted water, and in it swam tadpoles, living their lives 
 down there as fully and completely as if they were in a higher 
 sphere. The coal was there, good coal, thick seams, wonderful 
 coal, with all its weird mystery of deposition, and men had swung 
 themselves over dangerous rocks to cut those deep passages into, 
 the heart of the mountains. Do you know how men have pros- 
 pected our land for gold ? Think of it ! These men found coal 
 a fortune, black diamonds such as the world needs. They proved 
 the seams. They returned to the upper air, perhaps 2000 feet ;. 
 they secured the rights to mine, they cleared the land, and tried 
 to raise the money to work a mine, but — in vain. To-day Went- 
 worth Gorge is the new glory of the little town. Private funds 
 have opened the path. Not .£50 of Government money has been 
 spent on this new, beautiful reserve, and the efforts of the poor 
 miners have now come to light. What hopes they must have 
 had when they tunnelled into the mountains from the bottom of 
 the glorious gorge ! Poor fellows ! 
 
 We retraced our steps, and ere the top was won I had bitter 
 thoughts about the small boy. He gazed on me as I climbed up 
 that 2000 feet very wearily, and he said, sympathetically, " Are 
 you tired, Mr. Trotter V Was I tired ! Good hcsavens ! I said, 
 briefly and baldly, " Yes, I am." Then he said, so kindly, " Will 
 you have the loan of my stick T Fancy the mite of a boy ! No,. 
 I'd have died before I'd have given it up ! We climbed out of 
 that deep, deep chasm ; but sg had my moral nature been affected 
 by the tx'ip that when we got home, and they asked me what I 
 thought of Wentworth Gorge, I said something about being over- 
 gorged. But we did it all in two hours and twenty minutes, and 
 that was too quick, and it was that small boy's fault ! No man, 
 or woman should ever be allowed to go to Europe without having 
 seen that place, for then they would know what Australia is- 
 capable of in the way of scenery ; but they shouldn't go with a 
 small boy who has promised to get back in time for afternoon tea.
 
 The Blue Mountains. 123 
 
 Jhe Blue /)(\Quntait^s. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 GREAT philosopher was William Kingdoii Clifford ! 
 He saw through the body of things, through the 
 material of things, as it were, to their very heart, and 
 then, in simple words, he told us what he saw. He 
 was once in a barber's shop, and the barber brushed hair by 
 machinery. When the tonsorial artist wanted the machinery to 
 go he kicked on the floor with the heel of his boot, and lo ! the 
 wheels began to go round. " That," said William Kingdon 
 Clifford, " was due to the fact that there was a man in the 
 cellar." Behind all phenomena there is a great first cause, a 
 *' man in the cellar," so to speak. We can face Mrs. Besant or 
 any of the world's silver-tongued preachers if we hold on to this 
 simple proposition, that every effect has a cause, and if we have 
 faith and patience we will always be able to find the "man in 
 the cellar." 
 
 One day last week I sat at the front door of a man's house 
 in the Blue Mountains and gasped ! The infinite, unspeakable 
 mystery of a world-making rolled over me, and as a sheep before 
 the shearers is dumb, so I opened not my mouth, and it takes a 
 great deal to shut me up. If we were not so immersed in making 
 money, so engrossed in the business of paying the landlord and 
 the baker, and the other fellows who make life a burden, we 
 would be able to realise the vastness of the miracle that stands 
 for ever at our doors, in the shape of the mighty Blue Mountains. 
 When our land is the home of busy millions, and a leisured class 
 has time to devote to the study of such subjects, the glory and 
 the grandeur of our geological record will be their wonder and 
 their pride, and the Blue Mountains will become famous all over 
 the earth. Before that happens all of us will have been trans 
 formed into indistinguishable phosphates, and the water in our 
 systems will be represented by the chemist's formulce, which 
 denote hydrogen and oxygen, while the immortal parts of us, if 
 all tales are true, may be dwelling where sulphur is sadly plenti- 
 ful. At present nobody cares much about the Blue Mountains, 
 unless it be as a holiday resort, or as a place to dig for coal or 
 shale ; but there's a good time coming. 
 
 Now, here is a queer statement ! If you stand at South 
 Head and look up the harbour you will see that some force has 
 scooped it out. That force left Shark Island, Garden Island, 
 Clark Island, and Pinchgut all standing up in the middle of 
 what is now our beautiful harbour. What force was it % Come 
 up to Wentworth Falls and look down into the Jamieson Valley,
 
 124 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 and ask what power scooped it out. That valley is just like our 
 " Beautiful," except that it has no water in it. Supposing you 
 were to fill it up with water to-morrow, you would have Lone 
 Mountain and the Orphan Rock and two or three other islands 
 left above the flood. 
 
 Plenty of people, who think they think, think that the sea 
 came in between North and South Head and scooped out thu 
 harbour and crawled up Lane Cove and Parramatta Rivers, and 
 dug out Middle Harbour as well, but — they are off it ! You 
 never can find the " man in the cellar " with a bad guess. If you 
 want to know him you must seek him — 
 
 " At the dragon- warder'd fountains 
 Where the springs of knowledge are." 
 
 The same power scooped out the Jamieson and Kanimbla Valleys 
 as scooped out our harbour, and the same power fashioned the 
 Yarrangobilly Caves and the Devil's Coach House at the Fish 
 River. 
 
 There's one thing that knocks religion out of me, and that is 
 going to hear a fool preach ; but a sure and certain antidote is 
 to send me off to sea, or up the Blue Mountains, to where I come 
 face to face with the problems of the infinite. Now, all you 
 merry stockmen, come with me on a trip up the mountains, and 
 it will do us good. 
 
 We leave the problem of the harbour behind us, and we 
 steam away to Penrith, a distance of 34 miles, and we are on a 
 level plain all the way, for when we reach there we are only 88 
 feet above sea level. Now, another mile or two and we come to 
 the Blue Mountains that formed an impassable barrier only 70 
 years ago. The first man that ever drove across them to the 
 great lands beyond was, probably. Governor Macquarie, in 1815. 
 Now, listen ! We rise up from Penrith by means of some clever 
 engineering work, and in 14 miles we have risen to a height of 
 1,216 feet at Springwood, and in another 14 miles we have risen 
 to a height of 2,856 feet at Wentworth Falls. Here we discover 
 that the " man in the cellar" has scooped out more beautiful 
 harbours just like our own, but he left them almost waterless. 
 Instead of being filled with water, they are clad in gum trees and 
 sassafras, ornamented with waratahs and strange flowers, and 
 they are miles and miles away from the great Pacific Ocean. 
 
 Once upon a time, my masters, the Penrith Plains were on 
 the same level as the Blue Mountains, but the earth moved and 
 snapped off like a carrot at the Nepean River, and the Penrith 
 Plains sank down nearly 3,000 feet. If you had kept your eyes 
 open on the way up you would have seen where the accident 
 happened. You would have seen how the strata on the hillside 
 near Penrith has been bent down, and how the broken part must
 
 The Bine Mountains. 125 
 
 have gone grinding downwards to its present level ! You don't 
 believe it 1 Well, come down to South Head and look over the 
 vast cliffs to the deep, restless, awful sea where the dead sailors 
 sleep and the wild storm sweeps and the sea-birds scream. Look 
 now, and think. This continent of ours broke off there, too, and 
 that part of it went flop down beneath the sea. Perhaps it went 
 suddenly, but perhaps it took a million or two of years to go, and 
 perhaps it's going yet ! We measure our little lives by the sales 
 at Homebush, but it's a mistake, masters ! We need to lift our 
 eyes to the Infinite at times to get a fair idea of our littleness, 
 and of the everlasting might of that Power which makes for 
 righteousness. 
 
 If you dig for coal at Lithgow you will find it in the hill- 
 side. If you dig for coal at Sydney Harbour you will find it 
 2,000 below the surface. If you will go a few miles outside of 
 South Head and sink down into the shark-haunted depths of the 
 rolling sea, you will find coal again — the same seam that you left 
 on the mountain side at Lithgow. 
 
 Now, come and sit at my friend's door at Wentworth Falls 
 and look around, and, like myself, you will want to say your 
 prayers. To the left, in the blue haze, is Mount Hay and Mount 
 Tomah^ and far away Mount Wilson, while nearer to us stands, 
 grim, grand, and majestic. King George. In front of us, across 
 deep valleys and blue ridges, there lies, slightly to the left, the 
 old-fashioned sleepy town of Richmond, and right in front, deep 
 down by the sea margin, lies Sydney, while in the glinting sun 
 we can descry Botany Bay, Parramatta River, and the hoary, 
 trackless, beautiful ocean itself. 
 
 Now, neighbours, look down at your feet. The soil on which 
 your chair is placed is composed of sand and water-worn pebbles. 
 The solid rock of this mountain top was once the ocean's floor, 
 and strange floods rolled the tiny pebbles at your feet to their 
 present place when this " mountain " top was the ocean's floor. 
 Yet we talk about the " everlasting hills." Why, these Blue 
 Mountains, old and hoary though they be, are yet children of 
 yesterday, as counted by the power which rules the universe. 
 These ancient, rock-ribbed, venerable mountains were formed in 
 the long ago, when other lands towered high above them. Yet 
 to-day we sit at Wentworth and look down, through the blue 
 haze, at far-away Sydney, lying nearly 3,000 feet below us, and 
 we dream strange dreams, for these storied and beautiful moun- 
 tains were built from the wreck of ancient worlds, by the process 
 of a simple law which worketh ever — 
 
 " Out of the dark it wrought the heart of man, 
 Out of dull shells the pheasant's pencilled neck ; 
 Ever at toil, it brings to loveliness 
 All ancient wrath and wreck."
 
 126 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 "When the Red Cross Knights took possession of the Island 
 "of Malta, in 1530, it was a poor spot, in a lovely climate. The 
 repox't of the Crusaders' commissioners said it was " but an arid 
 rock covered in many places with sand, and here and there with 
 a small amount of soil, without river, rivulet, or spring." The 
 Knights of the Cross took charge of it, and made it into a fertile 
 garden, which has now a population of more than 150,000 souls. 
 It is but a little speck of land in the Mediterranean Sea, yet it is 
 a very gem of a place, because the soil was imported to make 
 gardens, and when had done their part the heavens did the rest. 
 
 What Malta was the summit of the Blue Mountains is, and 
 we are awaiting the Red Cross Knights — ^jolly old pirates they 
 were, too, with a sweet smack of sanctity about them. If they 
 could x^e-incarnate now, and come marching solemnly into Sydney, 
 we would hail them as saviours of the coup.try, and we would 
 escort them up to Katoomba, or Wentworth Falls, to show us 
 how to make a new Malta. We have the climate up there all 
 right enough, but the soil would almost make a gardener take a 
 fit. We have enterprising, enthusiastic Autralians who could do 
 more than ever the red-crossed, prayerful piiates could do, and 
 some of them are doing it, too ; but we never recognise the 
 nobility of our neighbours, at least not till after they are com- 
 fortably dead, with a big stone on top of them. 
 [-T We think we're big-hearted, but we're not. You try us with 
 the news of our neighbours. That song that was sung not long 
 ago strikes a solemn chorn in all our hearts — 
 
 " When you're canonized and settled, 
 
 With a halo on your head ; 
 When the news of your promotion 
 
 Came to Tom, or Dick, or Ted, 
 He would tip the wink to t'others, 
 
 And their faith he would alloy, 
 With ' What ! he a saint in glory ? 
 
 Why, I knew him as a boy !' " 
 
 Exactly so ! A prophet is not without honour, save in his 
 own country. That statement is ancient, but it is eternal in its 
 application. 
 
 Now, a man, a real modern man, made of dust the same as 
 the rest us, went up to Wentworth Falls less than five years ago, 
 and took up 40 acres of the raggedest, sandiest, meanest Maltese- 
 looking land that you could possibly want to see. W^hy, you 
 couldn't grow weeds on it, nor larrikins, nor even kangaroo rats,
 
 The Blue Mountains. 127 
 
 nor anything else ; but the climate was lovely. You cannot beat 
 the climate of Weutworth Falls on the face of this earth, and I 
 ought to know, for I've been round this world more than once, 
 and a good deal through it. But when you come to talk about 
 soil — phew ! you strike a snag. 
 
 This man took samples of his soil and sent them to the most 
 distinguished analysts of the country. I'm not going into figures, 
 but here's about the result : Sand and silica, 90 per cent. ; oxide 
 of iron, 5 per cent. ; decayed organic matter, 3 per cent., and the 
 other two per cent, wasn't worth putting in. There was no 
 phosphoric acid in it, no potash in it, and no lime. In fact, there 
 was nothing in it that a man would want about his house. When 
 you read an analysis like that, and think you own the land, then 
 you want to go out and kill somebody. The analyst said it would 
 take kindly to fertilizers ! That was a good remark, if it were 
 honestly meant, for with a climate such as they have at Went- 
 worth Falls you could grow almost anything, from children to 
 crocuses, and beat the world at the business. 
 
 This man at the Falls probably never thought about the 
 knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and probably never saw the 
 terraced gardens of Malta, where they have to build walls to 
 keep the soil from being washed away ; but being an Australian 
 clear through, with all the good and evil of an Australian's 
 character, he set to work. He cleared his land, fenced it, and 
 put 20 acres under cultivation. He built him a house, dug him 
 a well, made him a road, and said, practically, " Here I raise 
 mine Ebenezer," and when Australia is a bit older and a bit 
 wiser she will appreciate him. He did for our mountain summit 
 what the knights did for Malta. Now, hearken unto me. This 
 man put some manure into 18 of his 20 acres. He put on it in 
 four years 140 tons of lime, 1,200 tons of sheep and cattle manure, 
 400 tons of bones and bonedust, 20 tons of blood manure, 20 tons 
 of Gees' fertilizer, and 25 tons of Kainet, the German potash salt, 
 and now — Malta is out of it. There never was such a garden 
 since Adam's time. 
 
 The only gardens I ever saw that came at all near them 
 were at the old Dutch town of Haarlem, where they grow the 
 bulbs for the world's consumption. But in Holland, when the 
 winter comes, they have to take the delicate plants indoors, and 
 to litter up the others f-o the frost may not touch them ; but on 
 the Blue Mountains the frost is never hard enough to injure the 
 plants, and the heavens weep on them in summer days, and there 
 is such warmth, and such power of growth and reproduction, that 
 better flowers can be produced at Wentworth Falls than at 
 Haarlem itself. Sometimes the wayfarers in King-street, Sydney, 
 stop at Pearce's window to gaze on such flowers as mortal eye
 
 128 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 never beheld before under an Australian sun ; such wonderful 
 daffodils as never bloomed even at Hampton Court ; such 
 jonquils, narcissi, and lilies as no man ever saw before south of 
 the equator. These come from the made land at Wentworth 
 Falls ; these come from the loveliest climate in the world, and all 
 within 60 miles of the city of Sydney ! No wonder that the 
 birds sing gaily at the Falls, for the sight of such a garden recalls 
 Coleridge's wonderful song of the bird of heaven, and we hum as 
 we think of it — 
 
 " The lark is so brimful of gladness and love, 
 The gieen fields below him, the blue sky above, 
 That he sings, and he sings, and forever sings he, 
 * I love my love and my love loves me.'" 
 
 Strange, indeed, that this man should have selected the very 
 spot on all the mountains, where the experiment of the Red 
 Cross Knights was so certain of success. The decomposed sand- 
 stone of the mountains is thirsty, very thirsty, having an almost 
 infinite capacity for water. At Wentworth Falls they have one- 
 third more rain than they have at Lawson, which is only about 
 2^ miles distant as the crow flies ; they have about one-third 
 more rain than at Blackheath, which is only about seven miles 
 away in a direct line. This rain, and the soft, life-giving mists 
 which enwrap the place, make it the healthiest spot in the world, 
 for the rains dry up so rapidly that they only cool the air and 
 refresh the city-worn traveller. Here the hyacinths flower from 
 July to October, and the daffodils from May till November. 
 
 Fancy how wonderful it is to see blooming in this garden, 
 within sight of Sydney, half an acre of lovely hyacinths, half an 
 acre of lilies, 250,000 glorious daffodils, and 10,000 crowns of 
 lily of the valley. Here grow plants, hundreds of thousands of 
 them, true to name, stronger and more lovely than their Euro- 
 pean ancestors, growing in soil that has been artificially produced 
 for them in the loveliest climate on earth. Here the Red Cross 
 Knights have been outdone, and some day, when Australia comes 
 to count up her benefactors, the name of R. M. Pitt will stand in 
 the fronc rank, for he has proved several things in this magnifi- 
 cent experiment. He has gathered the trees, shrubs, and flowers 
 from all lands, and has proved what can be done with them in 
 the mountain air of New South Wales. He has proved, too, that 
 other people than Chinese can make successful gardeners in our 
 land, and that is an important point ; and, more than all, he has 
 shown the possibilities of our poor soil when irrigated and 
 manured. After the experiment at Wentworth Falls, Australia 
 is fuller than ever of mighty possibilities, for the refuse of our 
 S[reat cities will fertilise our plains, and we get water enough in 
 the land, if carefully conserved, to make us independent of 
 droughts. Hence comes the value of the great garden at Went-
 
 The Bhie Mountains. 129 
 
 worth Falls ; and the gardener may know that at some time — it 
 may be yet many years ahead — men will realise the value of his 
 experiment, and honour will come to his memory, for — 
 
 *' Honour waits o'er all the earth 
 
 Through endless generations, 
 The ai-t tiiat calls her harvests forth 
 
 And feeds the expectant nations." 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Professor Warren, D. D., President of Boston University, 
 wrote a book to prove that the Garden of Eden ivas at the North 
 Pole. And why not % This world has changed many times in 
 the course of its existence. Where we have glaciers now and 
 everlasting winter, we used to have sweet summers and 
 umbrageous trees. When our explorers looked beneath the ice 
 of the land of the midnight sun, they found beds of coal, traces 
 of palms and myrtles, and relics of a glorious, but long forgotten,, 
 summer time : then why should not Adam and Eve have enjoyed 
 the primal picnic there? 
 
 We are a conceited race, and we have an idea, hidden deep 
 down in our hearts, that the world we see about us now is the 
 world that has always been, But this old mud-ball of ours, this 
 falling mass on which we pass our little lives, has undergone 
 quite as many changes as we have ourselves, and we have under- 
 gone many, and will undergo some more yet ! The most horrible 
 thing in the world is to be an ignorant sceptic, to be an unbeliever 
 in the romance of the world's life ; to be satisfied with monev- 
 grubbing, and selfishness, and work and profit. Oh, phsaw ! 
 It makes me cry with Wordsworth — 
 
 "Great God ! I'd rather be 
 A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn, 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea, 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 
 
 Come and sit beside me at Wentworth Falls and listen ta 
 the music of the falling waters, and hear the mountain spirits 
 tell the story of the mystery of the mountains. We will only 
 hear what our ears have been trained to hear ; we will only see 
 what our eyes have the capacity to see ; and we will only under- 
 stand what our hearts can feel. 'Tis pity 'tis so, but 'tis true. 
 I once had a man working for me who was dull and stupid, yet
 
 130 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 he was a fair workman. One day he saw some garnets in my 
 hand, and suddenly exclaimed, " Why, I've got some stones like 
 them." 
 
 " Where did you get them?" 
 
 " In a Burmese river." 
 
 " What were you doing at a Burmese river 
 
 T 
 
 " Oh, I was a soldier." 
 
 And that wretched man had gone round and round the 
 world with Queen Victoria's soldiers \ he had seen sights such as 
 some of us would give years of life to see, yet he never could tell 
 what his eyes had beheld, or his ears had heard, because he was a 
 wooden-headed fool. He resembled those ancient sinners who 
 had eyes but saw not, and ears but heard not. There's many of 
 us like that, isn't there ? 
 
 Come, now, once more, and let us sit by the falling waters 
 at Wentworth and listen to the spirits that fill the air, while they 
 tell us something of this world's history. 
 
 Once upon a time, a very long time ago, and a very bad 
 time it was, great forests spread all over the world. England 
 was part of Europe then, and Australia was part of Asia, and 
 America may have been part of some other country, perhaps part 
 of the lost Atlantis. Sometimes the sea sweeps over the broad 
 lands for countless ages, and great reefs of coral were raised in 
 the clear waters of the sea by patient workers. Then the mighty 
 rivers deposited sand and silt and clay over the spots where the 
 coral zoophytes worked, and then the land rose up and formed a 
 swamp, and great trees grew again all over the earth. But no 
 birds sang in those days to welcome the sunshine, or to glorify 
 the shade, because birds had not yet been invented, or evolved, 
 or created. Even the birds with teeth had not yet been. The 
 trees were like the big tree ferns in the Jamieson Valley. There 
 were trees 70 or 80 feet high, looking exactly like the beautiful 
 little equisetums that we find in the bush to-day, but there were 
 no hardwood trees. The eucalyptus had not been thought of 
 then, or the sassafras, or the pine, nor the kangaroo, nor the 
 diprotodon, nor a human being. 
 
 There were no butterflies in that far-away time either, nor 
 any beautiful things, such as we to-day count beautiful. There 
 were horrible crawling amphibians for spectators, but no air- 
 breathing animals such as we know to-day. The only air-breathing 
 things on the earth were the white ant, the mayfly, the cock- 
 roach, the spider, and the scorpion. They are the ancients of the 
 earth ! We who come of British stock have a kind of reverence 
 in our blood for ancient lineage. We like to meet a man who 
 had a grandfather, and we almost revere him whose ancestors 
 fought at Waterloo or Trafalgar. If a man is descended from a 
 family of ancient thieves, who never did any honest work in their
 
 The Blue Motmtains 131 
 
 lives, then count we him as of " blue blood " and of great honour. 
 But, my brethren, we are not consistent. We should worship 
 the cockroach and the spider because they were living and working 
 through the far-off days when the world was young. They are 
 the blue-blooded aristocrats of the earth. Ah, well, we are a 
 queer race ! 
 
 When the great tree-ferns lived on the earth they must have 
 spread over enormous areas, over such vast portions of the earth's 
 surface as we cannot conceive of to-day, for part of that old tree- 
 fern forest is hidden under mountains of Arctic ice to-day, and 
 Dr. Warren said Eden was there. Part of it is under the Blue 
 Mountains to-day, part is in England, in Ireland, in France, 
 Germany, America, in India, almost everywhere. If you will 
 come down and learn the language of the cockroaches or the tree- 
 ferns at Lithgow, you will know the language of the cockroach 
 and the tree-fern in Russia and in Holland, in India and in 
 France, for they speak the same languages in all lands and times. 
 Men differ in languages, and men build ironclads to tight each 
 other, but men and beasts are of one blood, and they are fools 
 and blind for fighting. If we could sit and commune with the 
 spirits of the tree-ferns in Jamieson Valley we would soon come 
 to learn the world's universal brotherhood ! 
 
 For countless ages the tree-ferns covered the earth. Some- 
 times deep forests sank beneath the sea, and the clear waters and 
 the corals and the uncanny-looking fish were over them. But 
 the land rose again, or the rivers built new land, and the tree- 
 ferns grew once more, and then, after long ages, sank again 
 beneath the sea. Ah, it was a queer world then, and so it is 
 now, but our eyes are shut to its glory ! John Ruskin said, 
 " It was a good thought when God thought of a tree." Yes, 
 indeed, but which of us ever stops to look at a tree, at the leaves, 
 at the branches, at the roots, and reflect upon the miracle of it ? 
 Our eyes are dull and heavy, and we cannot see the miracle of a 
 
 tree. 
 
 " We are living, we are dwelling, 
 
 In a grand and awful time ; 
 In an age on ages telling, 
 
 To be living is sublime." 
 
 There is as much miracle in our day as there was in the 
 early days of the cockroach and the spider ; but we fail to see it 
 because we are blind and stupid, because we are competing against 
 each other in the cruel strife to live, and we have no time to look 
 upon the miracles which touch us on every side. 
 
 Let it suffice to say here — for I see the space is full — that 
 the great tree-fern forests of earth sank down beneath the rolling 
 seas, were buried beneath continents, mountains, and mighty 
 plains, and the world went on with its history, while the mightiest
 
 132 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 miracle of all was being wrought out in the dark caverns, in the 
 crucibles of nature. The dead tree-ferns were being metamor- 
 phised into mighty giants, and the sun's rays, gathered up in the 
 mosses, were being wrought into diamonds. The good spirits at 
 Wentworth Falls can tell us all these things, and will open our 
 eyes if we will it, and show us the proofs of these wondrous 
 things — proofs of that miracle that is all about us, of the miracle 
 that must endure 
 
 " Till human time 
 Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky 
 Be gathered like a scroll witliin the tomb, 
 Unread forever." 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Wlien Aladdin's mother rubbed the wonderful lamp and the 
 *' hideous and gigantic genius " appeared, the poor old dame was 
 nearly frightened to death. The young larrikin, Aladdin, was 
 not so easily frightened. He took the slave of the lamp in hand 
 at once, and ordered food, drink, wealth, and all sorts of thing 
 from the genii. The slave built him palaces, and made him the 
 most powerful man in the country, as most of our small boys 
 know, for the story of that " heathen Chinee," Aladdin, is known 
 all over the wide world. 
 
 That same slave sleeps beneath the Blue Mountains, and the 
 spirits of the air at Wentworth Fails can tell you all about him. 
 He is far more powerful now than he was in Aladdin's time. 
 He works so hard for the owners of the lamp that no tongue can 
 measure the amount of his labours. He not only builds palaces, 
 but he takes the larrikin Aladdins to Europe and marries them 
 to kings' daughters. He drives great ships across the sea, against 
 the wind. He does more real work in one year than all the 
 working men of the world could do in a generation. He is the 
 most wonderful slave that ever was, and he lives beneath the 
 Blue Mountains, and we see him frequently, but we never seem 
 to think him very wonderful. That is because we are fools and 
 blind ! If we can sit by the roaring waters at Wentworth, we 
 will hear the history of the black giant and of Australia. Some 
 of the new-chums say that we have no history, that we were only 
 born yesterday, but that shows how little they know. We have 
 none of their kind of miserable history ; we have none of that 
 history which is made up of 
 
 " Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, 
 
 Roarings deep and fiery sands ; 
 Clanging fights and flaming towns, 
 
 Sinking ships and praying hands."
 
 The Blue Mountains 133 
 
 Our history is the world's history, and it is more marvellous 
 than the tongue of man has y«t been able to tell. The mystery 
 of it rolls over me at Wentworth, and it is too deep for speech, 
 too wonderful for utterance, too weird for expression in printers' 
 type. But listen to the spirits of the Falls ! 
 
 When the earth sank below the sea, carrying the tree-ferns 
 with it, the dirt and sand and world stuff was borne by floods to 
 bury the tree-ferns, and the old times passed away and were 
 forgotben. New forms of life appeared on the earth — beasts with 
 wings, birds with teeth, mighty frog-like animals almost as large 
 as cows, and weird, ungainly monsters such as mortal man never 
 beheld. New trees came to bloom over the land that was built 
 over the buried tree ferns ; strange flowers were evolved, new 
 forms of life came to strive against other forms of life, and the 
 old, bitter, merciless life and death struggle got well under 
 weigh, and 
 
 " Years chased bloodstained years 
 With wild red feet." 
 
 All the while old Nature was at work fashioning the giant 
 in the bowels of the earth. She has more cunning ways than 
 mortal man ever yet dreamed of, and some of her work in the 
 dark caverns of the earth is marvellous beyond the power of 
 human expression. She took the fiery rays of the sun which 
 were buried in the earth along with the tree-ferns, and she made 
 diamonds ! When you see a lovely lady wearing on her neck a 
 string of glinting, glittering diamonds, you can ask what they 
 are, and the spirit of the Falls will tell you — they are bottled 
 sunshine ! They were formed by old Dame Nature in her work- 
 shop in the depth of the earth. When you see the diamonds 
 flash you know that the breast of the wearer is throbbing with 
 jife. You ask what life is, and the spirit of the Falls will tell 
 you that life is bottled sunshine. All life will end on our earth 
 when our sun ceases to shine. All life and force and fire and 
 emotion come from the sun. Diamonds and life are bottled 
 sunshine. Death is the butler who draws the cork and decants 
 the sweet and pleasant life into — aba ! 
 
 Old Nature, in her workshop, made sunshine into diamonds 
 
 and into graphite. When a small boy wets his lead pencil on 
 
 his tongue he might almost hear the spirits of the pencil telling 
 
 him that black lead pencil — graphite — is bottled sunshine. It is 
 
 sunshine that was bottled up millions and millions of years ago, 
 
 but our teachers are either so busy or so ignorant that they never 
 
 teach us about things like these. We only know, as Shakespeare 
 
 said, that — 
 
 " From hour to hour we ripe and ripe, 
 And then from hour to hour we rot and rot, 
 And thereby hangs a tale."
 
 134 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 Our own miserable little lives are the boundary of our vision, 
 and we toil on from the cradle to the grave and never dream of 
 the miracle that is all about us. God have mercj on us ! 
 
 Old Nature took the sunshine that was stored up in the 
 dead tree-ferns and built a black giant with it. She changed 
 the soft, punky fern into hard, black coal. She transformed the 
 forgottea sunshine into gas, into heat, into force, and she took 
 millions and millions and millions of years at the job. Nature is 
 in no hurry. She does not reckon by hours, or years, or lives. 
 She has all the time there is ! 
 
 When the black giant was ready, she hove him towards the 
 earth's surface, where he could be of service to man. In the 
 olden times, in England, they called the black giant " sea coal " 
 because he reached London in ships, but they failed to realise his 
 power. They only wanted him to warm them. When Stephenson 
 was born and grew up to understand the power of steam, then 
 the might of the black giant began to be understood. Men 
 harnessed him to long trains, and he pulled them. They tied 
 him to the machinery in their factories, and he worked for them. 
 They took him down into the holds of big ships, and he drove 
 them thousands of miles across the trackless sea. .Oh, a wonder- 
 ful, wonderful fellow is our black giant ! They found him at 
 Cremorne lately, on the shores of Sydney harbour, and " Tiger " 
 Inglis is at home just now rubbing the lamp. He wants the 
 black giant to give him riches and power and glory. You see, 
 that is the trouble. Nature never made the giant for the benefit 
 of any individuals. She made him for the good of all men, but 
 we, fools that we are, have invented " private property in land," 
 and "syndicates," and "royalties," and things like that, and the 
 miners who search out the black giant are starving, while the 
 larrikins who rub the lamp are rolling in wealth. You never 
 know what fools we are until you listen to the spirits of the 
 Falls telling the story of the black giant. 
 
 When Nature hove hira up to the earth's surface she often 
 blundered. In Ireland, for instance, she hove him right up until 
 the rain fell on him and the storms raved round him, and so he 
 was washed away into the sea, and poor Ould Ireland was left 
 with no coal at all to speak of. That was another piece of wicked 
 injustice to Ireland. Poor, bleeding Ireland ! What with 
 absentee landlords and the loss of her coal, she is badly off. 
 
 In the Blue Mountains the giant sleeps in queer places. 
 He has been badly twisted and contored in his resting-place, but _ 
 he is there all right, as strong as ever he was, and as ready to 
 come to our call and do our bidding as in the days of Aladdin. 
 If you will open your eyes at the Falls on a wild, wet day, you 
 will see how Nature has carved his resting-place. The rain carves 
 the rocks, and the debris colours the water that comes singing
 
 The Blue Mountains. l35 
 
 and roaring over the cliffs at Wentwortli. The same process is 
 going on today that has been going on for countless ages. Old 
 Dame Nature is carrying the mountains down to the sea to-day, 
 just as of old. She is levelling the mountains and building up 
 the ocean floor just as she has ever done. As our old mud-bail 
 cools it contracts, and the ridges raised by the contraction we 
 call mountains. Poor little mit'^s that we are ! With graving 
 tools like the stream at Wentworth Falls old Dame Nature does 
 her mighty work, for she never grows weary, and the stream, 
 sings as it works, innocently enough — 
 
 " I chatter, chatter as I flow 
 To join the brimming river, 
 For men may come and men may go, 
 But I go on for ever." 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Once upon a time, masters, we had ridden far across rough 
 
 Asiatic hills, when our little party came on a Turkish farm-house. 
 
 The homestead, a battlemented, windowless, turreted fortress,. 
 
 was surrounded by a high wall, and the yard was swarming with 
 
 savage dogs. But an Englishmen dwelt there — a noble fellow, 
 
 who gave us a glad welcome, for we bore to him tidings of the- 
 
 outer world. My companions returned in due time to civuisation,. 
 
 but I tarried with the Englishman, and together we made merry. 
 
 He hoisted the British flag over the house in honour of his visitor 
 
 from old England, and we hurrahed together when we saw its 
 
 folds float out on the air, because our hearts were glad, and we 
 
 were the only two Englishmen in all that country side Not that 
 
 either of us were English, but then all small race distinctions 
 
 vanish when men are far from home, for it is true, as Kipling 
 
 said — 
 
 "There is neither east nor west, 
 Border, nor breed, nor birth, 
 When two strong men stand face to face, 
 Tho' they come from the ends of the tarth." 
 
 We revelled in the glories of that land, so strange to me. 
 It was marvelous, wonderful, weird, awesome ! One day ihe 
 servants unearthed a treasure, and they kept it for me. 'Twas 
 an exquisitely-carved marble capital from the column of some 
 ancient temple. Long, long ago this very place had been the seat 
 of a high civilisation. Kings, priests, and emperors had fought 
 for the mastery, and Hannibal, the mighty one, had sheltered 
 once at Broussa, just over the brow of the hill there That 
 graceful, marble capital had a story to tell so at Katoomba. 
 
 Near the clift' edge, looking down into the Jamieson Valley,, 
 there stands a strangely-carved sandstone monument. It is not 
 so graceful as the marble capital, but it is old, very old. It is so
 
 136 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 old thac the ancient marble carving belongs to the yesterday of 
 the world's history as compared to it. This Katooniba monument 
 belongs to the same age as the sandstone arch at Wentworth 
 Falls. The same mighty hand carved ib; the same power wrought 
 its quaint figures and grotesque shapes, its uneven surfaces, and 
 grained protuberances. The same poor human idiot carved his 
 name on it, too, in the vain searching after immortality. 
 
 " When I see a fellow 
 
 Write his name on window^glass, 
 I know he owns a diamond. 
 And his fathei' owns an ass." 
 
 Oh, it's pitiful to see in human hearts, all the world over, 
 this almost insane yearning to be remembered after to-morrow. 
 The little human ants of to day write their poor liitle names in 
 the mountain shelter houses, carve them on mountain seats, and 
 grave them deep on the rugged rocks, as though they would 
 thereby gain a brief immortality. Poor little human mites ! 
 The race that carved the marble capital in Asia has been for- 
 gotten ; their nation their language, their temple.s, and their 
 tombs have utterly vanished away, and yet Johnnie Lackbrain 
 ■carves his name on the Blue Mountain seats and rocks, and rests 
 in hope of immortality. Or a pro nobis. 
 
 The sandstone column at Katoomba towers up, like the 
 Orphan Rock, like the ruins of some ancient castle, on the 
 beetling crag. But it is older than ever an English castle wa^ ; 
 it is older than the oldest monument of Europe, older than the 
 round towers of Ireland, older than the weird monuments on 
 Salisbury Plain that we call Stonehenge, older than mankind. 
 This quaintly-carved boss is a mark which Nature has accidently 
 set to show the process of the ages. 
 
 Once upon a time, masters, the top of that rock was level 
 with the rest of the mountain tops. Once upon a time, before 
 the Jamieson Valley was scooped out, all these Blue Mountains 
 were on a level, but the wind and the rain and the tiny rivers 
 carved them into their present shape ; but this columnar boss, 
 this sandstone monument, this gnarly remainder, was saved as a 
 mark. It was saved because it was topped with iron, because it 
 was, so to speak, an ironclad. You can see how the oxide of iron 
 has caked over its summit and protected it from erosion. 
 
 The soft clay in the valley was found by trickling waters and 
 carried away, and then the superimposed rocks fell down with a 
 crash, and so we get the rugged-faced, perpendicular cliffs. But 
 here, looking at the Orphan Rock and the Three Sisters, we 
 observe how the iron has saved this poor relic to show how the 
 world about it is wearing down. By the time this rocky boss 
 has worn away, by natural means, all the men who carved their 
 nameig on it will be dead, dusty and forgotten. A new race will
 
 The Blue Mountains, 137 
 
 have appeared upDu the earth, a wiser raoe than we, and they 
 will be able to read the story of the rocks, which has so little to 
 tell us to-day, and to them let us hope life will be easier. It is 
 sweet and pleasant to look forward to the wjrld that is yet to 
 be ; but we think of Mrs. Browning then md say — 
 
 " Observe — it had not much 
 Consoled the race of mastodons to know 
 
 Before they went to fossil that anon 
 Their place would quicken with the elephant. 
 
 They were not elephants, but mastodons !" 
 
 But we have the Blue Mountains to our silly selves to-day, 
 and have not yet learned to appreciate them. When the hot 
 summer days are on us and suffocating nights, the dwellers in the 
 Blue Mountains ought to be happy, for every night is cool up 
 there. A few hot days bring them a thunderstorm, and sweet, 
 soft, ozone-laden mists wrap them about. They can make lovely 
 gardens up there, and they can breathe so freely that life is a 
 luxury. They have deep glens where, even on the hottest day in 
 summer, it is cool ; they have such waratahs as bloom nowhere 
 else on earth, and tree ferns that recall the olden carboniferous 
 ages of the earth's history. Very beautiful and wonderful are 
 the Blue Mountains, and all too little do we appreciate the 
 glorious sanatorium that lies so close to our very door, but — a 
 time will come ! Even now, when a New South Wales man finds 
 himself in London or New York, and begins to talk about the 
 Blue Mountains, his heart burns within him, and he thinks he 
 must have been a fool not to appreciate them better. It is hard, 
 my masters, to see the glory that enwraps us, and 'twas ever 
 ■thus, for — 
 
 " King Arthur's self 
 
 Was commonplace to Lai}' Guenever ; 
 
 And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat 
 
 As George-Hrwt to our poets." 
 
 =") 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 When a stranger stands on the south coast of England and 
 :gazes on the spot where was fought the battle of Hastings, he is 
 struck with the contrasts of the scene. Where the Roman 
 'Oalleys landed there is a lovely city. Where the rude soldiers 
 of King Harold once fought for home and country there now 
 .promenade the most dainty and delicate of the sons of old 
 England. The barbarian of to day is the working man excur- 
 sionist or the country ploughman, at whom the dainty one turns 
 up his nose. Mighty changes have taken place at Hastings 
 since William the Conquerer landed there, and King Harold died 
 surrounded by his warriors while fighting for the land he loved 
 .-so well.
 
 138 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 It was in the year 1066 that the Norman and Saxon con- 
 tended for mastery on those distant fields, and the lot'g centuries 
 have cast a halo over the place, just as they will do to the site of 
 the " Exploiters' Tree " near Katoomba. Hastings and the 
 warring kings lie more than seven centuries from us to-day, but 
 the story of the "Explorers' Tree" is little more than seven 
 decades distant. There are men and women living to-day, hale 
 and hearty, who remember the year 1813, who remember the 
 story of those heroes who were our " early men." 
 
 The "Explorers' Tree" stands about a mile and a half from 
 Katoomba, on the Bathurst-road. When our colony is a few 
 centuries older, and the giant tree has crumbled away, and great 
 towns are dotting the mountains, then the site of the tree will 
 have become sacred, and young Australians will gaze around and 
 wonder if there ever was a time when men stood here amid the 
 gum trees and could go no farther. It is not difficult to realise 
 that now. We stand at the roadside to day and look up at the 
 skeleton trunk of the great tree and think about Lawson Went- 
 worth, and Blaxland, who lived and laboured when our century 
 was young. They lived on the sea coast, which was all our fore- 
 fathers knew of New South Wales. Tiiey saw the Blue 
 Mountains rising from the plains, shutting the coast dwellers 
 from the unknown land beyond. Columbus like, they yearned to 
 find a path across the trackless mountains to that fairer land 
 which they dreamed of as lying behind the mystic ranges of blue 
 swathed hills. Many a man had tried to pass the range ; many 
 a convict, weary of chains and starvation, of cruel tyranny and 
 oppression, had fled to the hills, but had never found a path 
 across them. Some convicts had come back to slavery and 
 sufifering rather than struggle longer with the desolation of death 
 which brooded for all time amid those dreadful hills ; and some 
 had come back nevermore. To-day we know why they came not 
 back. The early explorers had climbed the mountains over and 
 over again, only to find themselves standing on the edge of a 
 mighty precipice or shut into some great valley from whence there 
 was no exit, save by the way they had come. They had struggled on 
 through the bush day after day and week after week, but still 
 there came no gleam of hope, no end of the wilderness, ana they 
 either staggered back to the coast line or laid down and died in 
 the voiceless land of gum tree and clifi'. 
 
 This tree which stands so close to the flourishing little towni 
 of Katoomba was the furthest point of exploration until the year 
 1813. The explorers are said to have blazed the tree and cut 
 their names on it, and then to have returned to civilisation. It 
 was in thjit year, however, that the table lands beyond the 
 mountains were reached, and then a change took place. Convict 
 labour was employed — the only kind available — and in two years 
 a road was built across the mountains, a road of which Auslra-
 
 The Blue Mountains. 139 
 
 • lians have a right to be proud. It cro-sesdeep gullies, cuts along 
 the face of precipices, skirts deep valleys, goes around dizzy- 
 gorges, and reaches Bathurst after a track which makes us muse 
 on the deathless courage of the Anglo-Sixon race. How many 
 lives were lost on that great work nobody knows. How many 
 hearts were broken and how many souls were ruined none can 
 tell, but the road was built and a path opened to the interior. 
 
 Then came the railroad, and the iron horse went shriekinsr 
 through the gum bush and over the gorges which had set the 
 explorers at defiance, and now the train takes the curious traveller 
 from Sydney to the "Explorers' Tree " in a little over thr'ee 
 hours. Now we stand at the foot of the tree and watch the bend 
 of the brown, dusty Bathurst-road, and we think about the 
 convicts who made it. We catch a glimpse of the train as it 
 goes snorting along on its iron bed through the bush, and we bow 
 our heads at the march of civilisation and the mighty power of 
 that indomitable race to which we belong. 
 
 Sometimes when life grows weary — and it does grow weary 
 sometimes — we sit and muse over life's sorrows, and we join in 
 the pessimistic moan of the ill-fated Gordon, and we say with 
 him — 
 
 " 'Tis a weary round to which we are bound, • 
 The same thing over and over again : 
 Much toil and trouble, and a glittering bubble 
 Th it rises and bursts, is the best we gain." 
 
 But vve sit in&ide the rail which guards the " Explorers' Tree " 
 and pessimism loses its hold on our hearts, and a trip from 
 Sydney to this tree is well repaid by the thoughts that rise in 
 our breasts. The heroes of the tree are dead, but the memory of 
 their heroic deeds will live in our land when millions of the 
 nameless ones who idle away their days are all forgotten. Their 
 names will stand out like fiery beacons through the centuries, 
 burning ever clearer and brighter, even though we see them but 
 dimly now. We stand too close to them. We are not suthciently 
 removed from them to appreciate their gigantic proportions. 
 
 The tree is about 13 feet in circumference above the spring 
 of the roots. It rises white and ghostly for about 50 feet, and 
 then a few branches, still decked with leaves, mark the fact that 
 the tree is living, and that it is a gum tree. We look aloft at 
 the skeleton arms of the weary-looking old tree ; we think of the 
 kingly explorers, and then we look at the names of the unknown 
 herd which are carved, in every style, on the sacred tree itself, 
 and on the rail which surrounds it. Poor feeble little souls ! 
 
 Let us turn down Nellie's Glen and see what obstacles stood 
 in the way of these men who have made their names immortal. 
 When they stood on the hill-top in 1813 there were no roads 
 through the bush ; no mortal man had ever set his foot there 
 before, and no sign-post told of the path which led to the plains
 
 140 Australiati Gossip and Story. 
 
 beyond. Come now to tlie edge of the hill, just a few yards 
 beyond the tree, and look duwn into the Kanimbla Valley. 
 What a long, level stretch of wo ded land ! Wliata fair prospect 
 for an explorer ! Surely a better land lies through that far- 
 reaching vale? 
 
 Let us go down 81 years after them and see what an 
 explorer's life meant. We leave the carriage track and take to 
 the path, which is wide and clear and fairly well made, 
 
 On one side of the pathway there is a little pool which is 
 drying up i-apidly under the fi rce heat of the sun, and thei-e is 
 scarce a bucketful of water in what must have been, during the 
 winter, quite a large pool. In this slowly disappearing water- 
 hole there are a number of tadpoles, fat, healthy, embryo frogs. 
 If they develop legs and lungs before the pool dries up they may 
 escape over the dusty road to the trickling waters lower down 
 the glen, but if the water vanishes before these poor tadpoles 
 are ready to leave— and it looks now as if the water would win — 
 then the tadpoles will never grow into frogs, but they will be left 
 on the hot mud to gasp and die, with no eye to pity, no hand to 
 save. Nature is pitiless, passionless, and fearfully regardless of 
 joy or woe. Ah, well, human beings have died in these wilds, 
 and Nature never helped them either. 
 
 Lower down the path contracts and grows very rough, as the 
 walls of rock begin to rise on each side. Ferns deck the rising 
 rocks, little streamlets begin to ooze from out of the crevices of 
 sandstone, and lovely flowers bloom in odd crannies. Lower we 
 go, and the path grows ever rougher, and the rocks rise higher 
 and higher and come closer together, and the rude path winds 
 about and shows signs of human labour and engineering skill. 
 We wonder how horses ever manage to get down here, for we 
 see their footprints ; we wonder how the first man ever got down 
 here, for we see that a way has been cut through solid rocks by 
 thoughtful men. How did the explorers get down ? No wonder 
 some of them died and were never heard of more. Creeping care- 
 fully down Nellie's Glen, we feel as if the great busy world were 
 far, far away, and now, when we are hundreds of feet down and 
 can see but a long streak of blue sky high up over our heads, we 
 begin to quote Scripture, and wonder what man is anyhow, poor 
 little insect of an hour. What more is man that he should be 
 considered in the economy of Nature than these tadpoles on ihe 
 roadside ? We are but ants on those tiny pathways beneath the 
 giant rocks ; we are but specks on the fern-clad boulders down 
 that deep and beautiful glen, and as we listen to the voice of the 
 waters which come tumbling musically over the mighty ledges 
 we feel that life is but a bubble at best. Where is the Sydney 
 Stock Exchange now ? Where are the shares over which men 
 fight 1 What is life ? What is death 1 What is the meaning of 
 existence 1
 
 Jenny Kerr. 141 
 
 ennie Ken 
 
 K^ 
 
 ■^*^<^f FEW years ago a jovial crowd of people meb in a 
 Melbourne hotel. They cime together in the drawing 
 room by that subtle soaiethin^i; in all of us by which 
 people find out their friends. We were a mixed 
 company, as ail hotel gatherings are, and there was a stout^ 
 brown-eyed, smart, short-haired woman in the crowd who wa.s a 
 special favourite. She laughed and talked, played cards, and 
 jested with us all in a sweet, womanly way that was very wiining. 
 She was evidently in Melbourne on business, and she went 
 travelling all over the cit)' during the day in a well-cut, tailor- 
 made suit. We had no idea what her business was, and she never 
 mentioned it. Her name — there's no secret about it now, poor 
 soul — was Jennie Kerr, and her home was in Sydney. We 
 parted with mutual regret, and looked forward to meeting again 
 in the City of the Beautiful Harbour. 
 
 One day she called at our house, accidentally, to ask if we: 
 would subscribe to a photograph club, and her surprise at meeting 
 my wife was great. That was her business — canvassing for 
 a city photographer — but times were hard, and she was doing 
 badly. I may have mentioned before this that my wife is 
 a good woman — as good as they make 'em — and she wanted 
 to know how we could help poor Jennie; but it's not always 
 easy to do such a thing, for poor people are often, 
 proud, and we only surmised that Jennie was " hard up." Then 
 she took ill, for tramping round in wet weather looking for orders 
 for photographs is a hard business. I've never been exactly at 
 that job, but I've been near enough to know what it is. One day 
 Jennie went to the photographer and borrowed two shillings. 
 Her nice clothes were gone, her jewellery had gone, everything 
 had gone, and she had I'eached the bottom when she asked her 
 boss for a loan. 
 
 " Body of a woman found in Rose Bay." The description- 
 was that of Jennie Kerr, and I went to the morgue to see if it 
 was her. There she lay, naked and ghastly, on a slab in the 
 dead house, tired of life and struggle and poverty. She had given 
 it' best and gone out by tha only door that seemed to be open t» 
 her, to where there is no poverty nor toil nor weariness. Poor 
 Jennie ! It was an awful blow to my wee wifie, but what could 
 we do 1 You can't force jourself on poor, proud people, and you
 
 112 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 can't give much to people when you're poor yourself ; but we felt 
 to blame about poor Jennie, and I'll, maybe, never get the chance 
 to say all I felt that day as the sun struggled into that ghastly 
 place where our poor little friend lay awaiting the jury. 
 
 That jury returned the kind verdict of " Found drowned," 
 but that was wrong. You know it was wrong. I know it was 
 ■wrong. She died because of the miserable throat-cutting, soul- 
 destroying competition that exists in our big, unpopulated, 
 undeveloped Australia. Here we are, one of the biggest, richest, 
 least-crowded countries on the face of God's earth, and yet we are 
 competing against each other so cruelly that we are killing Jennie 
 Kerrs and hun^lreds of others like her every year. Instead of 
 acting like human beings, we act like a lot of wolves, and we rend 
 the flesh of our poorer neighbours as cruelly, aye, more cruelly, 
 than the beasts of the forest could ever do. We say we worship 
 God, but we are a lot of miserable liars and hypocrites, for we 
 don't ; we forget the men and women about us, and we bow down 
 and worship the god of " Supply and Demand " and buy our 
 goods in the cheapest market, we pay our servants as little as 
 possible, and then some of us go to church and pray on our knees 
 after preying on our neighbours all the week. We're a nice lot, 
 ain't we ? 
 
 How much can you get your likeness taken for 1 Five 
 shillings a dozen and an " opal " thrown in. That's the place for 
 us, A dozen photos, for live shillings ! Cheap and lovely ! 
 But where does Jennie Kerr come in? How much did you say 
 the picture cost ? Five shillings — and Jennie Kerr's life ! And 
 how many other lives ? how many other souls ? Cheap, yes, we 
 all want to buy cheap, and the cheaper we buy the harder the 
 world grows and the lower wages must fall. See how we've been 
 '' prospering " in Australia with our cheapness. See how many 
 pastoralists are in the hands of the banks, or the money-lenders of 
 smaller calibre. See how the banks themselves have had to be 
 " reconstructed " and how all of us have sufiFered. Do you know 
 what has done it all 1 The fever to be rich, the dread of being 
 poor. Better be in hell than be poor in Australia. Jennie 
 Kerr — poor, sweet, brown-eyed Jennie — would rather face the 
 dark beyond and the awful mystery of death than face the poverty 
 of the poor in our rich and boundless land. Who dares to blame 
 her 1 It's easy to be good and talk platitudes when you are rich 
 and well-to-do and the sun shines on you, but wait till you are 
 down on your luck and then see how it works, especially if you 
 are a woman. W^e are horribly hard on women just because they 
 are weaker than we are, and then we boast about our manhood, 
 our chivalry, our civilisation, and our love of fair play. Oh, it 
 makes me tired. We're a lot of mud-brained idiots and pious 
 frauds and senseless blatherskites, that's what we are !
 
 y-enny Kerr 143 
 
 Gentle readers, excuse rae geHiiig a bit warm, but when T 
 begin to think about my own race it almost ma''es me wish I 
 ■were a kookaburra, laughing nut my days on the licub of a gum 
 tree. Here we are stuck on the fringe of a big continent, full of 
 wealth a-id wondrous possibilities, yet kicking each other to death 
 in our eagor thirst to live, tliough there's enough and to spare for 
 us all and for millions upon millions to come If any one class of 
 us all managed to do w^ell, I could understand th^ condition of 
 things, becaus-^ it would be to the interest of one class to keep 
 the other class down, but, as a matter of simple fact, we are all 
 in the soup together. We have nearly as many poor people in 
 our midst as they have in the king-cursed, military rilden cities 
 of Eur.jpe. The poverty of our puor is as appalling as the 
 poverty of the London poor, and in all our big cities we are 
 raising an evil, idle, larrikin class that will rise up to curse us in a 
 future day. But, says you, what can we do? Aye, masters, 
 what can you do? I'll tell you — 
 
 " Let us reach into our bosoms 
 
 For I lie keys of other lives, 
 And, with love towards erring nitures, 
 
 Cherish good that still survives." 
 
 If we can sit down by the slab where Jennie Kerr lay cold 
 And stiff', and think out some of the problems of life as mani- 
 fested in our daily troubles, we'll begin to realise, in a dim way, 
 that there's something wrong with the social system. But so long 
 as "we are satisfied with what is we must suffer. Our present 
 •cruel, competitive system is killing all that is best in our hearts 
 and lives ; and what I want you to do is to grow discontented, 
 with a holy and magnificent discontent. Begin to ask why 
 ■churches and crime, wealth and poverty, Jennie Kerrs and spend- 
 thrifts are all rubbing shoulders in our streets ; why the poor are 
 so very poor and the helpless are so vei-y helpless. Then, when 
 jou have thought about it for a while, we'll have another yarn on 
 the subject. But, take my word for it, anyway, that Lucy 
 Larcom was not far wrong when she wrote — 
 
 " If the world seems cold to you, 
 
 Kindle fires to warm it I 
 Let their comfort hide from view 
 
 Winters that deform it. 
 Hearts as frozen as your own 
 
 Will to that radiance gather ; 
 Yi.u will soon forget to moan, 
 
 ' Ah ! the cheerless weather.' "
 
 144 Anstrah'an Gossip and Story. 
 
 LibentL), EqualitLj, ar^d pnaternitL). 
 
 ))T was Dean Swift, I think, who once visited a rich old 
 dame in an ancient city. She had been slighted by the 
 little great ones of her petty circle, and her heart was sore. 
 She objected to all caste, class, and social distinctions ; she 
 prated of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and talked like a long- 
 tongued sundowner. The Dean listened to her patiently and then 
 had a cup of tea, which was served by a smart young butler. 
 The Dean said • " That's a very nice butler you have ! " Ah, yes ; 
 he is a perfect gem of a young man," said the old dame. " He's 
 well educated, too, a very gentleman ! " "I thought so," said 
 the Dean, " from his looks. Let's ask him in to have a cup of 
 tea with us." " Nonsense," screamed the startled old dame ; 
 " he's only the butler." " But, said ths Dean, " I thought you 
 believed in fraternity, equality, and things of that kind." " So I 
 do, indeed ; but not that way ! " " Ah," said the Dean, " I see ; 
 you only believe in levelling down. Good afternoon, madam." 
 
 Brethren, that's what hurts. The people who believe in that 
 miserable old phrase generally believe in levelling down, and 
 there's one Government in Australia that seems to believe in it^ 
 too. Perhaps there's more, but we want to keep politics off this 
 page. "We want one place in this paper where a reader will find 
 neither pigs nor politics. T just wanted to have a yarn with you, 
 dear gossips, about liberty, equality, and fraternity. It's a 
 golden phrase for catching flats, and as soon as you come to think 
 about it you'll see it's a sham. There's no such thing on the 
 earth as liberty. The stars that move in the death-cold realms of 
 boundless space are swayed by a stern law which altereth never 
 through the ages of times. The astronomer can tell you how the 
 stars have moved for millions of years past, and how they will 
 move for millions of years to come. There is no liberty amid the 
 starry hosts of heaven. All is law ! Because our eyes are blind, 
 to the processes of the law, and because our ears are deaf to the 
 everlasting voice of the universe, we suffer; so comes turmoil and 
 sorrow — 
 
 '•"So grows the strife at'B Inst which make earth's war, 
 So grieve poor cheated hearts and flow salt tears ; 
 So wax the passions, envies, angers, hates ; 
 So years chase blood-stained jears 
 With wild, red feet.
 
 Liberty, Eqiialitv, and Fraternity. 145 
 
 The deep sea obeys the call of the sun and the moon, and 
 the tides rise and fall in obedience to law. The currents of the 
 sea and the winds ot' tin; air obey i he power which changeth 
 never, only man sets ud his nose, claiming intelligence, and then 
 comes trouble. It you depend on a sewing machine, a locomotive, 
 a clock, or a purely mechanical servant, you can depend, with 
 fair care, on certain results ; but if you depend on a shearer, a 
 unionist, or a man of any kind you might get left, because his 
 " God-given intelb'g'^nce " haa taught him something about liberty t 
 What a lot vre blame God for, don't we ! I could make some 
 remarks on that subject that would cause some people to snort, 
 because they'd think it wicked ; but I tell you, gossips, if people 
 only knew how much I don't say that I'd like to say, they'd 
 think I was a nice little man. But you can take my word for 
 this, God never invented "liberty." You can look all around the 
 universe for it, and you won't find it anywhere that God has 
 anything to do with. You'll find it in revolutions, when the 
 gutters are running with rich, warm, human blood ; but God has 
 nothing much to do with those things, I expect ! 
 
 Equality ! What a phrase. There's no two of us alike 
 anywhere, or anyhow. There are old women who would fain 
 level down all who are above them, socially or intellectually, but 
 it's a low, mean spirit. I don't want to be levelled up to anybody 
 in this world, either by act of Parliament or meat-axe, 
 and I'll be hanged if I want to be levelled down either. 
 There's more philosophy in that old remark about one 
 man being as good as another — and better too — than 
 meets the eye at a glance. We're all better or worse, or 
 both together, than some other people, for we're a mixed lot in 
 this world, but we're not equals. Look ! Every man is different 
 from every other man, every pea is different from every other 
 pea, and every hair in your head is different from every other 
 hair. You can't see that ! Well, that's not the hair's fault 1 
 The trouble is with your eyes ! If you take a small microscope — 
 a cheap one will do— and pull a hair out of your head and look 
 at the root of it, you'll be surprised ! You'll find that no two 
 hairs in your head are built the same way. If you 
 have a microscope in your house, you get a lot of people 
 round, get a hair from each head, and from each man's beard, 
 and you will find they are each and every one different. 
 Nature is no servile imitator. She never copies anybody, 
 not even herself ; she has an infinite variety of patterns 
 for everything. Yet some of the poor, small - souled, 
 pettifogging politicians and would-be politicians, and alleged 
 politicians go yelling at election times for "equality." God bless 
 you, merry gentlemen, there's no such thing as equality in the
 
 146 Australian Gossip and Story. 
 
 universe, and, moreover, there never will be, and — don't you 
 forget it ! 
 
 Fraternity ! That's the other fool phrase that makes me 
 tired. Fraternity by legal enactment, eh 1 Make me fraternise 
 with people I despise. Make me fraternise with men who have 
 no souls, and with men who have nothing else. You might easier 
 try to make water run up a hill ; you might easier try to effect a 
 union of the churches ! You can't make people fraternise by 
 law, for how can two walk together except they be agreed 1 
 But, you know, it's this way : Some people are always full of 
 liberty, equality, and fraternity about election time. It breaks 
 out then, and I despise Uie cant of the class that fishes for votes 
 with phrases, because, chiefly, they are like Dean Swift's old 
 Avoman — they want to level down all above them. Do you 
 remember that chap in Shakespeare's " King John " who said — 
 
 " \\ hile I'm a beggar, I will rail 
 And say — there is no sin but to be ricFi ; 
 And being rich, my virtue then shall be 
 To say — there is no vice but beggary." 
 
 The fellow who said that, was the ilJegitimate son of a great 
 liing, and he was a sturdy villain, too, and you can see his head 
 was screwed on the right way. But this claptrap that seems so 
 rife just now is horrible stuff. Whenever you have a would-be 
 member coming round your place, spouting about Liberty, 
 Fquality, and Fraternity, you just keep your eye on him. He's 
 either a fool or a knave, unless, indeed, he is a compound of both ; 
 but keep your eye on him, anyway, and don't vote for him. He 
 may be like the Dean's old woman, anxious for equality by 
 levelling down ; but keep clear of him, anyhow. There's no 
 politics in that, is there 1
 
 Advertisemeni. 
 
 i4r 
 
 Mills' Patent Pollard DistriTDutor. 
 
 The Chkapest, 
 
 Simplest, and 
 Most Efkective,. 
 
 Price, £() each. 
 
 Scarifiers, i!! 5s. 
 
 each. 
 
 ^ 4^ The only sure 
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 ^ Ral)hils is to use 
 
 MILLS 
 
 MACHINE and 
 
 rp:ceipe. 
 
 World - Renowned 
 
 PASTE DIP, 
 
 Per case, to Dip 2250 Sheep, 703. 
 
 THE VERY BEST KNOWN 
 
 HAYWARD'S 
 
 LIQUID DIP, 
 
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 Per Gallon, Gs. 
 Will make 200-gallon Bath. 
 
 Hayward's Specific kills all 
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 800 Sheep. 
 
 G-eo. Mackenzie & Co. 
 
 Importeks of 
 
 Woolpacks, Wire, Rock and Fine Salt,. 
 
 Tea, Sugar, and all General Station 
 
 and Shearing Supplies; are SOLE 
 
 AGENTS for the above Goods. 
 
 Write for Price Lists and full particulars to 
 
 GEO. My\GKENZIE&G0.,13 Pitt St., Sydney
 
 148 
 
 Advevtisemcnl 
 
 Mk. John Hain. 
 
 H(tliriii(in, Jnneg d: I)ei'lin, Limited. 
 
 Harrison, Jones k Devlin, limited, 
 
 STOCK AND STATION AGENTS, 
 
 'Superior Paddock Accommodation, and careful personal 
 supervision. The following figures require no comment : — 
 
 SALES FROM 1st NOVEMBER, 1894, to 31st OClOliER, 1895. 
 
 Sold at Homebush 316,555 Fat Sheep. 13,677 Fat Cattle 
 
 ."Sold Privately .. 
 
 T<1T\L ... 
 
 241,575 Fat Sheep. 
 
 4,990 Fat Cattle 
 
 558 130 Fat Slieep. 
 
 18,667 Fat Cattle
 
 A dvertisemen i 
 
 149 
 
 T H Brownk 
 
 J. C. YorN<;. 
 
 A. D. Browne. 
 
 J. C. YOUNG & CO., 
 
 Fat Stock Salesn^en, 
 
 Stock and Statioq Ager^ts, 
 
 21 PHILLIP STREET,
 
 150 
 
 A dver Use men t. 
 
 EstaWislietl 
 
 WAGGA 
 WAGGA 
 
 1870. 
 
 HAY 187;3. 
 
 SYDNEY 
 1877. 
 
 fy h b ^ 
 
 R. B. Wilkinson-. 
 
 J. S. Lavexder. 
 
 WILKINSON AND LAVENDER, 
 
 STOCK AND STATION AGENTS, 
 FAT STOCK SALESMEN, 
 
 Large Watering and Receiving Yards adjoining Flemington Sale Yards. 
 
 All Fat Stock Untrucked and Watered Immediately on arrival. 
 
 GOOD PADDOCK ACCOMMODATION. 
 
 Financial Agents. Valuators. Loans Negotiated. 
 
 Valuations of Freehold or Station Property Made. 
 
 k 
 
 OUR 
 
 Homehush Sales, 
 
 tor 18D5. 
 
 CATTLE- 4,218. 
 
 SHEEP 
 
 236,594. 
 
 mffz-fM 
 
 OUR 
 
 Outside Sales, 
 
 lor 1895. 
 
 CATTLE— 8,086 
 
 SHEEP— 
 
 525,261. 
 
 ?m 
 
 H. W. Slatter (Auctioneer).
 
 A dvertiscm en t. 
 
 151 
 
 A. MuOORItOE. 
 
 — TO g-:r^a.ziei^s. — 
 
 PITT, SON & BADGERY, LTD. 
 
 pat and Sto^e Stock Salesmen. 
 
 WE have the whole of the Yarding anrl Watering Accommodation adjoining tlie Fleinington 
 Sale Yards. Good and Extensive Paddocks close by. All Quaker Hill Estate and other 
 Fine Paddocks on the road at Blacktown. 
 
 All FAT STOCK received and attended tQ any hour, day or night, by careful men exclusively 
 in our employ. 
 
 Our Mr. Badgery conducts STOCK SALES, and our very large business is unsolicited and 
 well done. 
 
 HORSES as may be arranged. PIGS at Corporation Yards, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and 
 Fridays. CALVES on Wednesdays. 
 
 STORE STOCK DEPARTMENT skilfully managed, and reliable information given. 
 
 We hold all records for ordinary and Special Stud Clearing and other Sales.
 
 Ip2 
 
 A dvertisement. 
 
 F. G. Weaver. 
 
 John- W. Perry. 
 
 WEAVER & PERRY, 
 
 STOCK AND STATION AGENTS, 
 
 Fat and Store Stock Salesmen 
 
 City Bank Cliamliers, 164 PITT ST„ mm. 
 
 Extensive and permanently Watei'ed Paddocks on the Northern, Western 
 and Southern Roads, close to Blacktown, Pan-unatta and Liverpool, 
 for the accommodation of road cattle consigned to us 
 
 We have secured well grassed and permanently Watered Paddocks 
 within easy distance of the Flemington Yards for the accommodation of 
 Cattle and Sheep consigned to us by x-ail. All our Stock are thus placed 
 in the market looking full and fresh. 
 
 All Stock classed and drafted under our own immediate supervision. 
 P Sheep and Cattle unloaded and placed in our Paddocks under the 
 care of our own staff of men immediately on arrivnl at Flemington. 
 
 All Branches of a STOCK & STATION A&ENCY BUSINESS Conductetl. 
 
 Loans Negotiated. Valuation made for Probate, &.c. 
 
 COUNTRY SALES conducted by Sijecial Arrangement. 
 
 ^^ Account Sales & Proceeds rendered day following Sale.
 
 Ar^uertisement. 
 
 H. Trenciiakd. 
 
 P. E. Wyntek. 
 
 153 
 
 W. C. H11.L. • 
 W. E. RicHAKDS. p. C. Close. 
 
 .niP' 
 
 1]3LJ]^ \^. 
 
 6 O'Connell Street, Sydney, 
 
 •)^ #rv\ 
 
 STOCK & STATION AGENTS 
 
 FAT STOCK AND HOESE SALESMEN.
 
 :HILLING WORKS: NARANDERA cSc GUNNEDAH 
 
 L.. 
 
 ■AaWQAS HXHOM : XOd3a ONIZaSH^
 
 Advertisement. 
 
 1 55 
 
 M. Bergl. 
 
 ChA?. BRABBiy. 
 
 BERGL & BRABBIN, 
 
 LIVE CATTLE 
 
 AND — 
 
 DEAD MEAT EXFOETEHS 
 
 London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham, 
 Manchester. 
 
 Newcastle and Sydney, New South Wales. 
 
 Bowen and Gladstone, Queensland. 
 
 SYDNEY OFFICE— 
 
 City Bank Chambers, 
 
 164 PITT STREET.
 
 156 Advertisement. 
 
 HENDEPSON BROS 
 
 4 O'COfflELL ST., SYDKEr 
 
 ^tock, station, 
 
 AND 
 
 financial Jlgcnte, 
 
 SHEEP & CATTLE SALESMEN. 
 
 Valuations of Properties Arranged* 
 
 LOANS NEGOTIATED. 
 
 Erood Paddock Aoconiinodation for Stock at HomeMsL 
 
 All Conskjnivlents Receive Personal Attention. 
 Account Sales Rendered and Proceeds paid day after sale.
 
 A dvertisemen t. 
 
 157 
 
 AlBflTEUR PHOTOCRflPHV I 
 
 BAKER 
 
 — AND — 
 
 ROUSE, 
 
 PHOTOGRAPHIC STOCK 
 IMPORTERS. 
 
 TOUmSTS' OUTFITS 
 A SPECIALTY, 
 
 FULL STOCK 
 
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 Amateur Sets ana 
 Materials. 
 
 Developing, Retouch" 
 
 ing, Printing, and 
 
 Enlarging, 
 
 Undertaken for Amateurs 
 by Experienced Artists. 
 
 NEW 
 
 Illustrated Catalogues 
 
 POST FREE. 
 
 Note our Addresses- 
 
 375 GEORGEiST., SYDNEY. 
 81 Queen Street, BRISBANE. 
 
 260CoLlins St., MELBOURNE 
 65 Rundle St., ADELAIDE. 
 
 125| Liverpool Street, Hobart, TASMANIA.
 
 158 
 
 A dvertisemeni. 
 
 B^ffODIi 
 
 ^ 
 
 AND 
 
 ,-»<; 
 
 ^ 
 
 till 
 
 Mountain Grown and True, to /Nanne. 
 
 = >o.;^gS>o<<<. 
 
 THE UNDERSIGNED WILL BE PREPARED 
 TO SUPPLY 
 
 DAFFODIL BULBS in JANUARY 
 
 AND 
 
 -^-:>*^«— 
 
 LILIES in MAY 
 
 The LARGEST and MOST VARIED COL- 
 LECTION in AUSTRALASIA. 
 
 The Original Stock specially imported from Messrs. 
 Barr & Son, Long Ditton, England ; W. B. Hart- 
 land, Cork, Ireland ; and L. Boehmer & Co., 
 Japan ; and thorcmghly acclimatised in 
 a cold climate. 
 
 R. m. PITT.
 
 Yours fa itlifiL lly 
 
 WM. BROOKS & CO., 
 
 Printers and Publishers, 
 
 Sydney and Brisbane. 
 
 Proprietom of the 
 
 "SYDNEY STOCK AND STATION JOURNAL.'
 
 A dvertisemen t. 191 
 
 THE SYDNEY 
 
 Stock & Station Journal. 
 
 -»— L-^^o^-K* 
 
 The only STOCK PAPER in New South Wales. 
 
 The ''Sydney Stock and Station Journal"" 
 occupies a unique position, and exercises a poAver- 
 ful influence, in connection with the Pastoral 
 Industry of Australasia. It is the only nev^rspaper 
 published in the interests of Stoekowners and 
 Graziers, and no other paper so completely com- 
 mands their attention. 
 
 It is published t^vice \veekly (Tuesdays and 
 Fridays), the subscription being the nominal sum 
 of 7s. 6d. per annum, with postage added 
 
 Business firms \vishing to reach Australian 
 Pastoralists and Stoekowners ^vill find that the 
 "Sydney Stock and Station Journal" v/ill take 
 them there every time as no other paper could. 
 Our paper is read, as the fe\v pages of extracts 
 from letters given herewith will conclusively show. 
 
 Advertising rates on application. 
 
 OFFICE: 
 
 QUEEN'S PLACE, SYDNEY, N.S.W.
 
 162 
 
   a 
 
 SYDNEY STOCK & STATION JOURNAL." 
 
 ^^^' The only Live Stock Paper in Australasia. 
 
 Office— QUEEN'S PLACE, SYDNEY, N.S.W. 
 
 Extracts from unsolicited Correspondence: 
 
 "Messrs. Allen and McNamara, Lismore : — " Your ' Gossip ' is about 
 the best we know of, and ' GloVie Trotter ' is certainly the best that 
 has visited New South \Yales, from Captain Cook to now." — July 14, 
 1895. 
 
 Mr. Marcus Aitkix, Maida Hill, Wooloowin (Q.) : — " Find subscription 
 enclosed, hoping to see your Journal become our leading pastoral 
 record." — Augusts, 1895. 
 
 Mr. D. D. Baird, Dubbo : — " The Syd^tey Stock and Station Journal is a 
 widespread, valuable and most interesting Journal." — Aut;ust 5, 1895. 
 
 Mr. H. S. M. Betts : — "It is the cheapest paper published, and well 
 worth the money, particularly to squatters." 
 
 Mr. W. a. Bexn, Aberdeen Chilling and Freezing Works : — "Our head 
 office (London) writes : ' We get a copy cf the Sydney Stock and Station 
 Journal sent us every week, but we do not subscribe, and wish to do 
 so. Please send a subscription to the Manager, and ask him to con- 
 tinue sending a copy, and say we think the Journal most interesting.' " 
 — October 5, 1895. 
 
 -Mr. Wm. Blacksian, EUicar, Condobolin : — "Gossip's' yarns are 
 instructive and interesting ; he evidently is a thinker, and expresses 
 my sentimen s." 
 
 Mb. Blakeney Broughtox, Brewarrina : — " I consider your paper a valu- 
 able one to all stock-owners in Australia."' — September 27, 1895. 
 
 Mb. R. Briggs, Tenningering : — "Your valuable issue reaches us very 
 regularly. It is always ahead in its information with regard to all 
 matters connected with oversea meat export trade." — August 28, 1895. 
 
 Mr. W. C Bowen, Walla Walla, via Culcairn : — " I read your paper care- 
 fully, and always look forward to receiving it when I get the mail. 
 Subscription enclosed, and I hope you will be rushed with subscribers, 
 as you richly deserve." — Sept. 9, 1895. 
 
 JVIb. W. T. Cadell, Deepwater : — " Your Stock Journal is on the up-hill 
 grade. I am glad to see it is widely circulated. It conveys valuable 
 information, and you deserve every suppoit." — September 30th, 1895.
 
 163 
 
 Me. J. W. Cu^fNINGHAM, Narandera :— " Your efiei'vescing, kincUj- natured' 
 and useful Journal."- September 20th, 1895. 
 
 Mr. Alex. Cra\vford, Boggabri :— " We only get our mail once a week, 
 and it is usually a heavy one, but your paper is generally the first that 
 is opened. I wish your paper every success, which it richly deserves." 
 September 18, 189o. 
 
 Mr. J. F. Clode, Kikiamoh :— "Your paper in the hDUsehoId is much 
 sought after, and is generally the firstpaper opened."— September 6, 
 1895. 
 
 Mr. J. S. Christian', Rockhampton (Q.) :— " Since living here I have been 
 quite lost without your paper, so have taken the first opportunity of 
 writing for it. I wish you the success your paper merits." — Septem- 
 ber, 1895. 
 
 Mr. a. VV. F. Cakrigan, Moree : — "I wish to become a subscriber to j'our 
 spruce little paper, as there is a lot of valuable information in its 
 pages." — August 14, 1895. 
 
 Mr. John Crane, Warialda : — " Yours is a useful little .Journal for stock- 
 owders." — August 12, 1895. 
 
 Mr. Jas. D. Cox, Cullenbone, Mudgee : — "Besides commercial intelli- 
 gence, I derive a good deal of amusement from your writings, which 
 combine humour and philosophy, a rare quality in our Australian 
 literature."— July 12, 1895, 
 
 Mr. W. Colless, Come by-Chance : — " Your Sydney Stock and Station 
 Journal is a valuable little paper, and richly deserves every success." 
 July 18, 1895. 
 
 Mr. J. G. Dickson', Mitchell, (Q.) : — " I consider the information gained 
 from the Journal is cheap, and very valuable to graziers." — Septem- 
 ber 4, 1895. 
 
 Mr. T. De BiOCHE, Gunning : — " The paper is well got up, and worth more 
 than the price of subscription." — August 27, 1895. 
 
 Mr. D. H. Uunlop, Tilpa : — " It is a paper that should get assistance 
 from all pastoralists, and they should not mind paying for such a use- 
 ful and interesting paper." — July 16, 1895. 
 
 Mr. G. E. FAiTHFCL.Brewarranna Station : — 'I should like to find fault with 
 your Journal, but I can't. I observe that the older it gets, the better 
 it is."— October 8, 1895. 
 
 Mr. W. C. Finlay, Booroorban : — " I get a whole week's mail at once, and 
 yours is the first opened." — August 26, 1895. 
 
 » 
 
 FiNLAY AND Co., Goulbum. — " We think your paper a very valuable 
 advertising medium." — Septembers, 1895. 
 
 T. Foot and Sons, Windorah : — "I take it that the most simple manner 
 in which to show our appreciation of your paper is to send along our 
 subscription."— August 17, 1895. 
 
 Mr. J. G. Gray, Kentucky : — " Your paper deserves and must in time 
 command the support of all pastoralists." — August 18, 1895.
 
 164 
 
 Mr, B. Haydos Bland f ord : —"I think the Stock Journal is one of the 
 best pipers we have in the country, and I always look forward with 
 pleasure fur its arrival weekly." — September 21, 1895. 
 
 Mr. S. B. Hendkrsox, Goulburn : — "I consider your Journal tlie most 
 useful paper in the fJolony for agents and pastoralists." — September 18, 
 1895. 
 
 Mr. John Hyland, Araluen : — " I ana very much pleased with the 
 Journal. Your iten-s and news are well written, and your ' Gossip ' 
 quite enjoyable." — August 24, 1895. 
 
 Mk. T. Hammond, 'unee: — "I have been hitherto receiving your paper 
 free, but it contains so much valuable information I feel I ought to 
 become a subscriber." — July 25. 1895. 
 
 Mr. David Hannah. Coolamon :— '• Your Journal is most useful for those 
 connected with the pastoral industry. Xo other Journal gives half 
 the Sdme advantages." — July ^9. 1895. 
 
 Mr. Jas Juchan, Juvr., Coonamble : — "Your versatile paper has three 
 very prominent characteristic not usually found in journalism 
 of the present age — straightforwardness, amusing, and certainly 
 highly inbtructive to the general public." — October 19, 1895. 
 
 Mb. J. C. Jardin, South Queensland : — "I thoroughly enjoy reading your 
 
 Stock and Station Journal, as it is always crisp and freah." — August 18, 
 1895. 
 
 Mr. H. R. Jones, Taemas : — " Your paper is very much appreciated, and 
 with many it is the first one opened. I hope it. and its owner, may 
 long continue to flourish." — August 13, 1895. 
 
 ilR. R. E. V. Trindlk, Mt. Kerin : — " I am delighted with your ' Gossip ' 
 every week. I have not long been getting your newspaper, but would 
 feel lost without it now." 
 
 Mr. p. J. Kelly, Booroomugga : — " I appreciate your Journal very much. 
 In addition to giving derails of all sales, it contains much valuable 
 matter."— August 2.3, 1895. 
 
 Mr. C. L. Kendall, Gundagai : — "Permit me to add my own to the many 
 enconiums you have received on your very readable little paper, and 
 to express the hope that you will receive such support as will justify 
 your extending your powers of usefulness." — ^Atigust 22, 1895. 
 
 ^1r Joseph Lambert, Tumut : — " The Sydney Stock and Station Journal 
 is without doubt the best paper for pastoral information that I have 
 ever read." — August 8, 1&95. , . 
 
 Mr. Geo. N. Magill, Moree : — " I look forward to your paper as something 
 to read. It is a readable, valuable, and interesting production." — 
 August 26, 1895. 
 
 Messrs. Angus McPherson and Co., Roma (Q.) : — " The .Journal is one of 
 the best papers published in Australia, and for anyone having anything 
 to do with the pastoral interests it is simply invaluable." — August 24, 
 1S95. 
 
 Messrs. Nelson Bros, Ltd., London: — "We wish to subscribe to the 
 Stock and Station Journal, which has become an interesting publica- 
 tion." (Two years' subscription forwurded.) — July 5, 1895.
 
 165 
 
 Messrs. Ryder Bros., Gilgandia :— "The perusal of your paper alway 
 gives us pleasure, and we hope you will make it the success it promises 
 to be."— August 19, 1895. 
 
 Mr. R. Rouse, Guntawang : — " The paper is well written, and gives us 
 some very valuable information." — July 2, 1895. 
 
 Messrs. S. Wilsox, Sox axd Co., Marsden : — " Your paper is leally good, 
 and the ' Globe Trotter' is a wonder." — September 16, 1895. 
 
 Mr. Thomas Scrive.v, Mungindi : — 'The Journal is a big little paper, 
 and it is always rushed for as soon as it comes." — September 2, 1895. 
 
 Mr. R. Statham, Bonus Downs : — " Yours is the most useful paper that is 
 printed for stock men is this Colony." — August 15, 1895. 
 
 Mr. Thos. J. Sherwix, New Angledool :— '• It is an oft-repeated story to 
 tell you how much the stock-owners appreciate you paper. Long may 
 you keep to the front." — August .5, 1895. 
 
 Mr. R. H. Thompson, Brewongle :— " We must respectfully beg to com- 
 pliinent you on the pleasant yarns of ' Gossip,' and good style of 
 • 'Globe Trotter.' It does one good." — September 16th, 1895. 
 
 Mr. Thomson', Burrowa: — " We always look forward to the Journal coming 
 with pleasure, as the cheery remarks of ' Gossip ' help to break the 
 monotony, and lift a person up a bit higher." — August 11, 1895. 
 
 Mr. F. E. Whitehead, Urana :— " I congratulate you heartily on the 
 success your very valuable paper is achieving " — August, 1895. 
 
 Mr. John C. Watson, Young: — "It is quite refreshing to see your 
 Stock Journal appear bi-weekly. It is up-to-date, and right out into 
 the future with its ideas." 
 
 Mr. a. Wilshire, Carroll: — "I feel sure that the Stock Journal will 
 become the one paper looked forward to by all connected with pastoral 
 and fanning pursuits." — August 18, 1895. 
 
 Mr. Geo. Wilson, the Springs, Wagga Wagga : — " Your paper is a great 
 acquisition to those living in the country, not only on account of the 
 stock information, but the general readiuij vou introduce." — August 5. 
 1895. °
 
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 roof by electricity, no less- than 600 incandescent lamps being used. In 
 order to make the building almost fireproof the whole of the floors have 
 been plugged with fireproof deafening, so that the most nervous visitor 
 may retire without that haunting fear of fire which makes residence in 
 large hotels so wretched for certain people. 
 
 TARIFF — 10s. 6d. per day, or £3 3s. per week ^ or rooms may 
 
 be engaged separately from 3s. per day. 
 to the Manager promptly attended to. 
 
 A.11 communications addressed