THE CAXTONS. – PART XVI
CHAPTER XCV
The stage-scene has dropped. Settle yourselves, my good audience; chat each with his neighbour. Dear madam in the boxes, take up your opera-glass and look about you. Treat Tom and pretty Sal to some of those fine oranges, O thou happy-looking mother in the two-shilling gallery! Yes, brave 'prentice boys, in the tier above, the cat-call by all means! And you, "most potent, grave, and reverend seigneurs," in the front row of the pit – practised critics and steady old play-goers – who shake your heads at new actors and play-wrights, and, true to the creed of your youth, (for the which all honour to you!) firmly believe that we are shorter by the head than those giants our grandfathers – laugh or scold as you will, while the drop-scene still shuts out the stage. It is just that you should all amuse yourselves in your own way, O spectators! for the interval is long. All the actors have to change their dresses; all the scene-shifters are at work, sliding the "sides" of a new world into their grooves; and, in high disdain of all unity of time as of place, you will see in the playbills that there is a great demand on your belief. You are called upon to suppose that we are older by five years than when you last saw us "fret our hour upon the stage." Five years! the author tells us especially to humour the belief by letting the drop-scene linger longer than usual between the lamps and the stage.
Play up, O ye fiddles and kettle-drums! the time is elapsed. Stop that cat-call, young gentleman! – heads down in the pit there! Now the flourish is over – the scene draws up: – look before.
A bright, clear, transparent atmosphere – bright as that of the East, but vigorous and bracing as the air of the North; a broad and fair river, rolling through wide grassy plains; yonder, far in the distance, stretch away vast forests of evergreen, and gentle slopes break the line of the cloudless horizon; see the pastures, Arcadian with sheep in hundreds and thousands – Thyrsis and Menalcas would have had hard labour to count them, and small time, I fear, for singing songs about Daphne. But, alas! Daphnes are rare; no nymphs with garlands and crooks trip over those pastures.
Turn your eyes to the right, nearer the river; just parted by a low fence from the thirty acres or so that are farmed for amusement or convenience, not for profit —that comes from the sheep, – you catch a glimpse of a garden. Look not so scornfully at the primitive horticulture; such gardens are rare in the Bush. I doubt if the stately King of the Peak ever more rejoiced in the famous conservatory, through which you may drive in your carriage, than do the sons of the Bush in the herbs and blossoms which taste and breathe of the old fatherland. Go on, and behold the palace of the patriarchs – it is of wood, I grant you, but the house we build with our own hands is always a palace. Did you ever build one when you were a boy? And the lords of that palace are lords of the land, almost as far as you can see, and of those numberless flocks; and, better still, of a health which an antediluvian might have envied, and of nerves so seasoned with horse-breaking, cattle-driving, fighting with wild blacks – chases from them and after them, for life and for death – that if any passion vex the breast of those kings of the Bushland, fear at least is erased from the list.
See, here and there through the landscape, rude huts like the masters' – wild spirits and fierce dwell within. But they are tamed into order by plenty and hope; by the hand open but firm, by the eye keen but just.
Now, out from those woods, over those green rolling plains, harum-scarum, helter-skelter, long hair flying wild, and all bearded as a Turk or a pard, comes a rider you recognise. The rider dismounts, and another old acquaintance turns from a shepherd, with whom he has been conversing on matters that never plagued Thyrsis and Menalcas, whose sheep seem to have been innocent of foot-rot and scab, and accosts the horseman.
Pisistratus. – My dear Guy, where on earth have you been?
Guy (producing a book from his pocket with great triumph.) – There! Dr Johnson's Lives of the Poets. I could not get the squatter to let me have Kenilworth, though I offered him three sheep for it. Dull old fellow, that Dr Johnson, I suspect; so much the better, the book will last all the longer. And here's a Sydney paper too, only two months old! (Guy takes a short pipe or dodeen from his hat, in the band of which it had been stuck, fills and lights it.)
Pisistratus. – You must have ridden thirty miles at the least. To think of your turning book-hunter, Guy!
Guy Bolding, (philosophically.) – Ay, one don't know the worth of a thing till one has lost it. No sneers at me, old fellow; you, too, declared that you were bothered out of your life by those books, till you found how long the evenings were without them. Then, the first new book we got – an old volume of the Spectator!– such fun!
Pisistratus. – Very true. The brown cow has calved in your absence. Do you know, Guy, I think we shall have no scab in the fold this year? If so, there will be a rare sum to lay by! Things look up with us now, Guy.
Guy Bolding. – Yes; very different from the first two years. You drew a long face then. How wise you were, to insist on our learning experience at another man's station before we hazarded our own capital! But, by Jove! those sheep, at first, were enough to plague a man out of his wits! What with the wild dogs, just as the sheep had been washed and ready to shear; then that cursed scabby sheep of Joe Timmes's, that we caught rubbing his sides so complacently against our unsuspecting poor ewes. I wonder we did not run away. But "Patientia fit," – what is that line in Horace? Never mind now. "It is a long lane that has no turning" does just as well as anything in Horace, and Virgil to boot. I say, has not Vivian been here?
Pisistratus. – No; but he will be sure to come to-day.
Guy Bolding. – He has much the best berth of it. Horse-breeding and cattle-feeding; galloping after those wild devils; lost in a forest of horns; beasts lowing, scampering, goring, tearing off like mad buffaloes; horses galloping up hill, down hill, over rocks, stones, and timber; whips cracking, men shouting – your neck all but broken; a great bull making at you full rush. Such fun! Sheep are dull things to look at after a bull-hunt and a cattle-feast.
Pisistratus. – Every man to his taste in the Bush. One may make one's money more easily and safely, with more adventure and sport, in the bucolic department. But one makes larger profit and