Few things are pleasanter, in their way, than staying in an agreeable house, while the welcome, the local recreations, the allotted leisure, are alike in the fresh bloom of unexhausted enjoyment. Your justifiable curiosity as to your friends’ intellects, experiences, and power of amusing you is for a while unsatiated. All is new and delightful; to be savoured with the full approval of conscience. The gardens are enchanted, the ladye peerless fair, the stranger knights courteous, the host an incarnation of appreciation and generosity. All this glamour lasts undiminished for the first fleeting week or two, possibly survives the month. Then the process of disenchantment commences. Either you have business external to the castle, or you have not. In the former case, you begin to feel darkly fearful of neglect, and conscience, if you keep one, self-interest if you do not, commences to be ‘faithful,’ even to inconvenience. If you own no care, or tie, or duty, which may not be postponed to the ‘Cynthias of the minute,’ and still prolong your stay, you cease to be a guest and fall into the more prosaic rÔle of habituÉ, inmate, lodger, amenable to family rules and to criticism. Then the fair ladye, if she be the sole cause of detention, is at times sharply scanned, lest the proverbial chandelier bear hard on the value of the entertainment. On the whole, a state of perpetual arrival at the mansions of favourably prejudiced strangers, combined with comparatively early departure,—unerringly anticipating the first shade of social satiety,—would probably comprise most of the pleasurable sensations permissible in this imperfect existence.

Mr. Neuchamp had, from the first, no thought of trenching upon even the border of this ‘debatable land’; for after a very short trial of this pleasant life he told Miss Frankston that if he stayed for twelve months, he should still find new objects of interest. He thereupon completed the painful process known as ‘making up one’s mind,’ and arranged to leave for the interior on the following day. Not that he was peculiarly sensible to any state of uncertainty. His enthusiastic temperament saved him from indecision. Having, with what he believed to be sufficient care and circumspection, elaborated a plan, he was uneasy and incapable of enjoyment until an advance in line was made. His, the fervid temperament, which delights itself with intensifying the action of all warfare, declared against circumstance, ever the foe of generous youth and ardent manhood.

So impatient was Mr. Neuchamp to hear the first shot of his campaign fired, that he had the stern virtue to refuse to remain another week for a certain picnic, at which all the notabilities of the metropolis were to be present, and at which the purest form of social pleasure might be anticipated.

‘My dear Miss Frankston,’ replied he, when urged upon this subject by Antonia, ‘I grieve that I cannot consistently comply with your kind request. But I feel myself so rapidly turning into a mere town lounger, that I am sure another week or two would complete the transformation, and my moral ruin. For besides, unfortunately’—here he smiled at his expressed regret—‘I fixed to-morrow for my departure from your most pleasant and hospitable home, and I never alter my plans.’

‘I should be very sorry to wish you to alter them for our sake,’ said the girl, unable, however, to suppress a slight tone of pique. ‘No doubt you will be much happier exploring the highway across the Blue Mountains, which, of course, will be a great novelty to you. But I should not have thought a few days would have made any difference. You will find it dull enough at Garrandilla, where you are going.’

‘Dull!’ said he, ‘dull! in the heart of a new continent, a new world, with untold stores of new plants, new companions, new experiences, the outset of a new life. My dear Miss Antonia, how can it be dull to any person of ordinary intelligence?’

‘Well,’ answered she, smiling, ‘perhaps it is I who am dull for thinking so. Most young men who have left our house for the interior have been of that opinion. But I will not attempt to cloud your anticipations. Only, I really do think you ought not to walk.’

‘Why not? What possible difference can it make how I get over the twenty or thirty miles a day before I reach the station, to which your father has so kindly given me letters of introduction? Such jolly walking tours as I have had in England and Wales, in Ireland, and one lovely vacation tour in our old home, Normandy.’

‘What a charming thing to be able to see the place where one’s ancestors lived a thousand years ago!’ said she eagerly. (Mr. Neuchamp, having let slip the admission of the early settlement of his family in that rather stirring Norse colony, had been cross-questioned upon the subject.) ‘How you must have enjoyed it! That’s the worst of Australia—there’s nothing a hundred years old in it, except a red-gum tree. But seriously, you may find yourself exposed to inconveniences by walking, like a labouring man. It is not the fashion in our country for gentlemen to walk.’

Miss Antonia had entirely settled the matter by the last observation. Fashion had been through life one of the deadliest enemies to the peace of Ernest Neuchamp. In his own country he had alarmed his relatives and scandalised his neighbours by his wild defiance of that successor of Thor and Odin, as he profanely termed the social belief of decorous Christians. Was he to bow the knee to this false god in a strange land, which at least he hoped to be pure from the idolatries of the effete civilisation from which he had fled? Not so, by St. Newbold! the patron saint of his house. He smiled with great gentleness as he answered, with half sad but most irrevocable decision—

‘My dear Miss Frankston, I did not become a colonist with any idea of being trammelled by usages or customs. You will pardon me, I am sure, if I retain my first intention.’

‘Most certainly,’ said she. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if you had a friend or two in England who called you obstinate. But you will tell me some day how you got on, and whether there was any small portion of reason in the advice given you.’

‘I shall for ever feel grateful,’ he said warmly, ‘for the intention of the advice, and for the great kindness which has accompanied it. Whether or not I succeed in Australia, I shall always have one pleasant remembrance to look back upon.’

‘My father, and I also, will be glad if you feel thus,’ she said, with the ordinary calm kindness of her tone; ‘and now, I must go to town. You leave to-morrow?’

‘Yes; I am sorry, in one way, to say so.’

‘Then papa will be able to give you his final counsels to-night. I know he wishes to have some last words with you.’

Dinner over and the night being fine, as usual, an adjournment to the sea-balcony was carried unanimously. When the first cigar was half through, Mr. Frankston thus addressed his guest—

‘So you are off to-morrow, Antonia tells me, and can’t be persuaded to wait for the grand picnic. I don’t say you’re wrong. When the ship’s ready and the wind’s fair, it’s better to wait for no repairs. You’re going to walk, too. It’s a long way; but you’re young and strong, and you’ll find out all I can tell you for yourself; if you don’t, all the telling in the world won’t help you. Now, see here, we’ll arrange everything for the first twelve months, or two years, if you don’t care to change.’

‘You’re most kind and generous, my dear sir, and I don’t know what I should have done without you,’ said Ernest.

‘Thank you,’ said Mr. Frankston; ‘we’ll see about that in about five or six years, if we all live so long—we can’t tell just yet. I may be persuading you not to buy in with a rising market, which would double your money in three years, or I may be saving you from losing all but what you stand upright in in about the same time. I think it’s the last, but we can’t tell. This is an uncertain country, particularly about rain. And rain means fat stock, cheap money, and general prosperity.’

‘But can’t one provide against the want of rain?’ inquired Mr. Neuchamp, who was prone to array himself against Providence, holding that all things might be met or conquered by energy and foresight. ‘Irrigation, for instance.’

‘There is no provision that can be made,’ said the man of experience, ‘except on a small scale, and irrigation means labour; and paying for labour in Australia, except to a very limited extent, means ruin. A great drought is like a heavy gale at sea; you may be saved, or you may go down with all hands. One visitation is as easy to stop or to calculate about as the other.’

‘And is it a drought now?’

‘Yes; and one of the worst ever known.’

‘Then what will happen?’

‘Stock,’ said the old man, ‘will keep on falling in price. Many stockholders will be ruined, including Selmore, if he does not clear out Gammon Downs to a——’

‘A black hat,’ laughed Ernest. ‘I shall remember that joke. It came near, as our American fellow-passenger would say, costing me five thousand pounds.’

‘But they won’t be all ruined,’ continued Mr. Frankston; ‘and what I strongly advise you to do is this—you’ve left your money, for a year certain, in the Bank of New Holland, for which you’ll get tidy interest, and it’s as safe as the Bank of England—you go, where I give you this letter of introduction, to Forrester, who is a good fellow and knows me, and it’s a good station, Garrandilla; that’s a great matter, as you will find. There you will be treated like a gentleman. It will cost you nothing but your clothes. There you’ll learn all that can be learnt about stock. In a couple of years, say (here Mr. Neuchamp winced), or perhaps eighteen months, you’ll be fit to look after a station, and able to buy one for yourself.’

‘Don’t you think a year’s experience,’ pleaded Mr. Neuchamp, ‘might——’

‘No, I don’t,’ stoutly asserted the senior; ‘and in two years it’s my belief that your five thousand pounds will buy as large a station as ten thousand would now.’

The following morning saw Mr. Neuchamp, who had risen early and made all his arrangements, fully prepared for the momentous plunge into real life. He had attired himself in an old tourist’s suit of rough serviceable tweed, and donned a pair of thick-soled lace-up boots fitted for climbing mountain sides, and the roughest pedestrian work that might occur. He had filled his knapsack with the requisites that a gentleman cannot dispense with, even in the lightest marching order, and had adopted a brown wide-awake hat, which he trusted would relieve him henceforward from any injurious sobriquet. Thus armed at all points, he awaited breakfast and the arrival of Antonia Frankston, to whom he felt inclined to bid a more heartfelt farewell than he had thought any young lady in the southern hemisphere would have earned the right to receive.

Let me not be understood to assume for a moment that Mr. Neuchamp was wholly insensible to the tender passion. But he was fully possessed and occupied for the present by the ‘enterprise of great pith and moment’ which he contemplated. And the boy-god found the tenement of his heart for the time so thoroughly filled by busy, unsympathetic ideas, that he was fain to hover like a bird round a populous dovecote, vainly seeking a single unoccupied pigeon-hole.

‘Friendship, indeed,’ Mr. Neuchamp confessed to himself, ‘had sprung up of an intellectual and truly fraternal nature between himself and this girl, who had but few companions, and fewer intimates of her own age.’ But he told himself that it was a prosaic alliance of intelligence, natural, and almost inevitable between two people not very different in age, whose temperaments were rather widely apart, but whose tastes and feelings assimilated closely. Just the kind of feeling he might have had for his lady cousins in England, but that they showed no respect for his opinions and openly jeered at his aspirations.

Now Antonia Frankston paid the compliment of respect to all the principles and opinions which he enunciated, even while doing battle unyieldingly against their practical application.

‘It is a great matter to be thoroughly comprehended,’ he had said to himself. ‘One may be right or one may be wrong. I am the last person to deny free exercise of opinion, and the healthful effect of free antagonism. But I must own to a preference of being understood by my critics.’

Under this stimulus he had poured forth, in the leisure time which he had abundantly enjoyed with Miss Frankston, his plans for the regeneration of society, and of Australian life in particular. He had foretold the reign of abstract justice, and the coming dethronement of shams. He saw afar a general refinement in manners, pervading culture, which was harmoniously to fuse classes, now so unhappily divided; the co-operation of labour with capital, and the equal partition of the public lands. In a word, all the fair visions of the higher life, the splendid possibilities of the race which commend themselves to ardent youth and generous manhood, in that springtime of the heart when beautiful emanations are evolved in multiform glory, to be chilled and withered by colder age and hard experience.

To the record of these and similar aspirations, as they poured forth from the enthusiastic soul of Ernest Neuchamp, tinged with poetic thoughts and dignified by a pure ‘enthusiasm of humanity,’ had Antonia listened, by no means without interest. It was new to her to hear projects free from the taint of selfish gain or personal advantage. And though she entered her protests, gently but firmly, against many of his conclusions, there was to him a deep interest in dialogues in which he secured so patient, so fair a listener, gifted with a high and cultured intelligence.

Thus Mr. Neuchamp made all necessary adieux, and having received his credentials, in the shape of a letter of introduction to the owner of Garrandilla, where he was to abide during his novitiate, and a letter of credit in case he should have unexpected need of money, departed from the hospitable gates of Morahmee.

With his knapsack on his back he paced through the city. Being not sufficiently philosophical, I must confess, to avail himself of the George Street pavement, he crossed Hyde Park, and turning round to take one last look at the blue waters and the grand headland, it may be that his eyes rested lingeringly upon the nearest point which he could recognise to Morahmee.

Then he turned his back upon nature’s loveliness and fond regrets, and strode resolutely onward towards the far untried Waste—to him the land of hope and of endeavour.

Taking a somewhat diagonal course adown and across the old-fashioned dingy streets, where the aged, decrepit, but in some instances picturesque dwellings tell a tale of the earliest colonial days, Mr. Neuchamp presently debouched upon the great arterial thoroughfare which, before the advent of the steam king, led to that somewhat mysterious domain, vaguely designated as ‘the bush.’

Here he began to put on his tourist pace, and no longer trammelled by fear of the fashionable world, exerted those powers of progression which had won him fame in Scottish Highlands, by Killarney’s fair lake, and on the cols and passes which, amid eternal snow, girdle the monarch of the Alps.

Mile after mile, at a rattling pace, went he, pleased to find himself once more upon a highroad, though comparatively disused, as the Dover and Calais route, where the great empty posting-houses tell of ‘ruin,’ and the ‘ruthless king,’ which has driven coach and guard, ostler and landlord, boots and barmaid, all off the road together. Such had been the doom of this once inevitable and crowded highway; and Mr. Neuchamp noted with interest the remains of a former state, long passed away.

‘Really!’ soliloquised he, ‘I have come upon a locality adapted for antiquarian research. I did not expect that in Australia. As I perceive, those old buildings are massive and imposing, with walls of solidity far from common. What fine trees are in the orchards! I must see what o’clock it is. This venerable mansion seems inhabited; I wonder if I could get a glass of beer?’

This latter outcome of the inner consciousness, not particularly germane to antiquarian research, was the result of a discovery by Mr. Neuchamp that he was uncommonly heated. The truth was that he had, in the ardour of his feelings, been pelting along at the rate of four miles and a half an hour, forgetting that the thermometer stood at 85 in the shade; hence his complexion was much heightened; his shirt-collar limp to a degree whence hope was fled for ever; ‘his brow was wet with honest whatsyname,’ while a general and unpleasant saturation of his whole clothing told the tale of a temperature unknown to his European experiences. To his great contentment, the hostelry was inhabited and still offered entertainment to man and that fellow-creature, whose good example had the more highly organised vertebrate followed what romances of crime had remained unwritten; what occupations, literary and sensational, had been gone; what reputations, even of Ouida, Miss Braddon, and that ‘bright particular star,’ of the firmament of fiction, the great George Eliot herself, had been faint and prosaically mediocre! The surviving of the past favourites of the ‘shouting multitude’ owed its spirituous existence to the fact of a byroad from certain farms, here reaching the old highway. By dint of an early start, and a little night-work, the farmers and dealers were able to reach and return from the metropolis within the day, thus dispensing with the swift and, to provincial ideas, somewhat costly train. But the long hours and late and early travelling necessitated beer; hence this relic of past bibulousness with ancient porch hard by a real milestone, the twelfth, which our wayfarer hailed with joy, eagerly scanning the deeply-graven numerals.

He found the outer room presided over by an excessively clean old woman, whose starched cap and general get-up reminded him of a well-known Cambridge landlady. Espying a pewter, he demanded a pint of ale, and sitting down upon a bench, disposed of the cool draught with the deep enjoyment which the pedestrian or the worker alone knows. This duty completed, he consulted his watch, and finding that mid-day was passed, decided upon a slight refection of bread and cheese, and a halt.

‘So you still keep the house open?’ he observed to his hostess. ‘I see a good many of those along the road are closed.’

‘So should we ’a been closed too,’ said the ancient dame, ‘but this road, as the fruit-carts and firewood and small farming loads comes in by, keeps a little trade up, and we’ve not a big family; there’s my husband, as is out, and my son, as works in the garden, and does most of the work about the place, and Carry.’

‘And you have lived here a long time, I suppose?’

‘Over forty years, since my husband, John Walton, got a grant of land, and we came here just after we married. We built the house after we’d made a bit of money, and planted the orchard, and did every mortal thing as is done.’

‘And you lost all the traffic when the train commenced to run.’

‘All the paying business; everything but this small line as we used to despise. Father, he was for clearing out, but I couldn’t bear to leave the old place; we’d saved a bit o’ money, and says I: “Well, father, suppose we live on here comfortable and steady, and don’t change. There’s Jem and Carry fit to do all the work; we don’t need no servants, you can potter about the garden, and the pigs and poultry, and bee-hives, and they all makes a bit of money, or saves it, and we’ll, maybe, do as well as those that goes up into the bush, and goodness knows where.” But you’ll have some lunch, sir—please to walk this way.’

Mr. Neuchamp was forthwith inducted into an old-fashioned room, the size and pretensions of which showed the different style of the entertainment once supplied. Leading from this were several bedrooms, to the open door of one of which the old dame pointed. Here, with the help of a sufficiency of cold water and the cleanest towels, he restored himself to a condition favourable to the proper appreciation of lunch.

When he returned he found the table being laid by a neatly-dressed, modest-looking young woman of five or six and twenty.

‘I suppose you are Carry?’ he said, mentally comparing her with an English country girl of the same rank and condition, and concluding that the damsel before him did not show to any great disadvantage.

‘Mother’s been telling you, sir, I suppose,’ said the girl, smiling; ‘she’s glad to talk about old times with any one, it’s nearly all she has to do now.’

‘Well, we had a chat about the state of the roads,’ affably rejoined Mr. Neuchamp; ‘you have a very nice old place here, and I think you were very wise to stay.’

‘I don’t mind it,’ said the girl, ‘though it is awfully dull sometimes. I’m used to a quiet life; but it’s rather hard upon Jem, my brother that is, sir, for he might have bettered himself in many ways.’

‘How do you think he might?’

‘Why, ever so many times he’s had offers of employment, but he won’t leave the old people; and then, he might go into the bush.’

‘The bush! and is every one who goes into the bush certain to do well?’

‘Oh no, sir; but every young man of spirit in the colony likes to have a turn, and run his chance there some time or other. Excuse me, sir, but you haven’t been very long out, have you?’

‘How the deuce does she know that?’ inquired Mr. Neuchamp of himself. ‘Is there anything written on this brow, and so on? However, I have catechised her sufficiently, and cannot object to a little cross-examination in return.’

‘Well, Carry, the truth is that I have not been very long out from home, as you very wisely have discovered; that’s the reason I am a little inquisitive about your country. But how did you know?’

‘By lots of things,’ said Carry, rather mischievously; ‘by your having such a fresh complexion, and so many mosquito-bites,—they don’t bite us natives that way; and by your clothes, and your shirt-collar, and your boots, and your pack, or whatever it is—and by your being on foot.’

‘What a long list, Carry! and the worst of it is, that if I was asked how I should know whether you are a native, as you call yourself, and not an English girl, I should not have half as many things to swear by.’

‘And what would they be, sir?’

‘Let me see. I think you are a little paler, for one thing—but that’s the heat, I suppose—and rather taller—and a little, only a very little slighter—and your hands are smaller; just let me look, for I can’t be sure; and, on the whole, rather prettier than most English girls are.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ interrupted Carry at this point, with a not wholly displeased expression. ‘I don’t believe half of it. I’m sure everybody says English girls have such lovely complexions and figures, and cut out us poor “currency lasses” altogether.’

‘That’s not true, Carry, my dear,’ protested Mr. Neuchamp with warmth. ‘I can assure you that no one would think to look at you that you had lived all your life in a climate something like a greenhouse, with the door shut. It can’t be such a very had one after all, if it turns out such very nice specimens of——’

Here Miss Carry pretended to hear her mother calling, and discreetly departed.

Ernest was too experienced a pedestrian to overwork himself, and blister his feet the first day, thereby converting the remaining portion of the journey into a penance; so finding himself in pleasant quarters, he determined to wait till the cool of the evening, and go on as far as the ancient and venerable town of Parramatta, which he was led to believe reared its double spires about eight miles farther on.

After enjoying the home-baked bread, the well-cured bacon, the fresh butter, and another tankard, he occupied himself with observing the pictures, which in rather grand gilt frames adorned the room. They smacked of the good old days. There was ‘The Tally-ho Coach leaving the Post-office, Sydney.’ A true English four-insider, with a team of highly improbable grays, proceeding at an impossible pace, from a pillared edifice with an enormous clock. The celebrated racehorse ‘Jorrocks,’ as he appeared winning his forty-fifth race, the majority of the cheering crowd depicted as wearing cabbage-tree hats. There was also the terrific finish at the Five Dock Steeplechase between Fergus and Slasher, with a sketch of the astonishing struggle, when Traveller beat Chester for the Sydney Cup after the fifth heat, on the old Sandy Course. This turf triumph had occurred about forty-five years since.

Much meditating upon the comparative antiquity and hoary age of incidents, even in a colony, Mr. Neuchamp paid his modest bill, shouldered his knapsack, and prepared to depart from this beer fountain in the desert. Meeting the pleasant glance of Carry as he was passing the door, he turned and said, ‘I must come down to Sydney next year, and I’ll be sure to pay you a visit, Carry.’

‘Oh, do!’ she said; ‘mother will be so pleased. But you haven’t told me your name; how shall we hear of you?’

‘If any one talks about Ernest Neuchamp to you, it will be of me.’

‘Ernest is a pretty name,’ said the girl, ‘but “Newchum!” that is not your real name, is it? of course you are a new chum, though it would be rude to say so.’

‘And what is “a new chum,” Carry? That is not my name, though the pronunciation is not so far unlike.’

‘Why, a new chum is a new arrival—a gentleman that——’

‘A black hat?’ suggested he.

‘Well, it’s all the same, I believe,’ she answered; ‘it means somebody who has just come and doesn’t know anything about the country.’

‘And a most extraordinary country it is,’ muttered he; ‘it appears that it is not to be known very readily, even after a short stay. Well, here is my card, Carry; you can spell it at your leisure. Good-bye, my dear, and take care of yourself till I come back next year.’

‘Good-bye, sir; be sure you stop at the “Red Cow,” at Parramatta.’

This badinage over, Mr. Neuchamp pursued his journey, much refreshed in body, but exercised in mind by the similarity of his name to the accusation of newness and cockneyism, so to speak, which the colonial appellation conveyed. ‘Most vexatious!’ said he to himself; ‘I thought I saw Antonia look warningly more than once at her father, when he seemed disposed to dwell on the pronunciation of my name. That must have been the mot she forbade.’

The sun was low as he strolled into the quiet, old-fashioned, rather hot town of Parramatta. Here he beheld, within a dozen miles of the thronged and eager metropolis, a population for the most part more incurious and unenterprising than if their habitation had been five hundred miles inland. Every one walked or sauntered down the streets with that thoroughly provincial absence of hurry which is so refreshing to the wearied mental labourer.

Among the lower classes, generation after generation had been born and grown, and aged, since the first occupation of the wonderful land, which has made such haste to become a nation. There seemed a large population of well-to-do retired capitalists, something under the millionaire class, who, having built cottages and planted orangeries (the export of oranges is the great trade feature of the locality), felt a calm confidence that here they could wear out life with less than the usual friction.

He was much surprised and pleased to observe the unusually large number of oaks, elms, and ash trees which had by the pious founders been planted in and around the town. Many of these were of great age, speaking in an Australian sense, and had grown to be ornamental and dignified of aspect, besides being useful in point of shade.

As he walked slowly down the principal street he was pleased to see wide stretches of grass, a river, gardens, and a considerable exemption from the brick-and-mortar tyranny of latter days. The air was becoming pleasantly cool; a certain amount of loitering and musing, dear to Mr. Neuchamp’s artistic mind, was observable. A few schoolboys passed, one pair with arms round one another’s neck, sworn friends and tellers evidently of some mutually thrilling tale. The cabs were delightfully old-fashioned. The very air had a Rip Van Winkle flavour about it, so utterly foreign to the genius of a new country, that Mr. Neuchamp lamented to himself, as he captured a barefooted urchin and ordered him to show him to the Red Cow Inn, that he could not prolong his stay.