He commenced his next day’s journey at an early hour, in full vigour of mind and body and in charity with all men. He had fed and rested with keen relish, and all slight fatigue consequent on unaccustomed exercise had disappeared. The morning air was fresh and cool. The indescribable charm of the unworn day rested upon the rural landscape, where farmhouses, maize fields, orangeries, and orchards alternated with primeval woodlands and wide-stretching pastures. The houses were often old, the farming indifferent, the fences decayed; but with all faults it was the country—the blessed country—and the heart of Ernest Neuchamp, a born and bred land worshipper, went out to the dew-bespangled champaign.

He halted no more until the great valley of the Hawkesbury lay before him, with again comparatively ancient settlement, composed of massively constructed houses, and even boasting—wonder of wonders—in this strange new land, of—ruins! Yes; memorials of the past were there! of an epoch when the easily acquired fortunes of the military, or other notables of the day, had been devoted to the erection of mansions more in accordance with their British recollections than with the circumstances of the colony, or indeed with their regular incomes. Studding the wide fertile meadows were farmhouses of all grades of architecture and pretension. Enormous fields of maize, in spite of the untoward rainless season, told of the unsurpassed richness of a region which, after more than half a century’s ceaseless cropping, maintained its fertility.

It so happened that the first two or three individuals who encountered Mr. Neuchamp as he pursued his way along the uniform high road, which led through the flat, somewhat Flemish-looking district, were men of unusual height, breadth, and solidity. Beyond the quick but observant glance habitual to him, our traveller exhibited no surprise at what he took to be exceptional individuals accidentally met. But after several miles’ travelling and a repetition of inhabitants of the same vast stature, he commenced to realise the fact that he had come upon a human family of near relationship to the Anakim.

He then remembered some jesting remarks of Mr. Frankston, in which, for the purpose of pointing to some anecdote of entertaining, if not wholly instructive tendency, he had said ‘as big and as slow as a Hawkesbury man,’ or words to that effect.

‘Here, then,’ mused Ernest, after finally possessing himself of the fact, ‘you have the result of an agricultural population, located upon rich level country, with ample means of subsistence and an absence of anxiety about the morrow almost absolute. Nearly eighty years have passed since the parent-farmers of this community were settled upon these levels. In their descendants you have the true New Hollander, like his prototype, large, phlegmatic, slow-moving, unenterprising, but bearing within him the germs of valiant resistance to tyranny at need, of steadfast labour, of mighty engineering, of deathless struggles for political freedom!’

Having traversed this land of Goshen—evergreen and fertile oasis of the eucalyptus wilderness, not excepting its Platt Deutsch habit of periodical total immersion, Ernest halted upon an eminence which bore traces of having been artificially cleared. He gazed upon the broad winding river at his feet, the wide expanse of river, sharply contrasted with the savage heights and rugged ravines of the great mountain-chain which apparently barred all onward path.

He moved a short distance forward, attracted by the appearance of the remains of an edifice placed exactly upon the brow of the hill, and found himself among the ruins of a mansion of far more than ordinary pretensions.

Fire had destroyed much of the main building, but neglect and abandonment were visible in the dislodged pillars, broken steps, grass-grown courtyard, and roofless hall.

‘This has been no ordinary home-wreck,’ thought he; ‘it needs but little imagination to picture to oneself the overflowing hospitality, the wild revelry, the old-world courtesy, that these crumbling walls have witnessed. Mark the great range of stabling! For no ordinary carriage and pair, with couple of hacks only, were they needed, I trow. There you can still trace the shape and sweep of the avenue leading from the outer gate to the front entrance, and see where the broken bridge spanned the little brook! A few glorious irregular orange-trees mark the place “where once a garden smiled.” This was doubtless one of the great houses in the period which corresponded with the palmy days of the West Indian planters, with the old slave-holding times of the Sunny South, when money was plentiful and (compulsory) labour cheap; when the magnates of the land held high festival, not periodically but as the rule of their daily life, and drank and danced and drove and diced and fought and feasted, all heedless of the morrow, whether in South Carolina, Jamaica, or in Sydney. The morrow had come during the lives of some proprietors. In other cases, not until their heirs were fitted to realise the misery of a lost inheritance. And was this the end, the moral, of that bon vieux temps? The broken arch, the down-trodden shrubberies, the ghostly portals?’

By the time Mr. Neuchamp had brought his musings to a reluctant conclusion, the sun lay goldenly in the clear autumn eve, athwart the dark blue many-shadowed mountain-chain which rose with abrupt sternness from the broad green fertile levels. A wondrous clearness of atmosphere was manifest to the wayfarer from the misty mother-lands, now irradiated with the glories of a southern sunset. Tints of all hues and gradations of colour, clear unflecked amber, burning gold, purple, and orange, cast themselves in softly blending masses upon the fast darkening, solemn, unrelieved mountain-chain.

He was aware, from guide-book lore, that at this point the early progress of civilisation and prosperity of the struggling colony of New South Wales had come to an abrupt conclusion. All things which he saw around explained so much. Careful cultivation of land now disused and restored to grazing. A multiplication of small well-improved farms. Expensive and thorough clearing of timber from great tracts of indifferent soil, only explicable on the hypothesis of cheap labour and artificially heightened prices for all kinds of farm produce.

Then the end had come. The pent-up flocks and herds, the fall of the protection prices, dearth of employment for labour, the vigorous manhood of the colony native to the soil clamouring for remuneration and adventurous employment—all the causes, in fact, which lead to the decay of a weak or the development of a strong race.

One people, one ‘happy breed of men,’ in such straits and urgency, has ever found chiefs of its own blood capable of guiding it to death or victory. The time was come—the men were at hand—Wentworth, Lawson, and Blaxland, hereditary leaders, as belonging to the military aristocracy, and to the squirearchy of the land, stood forward and fronted the supreme crisis. Taking with them a scant equipment, they cast themselves into the interminable wilderness of barren rock and mountain, frowning precipice and barren heath, endlessly alternating with ‘horrible hopeless sultry dells’ for leagues, which no white man had hitherto measured or traversed.

The problem, upon the favourable solution of which hung the life of the infant settlement, was, whether a region lay beyond this pathless natural barrier, which in pasture alone should prove sufficiently extensive to sustain the flocks and herds so rapidly increasing in numbers and value.

It was a task difficult and dangerous beyond what, in this day of feather-bed travel, the imagination can easily reach. But the reward was splendid; and they, with hunger-sharpened features, barefooted and almost naked from contact with bush and brier, with the unshaken courage and dogged obstinacy to the death, proper to their race, reached forth the strong right hand, seized, and held it fast.

For, after untold weary wanderings, with loss of burdened beasts, famine, doubt, and every hardship but that of divided counsels, they stood one day upon a mountain-top and saw stretched out before them the glory of the great unknown, untrodden, Austral interior, fated to be the pasture ground of millions of sheep and beeves and horses, the home of millions of Anglo-Saxons. A portion of this they saw when they sighted the first tract of richly grassed park-like forest, the first rippling river, the first prairie-like meadow.

The yet unfolded treasures of the boundless waste were doubtless seen in the spirit by the poet soul, the statesmanlike intellect, the patriotic heart of William Charles Wentworth.

Thus far the guide-book narrative, which perhaps Mr. Neuchamp partially recalled and revolved as he betook himself to the last of the older country towns of the land, which lay amid gardens and church spires on the nether side of the broad river, under the shadow of the ancient mountain superstition, now with ‘hull riddled’ by broadsides of steam, like other fallacies exploded by modern determination and the remorseless logic of the age.

On the morrow the pilgrim girded himself for the long ascent which plainly lay before him when he should cross the bridge and leave the cleared fertile vale.

Rising at an earlier hour than usual, he quitted the village inn before the sun had more than cleared the eastern horizon.

Ernest enjoyed in silent ecstasy the calm fresh beauty of the morn, as following the old road,—now winding round the spur of a mountain; now scarped from the hillside with a sheer fall of a thousand feet ere the tops of the trees could be beheld, which looked like brierbushes at the bottom of the glen; now running with comparatively level measure along the plateau from which an endless vision of mountain, valley, and woodland was visible,—he gradually ascended to an elevation from which he was able to take a last glance at the rich lowlands through which the course of the river gleamed in long bright curves.

Mr. Neuchamp was a tolerable botanist, a rather more advanced geologist. He therefore possessed the unfading interest which he can ever ensure who reads with heaven-cleared eyes the book of nature. He was able to gratify both tastes without departing from the beaten track. Around, before, above him he beheld shrubs, forest trees, flowers, grasses, utterly unknown previously, but which from early reading he was enabled to recognise and classify. Every step along the sandstone slopes or heath-covered mountain-top was to him a joy, a surprise, an overflowing feast of new and pleasurable sensations.

Descending again from an elevation where the mountain wind blew keenly, and the eagle soared from thunder-blasted giant eucalyptus adown the stupendous glen, at the sunless base of which lay an ever-gurgling rivulet of purest spring-fed water, he shouted aloud at the rare ferns which grew in unnoticed tender beauty where ‘rivulets dance their wayward round.’ He saw the deserted and rude appliances where the wandering miner had essayed to ‘wash out’ a modest deposit of the great conqueror, gold!

Then would he happen upon some long-disused, half-forgotten ‘camp,’ a half military station, where a subaltern had been stationed with some hundred convicts, whose forced labour made the road upon which he now so peaceably travelled.

There were the huts, here the great blocks of stone which they had hewn and raised from the quarry; there had been the triangles where, pah! the contumacious or luckless convict had the flesh cut from his back or much bemarked at least by that high official the government flogger. How wondrous grand the view, at morn and eve, before the eye of hopeless God-forsaken men, who in deliberate wrath and unendurable misery, cursed therefrom the day and the night, the moon and stars, the country, and every official from the gaoler to the governor. He gazed at the glorious cataract where the lonely water gathers its stray threads to fall like the lace tracery of a veil over the sullen spur. He saw the rock battlements and pinnacles, bright in the morning sun, against the rifted water-washed bases of which in long past ages the billows of an ancient sea had rolled and dashed. He saw the huge promontories which frowningly reared themselves on the verge of measureless abysses or obtruded their vast proportions and dizzy height into the boundless ocean of pale foliage which stretched, alternating but with sandstone peaks and masses, to the farthest horizon. From time to time he encountered men in charge of droves of horses and of cattle. These of necessity pursued the old and rugged road, not caring to use the swifter, costlier trainage. At first Mr. Neuchamp used to stand in the middle of the road, until he was warned by the fierce eyes and glancing horns of the cattle, and the extremely unreserved language of the accompanying stockmen, that he was violating etiquette and incurring danger.

Ever and anon he would halt as the warning steam-whistle heralded the approach of a locomotive, and marvel and muse as he saw the long train wind swiftly and securely adown or up the graded mountain side. He saw the half-advancing, half-receding series of approaches which at length land the travellers and the merchandise of the coast upon the pinnacles of the Australian Mont Cenis, and he thanked God, who had made him of one kindred with the men who had conquered nature, both in the land of his fathers which he had left and in the new land, a void and voiceless primeval forest but yesterday.

Much reflecting upon the overflowing pabulum mentis which had been spread before him on that day, Ernest was as grateful as a philosopher could be when he saw at the rather chilly approach of eve the outline of a building, faulty as a work of primitive art, as a specimen of any known order of architecture beneath contempt. It was the humble abode of one of the innkeepers of a former rÉgime, who had retained his lodgment upon the keen mountain plateau, and still smoked his pipe beside the roaring log fire in frosty winter nights. He now gathered russet pippins in his orchard, with an increasing sense of solvency, long after the last of the coaches had rattled away from his door to face the awful grades of the midnight mountain stage.

When, therefore, after a glorious day of intellectual exercise and frank bodily toil this most praiseworthy hostelry was reached, Mr. Neuchamp felt that fate had but small chance of doing him an injury on that particular night, had her intention been ever so unkind. He walked briskly up to the house, and was then and there taken in charge by a fresh-coloured, broad-shouldered, cheery individual, evidently the landlord, or a gross personal forgery of that functionary. He was promptly relieved of his knapsack, and lodged in the cleanest of bedrooms, with spoken and definite assurance of dinner.

‘I see you a-comin’ up the hill, with my glass, a good two miles off,‘ said Boniface. ‘You see, sir, there ain’t no other place but mine for twenty mile good. So I made the old woman have everything handy for a spatchcock. He always liked a spatchcock. Many a time he’s been a furragin’ and a rummagin’ over every nook and cranny of these here mountains till he must have walked them blessed iron legs of his very near off. Ha, ha, ha! You’ll excuse me, sir; but when I see the knapsack, I took you for the Rev. Mr. Marke, the heminent-geehol-holler.’

‘Geologist, I suppose you mean,’ asserted Ernest. ‘Well, I hope you are not deeply disappointed; I am glad to find that there’s a man in Australia besides myself who is fond of using his legs.’

‘Bless your heart, sir, you’ll find when you’ve a been in the country a few years more’ (here Ernest contracted his brow) ‘that there’s a many gentlemen likes a goodish long walk when they can get a bit of a holiday. There’s Counsellor Burley, he thinks nothing of a twenty-mile walk out and in, nor his brother neither. They all comes up to me when they want to stretch their legs a bit. But I must see to your tea, sir.’

Mr. Neuchamp was partly interested in this record of pedestrianism other than his own. Nevertheless, he experienced a shade of disappointment at finding that he was not in such a glorious monopoly of tourist life as he had imagined. However, as he stretched his slipper-encased feet on either side of the great fireplace, in which burned a fire, which the keen, almost frosty mountain air made pleasant and necessary, he came to the conclusion that ‘none but the brave,’ etc.; or, in other words, that no man who has not done a fair day’s journey, upon his own legs, if possible, can thoroughly, intensely, comprehensively enjoy a well-cooked, well-served evening meal, like unto the spatchcock which immediately followed, and put a period to these reflections.