It was on the following morning that we took boat for Watson's Bay, and stood near the lighthouse to look down the sheer wall at the foot of which the Dunbar was wrecked, one only of her living freight surviving to tell the tale. It was awful to think of that event with the scene under one's eyes—the jagged cliff face going down and down, the thundering whirlpool raging at the bottom of it; and this was a sunny Sunday morning, and that was pitch-black night, so thick with rain and storm that a careful navigator accustomed to the port could not see the beacon lit for him. But it was not, I think, the present light; it could not have been.
Those out-door excursions and intellectual entertainments—and I have not named the half of them—come first in my memories of this time; they are the pictures "on the line"; but around them were packed many social incidents of a less special but still interesting kind. We went to men-o'-war parties, which are always charming—the German Bismarck in particular was splendidly hospitable—and the American Consul took pleasure in giving us dinner-theatre evenings. Between whiles we gave parties at home, and filled the interstices with drives. And so every day was a full holiday, and I was always well, and the sky was always blue and the sun shining. And so, when people ask me what I think of Sydney, I tell them that it is an earthly Paradise. Nothing will shake that conviction—until I go again.
I returned home overland, rather than descend to the status of an ordinary passenger on a steamboat to whose captain I was unknown, and I left my glass slipper on the Redfern platform. "Would you," implored a strange lady at my carriage window, as the express was about to start, "oh, would you mind taking charge of this little girl, who is travelling to Melbourne alone?" She handed up a child, and what could I do? I said I was not accustomed to taking charge of myself, that I had never made the journey before, and was not going as far as Melbourne; but she was sure it would be all right. What a night I had, with no sleeping berth available! And in the dark of the raw morning, when we were bundled out at Albury and into the hands of the Customs' officers, while looking after the child's luggage I lost my own, and did not recover it for months afterwards. And then I landed at W——, chilled to the bone and exhausted with my fatigues, and had to wait many hours for the B—— branch train; and finally reached home to find winter again and all kinds of arrears of work awaiting me. I sat down to mend the stockings, and two days later there was snow upon the ground.
After all, that was the best part of it.
CHAPTER XVIII[ToC]
THE END OF BUSH LIFE
In 1893 our long country life came to an end. For years we had been hankering after a Melbourne parish, and at times, I must confess, had done a little canvassing for the vote and interest of the influential, under the well-founded impression that Providence helps those who help themselves; but it is very hard, when once "out of it," as the country-clergy describe their case, to get in, and we had come to consider our chances of metropolitan preferment as about equal to that of the camel which would pass through a needle's eye. Then suddenly it came to us, unsought.