Chapter Nineteen.
My Patient the Emigrant.
Talking of penal settlements naturally suggests settlements that are not penal, where our most enterprising unsuccessful men go to seek the home and prosperity that they have not been able to discover here. One such man as this was Samson Harris, who, after twenty years of Australian life, returned home with a comfortable competency for a man of his class. He was no millionaire, but he had made enough to live upon to the end of his days, and then leave enough for his children.
I attended his family, the little that they needed of medical aid, and finding him a thoroughly well-informed man, full of general knowledge, a certain amount of intimacy ensued, and he at various times told me so much of his life out at the Antipodes, that I was pretty well able to picture it from beginning to end.
He gave me one very vivid account of an incident in his career which I have endeavoured to reproduce.
From his description of his home, it might have been in one of the midland counties, the scene was so calm and peaceful. The roughly-built cottage, with its familiar English objects here and there—the loudly-ticking clock, the cleanly-scrubbed three-legged table; the big old family Bible; the cage of white wicker, with its ragged-tailed thrush hopping from perch to perch; and I picture to myself Samson Harris seated there upon a stool in the midst of the humble room, before a tin bucket of water, Englishman written boldly in the lines of his rugged, ruddy, sun-tanned face, as he bent to his task of washing out the barrel of his rifle—a necessity for protection in those early settling days—making the water play up like a fountain from the nipple, to the great delight of two rosy children who were looking on.
It might have been here, in one of the midland counties, but there was something about the brightness of the afternoon sun which streamed in at the open door, the blueness of the sky, the clearness of the atmosphere, and the scenery around, that was not English. The flowers that clustered about the door and nodded round the rough window-frame, and the objects that peeped here and there from some corner, too, told of a foreign land; while the huge pines that shot up arrow-like towards the sky were such as could be seen nowhere but in Australia.
“The poor brutes have been calling you, lass, for the last half-hour,” said he, looking up as a tall, fair-haired girl entered the room where he was busy, milking-pail in hand, and stood to watch the task with as much interest as the children.