If I were to enter into a minute description of the setting-up of the stock and agricultural farm, chapter after chapter would have to be written, and still I should not have finished. I do not think it would be unprofitable reading either, nor such as one would feel inclined to skip. But as there are a deal of different ways of building and furnishing new places the plan adopted by the three friends might not be considered the best after all. Besides, improvements are taking place every day even in Bush-life. However, in the free-and-easy life one leads in the Bush one soon learns to feel quite independent of the finer arts of the upholsterer.
In that last sentence I have used the adjective “easy;” but please to observe it is adjoined to another hyphenically, and becomes one with it—“free-and-easy.” There is really very little ease in the Bush. Nor does a man want it or care for it—he goes there to work. Loafers had best keep to cities and to city life, and look for their little enjoyments in parks and gardens by day, in smoke-filled billiard-rooms or glaringly-lighted music-halls by night, go to bed at midnight, and make a late breakfast on rusks and soda-water. We citizens of the woods and wilds do not envy them. We go to bed with the birds, or soon after. We go to sleep, no matter how hard our couches may be; and we do sleep too, and wake with clear heads and clean tongues, and after breakfast feel that nothing in the world will be a comfort to us but work. Yes, men work in the Bush; and, strange to say, though they go there young, they do not appear to grow quickly old. Grey hairs may come, and Nature may do a bit of etching on their brows and around their eyes with the pencil of time, but this does not make an atom of difference to their brains and hearts. These get a trifle tougher, that is all, but no older.
Well, of the three friends I think Archie made the best Bushman, though Bob came next, then Harry, who really had developed his powers of mind and body wonderfully, which only just proves that there is nothing after all, even for a Cockney, like rubbing shoulders against a rough world.
A dozen times a week at least Archie mentally thanked his father for having taught him to work at home, and for the training he had received in riding to hounds, in tramping over the fields and moors with Branson, in gaining practical knowledge at the barn-yards, and last, though not least, in the good, honest, useful groundwork of education received from his tutor Walton.
There was something else that Archie never failed to feel thankful to heaven for, and that was the education his mother had given him.
Remember this: Archie was but a rough, harum-scarum kind of a British boy at best, and religious teaching might have fallen on his soul as water falls on a duck’s back, to use a homely phrase. But as a boy he had lived in an atmosphere of refinement. He constantly breathed it till he became imbued with it; and he received the influence also second-hand, or by reflection, from his brother Rupert and his sister.
Often and often in the Bush, around the log fire of an evening, did Archie speak proudly of that beloved twain to his companions. His language really had, at times, a smack of real, downright innocence about it, as when he said to Bob once: “Mind you, Bob, I never was what you might call good. I said, and do say, my prayers, and all the like of that; but Roup and Elsie were so high above me that, after coming in from a day’s work or a day on the hill, it used to be like going into church on a week-day to enter the green parlour. I felt my own mental weakness, and I tried to put off my soul’s roughness with my dirty boots in the kitchen.”
But Archie was now an excellent superintendent of work. He knew when things were being well done, and he determined they should be. Nothing riled him more than an attempt on the part of any of the men to take advantage of him.
They soon came to know him; not as a tyrant, but simply as one who would have things rightly done, and who knew when they were being rightly done, even if it were only so apparently simple a matter as planting a fence-post; for there is a right way and a wrong way of doing that.
The men spoke of him as the young Boss. Harry being ignored in all matters that required field-knowledge.