"Valuable race-horses are the best off after all, then?"
"Well, they have neither bits of gates nor fancy fences to negotiate; they have stone walls and solid five-foot timber jumps. They have to go over the whole lot clear, or come to grief. I have shot about 1,000 crippled first-class crack racers in ten years on the course alone."
"Then there is no love for the horses here?"
"Nonsense! we love 'em. Why, it is a touching incident, I tell you, when I come on the scene to save further pain for the poor animal. The boy who has had it in charge runs over with a cloth to throw over his favourite. Then he draws me on one side, and says, 'Don't shoot, sir, till I'm away, I can't bear it.'"
LANDING AT ADELAIDE.
Adelaide is a charming place when you get there, but you have to get there first. Getting there is no easy matter if you arrive by sea, as you must when coming direct from the Old Country. Both for comfort and effect Adelaide is better approached by land, as when coming by rail from Melbourne. The railway has to cross the range of hills which shuts Adelaide in from the east, and some fine views of the city and the plains are obtained.
From the anchorage at Largs Bay the city is barely visible, and travellers have to take train through Port Adelaide up to the city, a journey of about eight miles across the plains. These plains have been cleared of trees, and the country is bare and uninteresting.
Before starting on this journey, however, the unhappy voyager has much to go through. In this respect Adelaide compares badly with Melbourne and Sydney. Sydney harbours the largest steamers in the centre of the city; Melbourne allows them to come to the back door—at Port Melbourne; while Adelaide compels them to stay outside in the middle of the road, or roadstead, and a very rough roadstead it is. When the weather is at all fresh, the landing is positively dangerous. The steam launches which come out to the mail steamers are bound round from stem to stern with huge rope fenders. When the launches are jumping, wriggling and plunging alongside the steamers, it is no easy matter to get into them, and anyone but a sailor or a professional acrobat would find it safest to be lowered over the side in a basket. The voyage to the jetty at Largs Bay is a brief epitome of the Bay of Biscay, the Australian Bight, and the monsoons of the Indian Ocean. When you reach the jetty, you are hoisted on to it by practised hands as the launch jumps to the right level. Then—splash! and up comes a green sea through the boards and you are wet to the skin. Bathing, it seems, like education, is "free and compulsory" at Adelaide. Perhaps this is a part of the quarantine operations—disinfection by salt water. This sea bath is, however, the only thing, as far as I am aware, that the traveller gets for nothing in South Australia. Passengers' baggage is charged for when it lands at the jetty at the rate of 1s. 3d. per cwt., and the same has to be paid on leaving. When at last you get into the train!—such a train! but perhaps the railway department does not like the risk of having good carriages soiled by passengers' wet clothes—you compare this "boat express" with those of Folkestone, Dover, Harwich, and Southampton. The first-class carriages are not equal to the third-class on the English lines. Being an express, this train runs more than a mile without stopping. Then you have to change trains. When you get along again, you notice that the railway to Port Adelaide runs along the street without any fence whatever to prevent people from driving or walking on to the line. Fatalities of course are common, and excite little notice; bolting horses and consequent accidents are of almost daily occurrence, and the local residents get quite to enjoy being pitched out of their buggies. Life here cannot be dull, while it lasts. Passengers are lucky if they reach Adelaide within an hour and a half of leaving the steamer, the distance being about ten miles.
