And, over and above all, is a splendid, almost prodigal hospitality.
* * * *
One last look back over the journey and the track.
However it may have been with myself (whether I met with the adventures I had been hopefully looking forward to and whether the exciting episodes or interesting incidents and objects came up to expectations or not) of this I still feel assured: For two or three good humoured cyclists, with whom considerations of time would be of but secondary importance who would start in the proper season (that is March or April), and who would need not to be niggardly in their expenditure, no more promising fields can there be in all the world for a cycle-trip, at once interesting and sufficiently adventurous, than along this same route—in the crossing of Australia from South to North.
Although anyone undertaking to do the journey in fast time will be called upon to endure privations and run grave risks of coming to grief, yet a person who had been once overland, or one of the telegraph station employees—a cyclist in short, who beforehand knew how the tracks ran and where exactly the watering places lay—should find the task neither very difficult nor demanding a great expenditure of days.
Now that the country and what to expect has become a little better known; now that it has been seen and spoken of from a cyclist's view, now that the wheelman may therefore prepare himself, it remains open for any down-town or up-country sprinter, with the three good things of which I have made previous mention, viz., good health, good luck and a good bicycle, to double up the writer's so called "feat" into very small compass indeed, and incontinently knock it out of sight into the obscuring depths of an oblivious cocked hat.
It was one of my objects to leave it so open. Nevertheless I will not take upon myself the responsibility of advising anyone to bother about having a try at the "record-smashing" business unless it be well worth his while to do so.
To be prepared counts for very much. The cyclist who is sure of his road can never imagine the weakening effect which uncertainties on that most vital point can produce. Such doubts evolve sickening, depressing, unhappy sensations which make themselves felt more acutely than do the mere bodily disablements associated with hunger and thirst.
I knew next to nothing of the country, and made it a point to make but very few enquiries about it before I travelled up to have a look. I knew nobody in it, and from the day of my leaving Adelaide to the day I arrived at Sydney, I met no one with whom I had been in any way previously acquainted.
* * * *