Tom had sought refuge from the fly in the bed-clothes, and muffled nasal monotones made a sonorous chorale. On the other hand, Sandy, impervious to all impious fly assaults, lay on his back, mouth wide open, breathing heavily and steadily. Sandy was of the pachydermatous order. Neither mosquito nor fly troubled him. The flies evidently found his eyes to be a dry patch, while they were unable to obtain a permanent foothold at his nostrils owing to the intermittent, horse-like snorts which blew them as from the mouth of a blunderbuss. But they heavily fringed his mouth, eating with manifest relish their bacilli breakfast.
In a jiffy the bed-clothes are whipped off the slumbering lads, and in less than no time the latter, pillows in hand, make common cause against the aggressor. Joe puts up a gallant fight, but the odds are too much for him; he is driven into a corner at last and unmercifully pelted.
This prelude to the day's enjoyment concluded, the pals jump into their clothes and proceed to execute the second item on the day's programme, namely, a horseback scamper through the bush before breakfast.
Oh, the glory of it! Out from the confines of four walls into the open spaces of the world when night is merging into day; to move in the dawn of a new day; to stand enwrapped in its pearl-grey mantle ere the mounting sun has turned its soft shades to rosy brilliance; to inhale the spicy breeze which, during the night watches, having extracted the perfumes of the forest flowers, comes heavily freighted o'er gully and range, and diffuses the sweet odours as the reward of the early riser. And then—to watch the daily miracle of sunrise!
"See! the dapple-grey coursers of the morn
Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs
And chase it through the sky."
Sandy, on old Rufus, kept for that work, soon rounds-up and yards several steeds from the horse-paddock. From these three are picked and saddled; and ere the rising sun has walked "o'er the dew of yon high eastern hills," the lads are scampering through bush and brake, o'er dale and hill. They chivy the silent kangaroo through the lush grass; have a glorious burst after a belated dingo; rouse screaming parrots and paroquets from their matutinal meal off the honey blossoms of box and apple trees; pulling up at last on the summit of a dome-shaped, treeless hill, from whence, with the bloom of the morning still upon it, the landscape extends in a vast stretch of undulation, broken at irregular intervals by silver ribbons of creek and river.
Belts of scrub and forest, rich pasturages and arable lands, are dotted here and there, with minute spots from which rise slender threads of smoke indicating settlers' houses; while away in the background are the purple hills and the blue mountains.
Boys are not usually considered to be impressionable creatures on the æsthetic side of things. Herein we wrong them. They may not attitudinise, nor spout poetry when under the supreme touches of nature, for the boy is too natural to be theatrical. But, without doubt, the morning and evening glories of dear old mother earth do touch their sense of beauty; and though these impressions may seem to be effaced by other and more sordid things, nevertheless they linger through the long years, called up from time to time in sweet association with days that are no more.
The lads, while they rested their steeds, stood in silent and wondering gaze, broken at last by Tom, who, pointing across the intervening spaces to the broadest of the many silver threads, exclaimed, "Tender's Tareela!" Many miles away, as the crow flies, lay the river village, a small cluster of dots, a few of which glistened in the sunlight. These shining spots indicated the "superior" houses that sported corrugated iron roofs, new in those days. For the most part the "roof-trees" were shingle or bark.
And now, homeward bound, the horsemen slither down the hillside, plunge into a pine scrub, to emerge therefrom on the border of a small plain, and chase a mob of brumbies grazing thereon. They, with snorting nostrils and waving manes, headed by a notorious grey stallion—of whom more anon—dash up a ravine into the fastnesses of the scrub, and, though followed some distance by the reckless riders, vanish from sight with a celerity possible only to wild bush-horses.