Jim and Wally

by Mary Grant Bruce

“Something’s up; I’m going to see,” said Wally.

They all went to see. The two cyclists, visions of helpless rage, confronted a scene of desolation. The truck, being opened, disclosed upon the floor a mingled heap of scrap-iron and twisted metal, which had once been two fair bicycles: in the midst of which, firmly caught among the battered spokes, a couple of fat wethers stood and bleated a woe almost equal to that of the cyclists. A dozen more sheep, most of them bearing traces of conflict with the defunct machines, in the shape of scarred legs, pressed about the doorway, while the guard, distraught to incoherence, endeavoured to restrain them from escaping while attempting to justify himself before the outraged owners. Totally unsuccessful in the second endeavour, he was only partially fortunate in the first: a black-faced sheep, bearing a mudguard wedged upon his horns, made a dash for freedom and fled wildly down the platform, apparently maddened by his unfamiliar adornment.

“And I after putting them in at one end of the truck!” lamented the guard—“and them bikes standing against the other end! Wasn’t there room for them all—how would I know they’d mix up on me! Get back there, bad luck to ye, ye vilyun!”—to another black-faced aspirant for liberty.

Helpers, divided in their sympathies, but with the preponderance of feeling on the side of the guard, appeared mysteriously from an apparently empty landscape and disentangled the sheep from the ruins. The engine-driver, cutting the Gordian knot of debate, discovered that the time-table demanded that the train should proceed forthwith; and the cyclists were left foaming over a twisted heap on the platform, threatening immediate telegrams to headquarters, and, if necessary, murder. As the train slid away from the sound of their lamentations, the fugitive sheep could be descried standing on a bank, his black visage melancholy beneath the mudguard.

At the next station, the guard, with a chastened face, appeared at the window.

“Killard, sir,” he stated. “And Patsy Burke, he have the outside car and an ass-cart for ye.”

Mr. Linton and his party obeyed the summons gladly. They found themselves on a grass-grown platform, boasting very rudimentary station-buildings. Beyond, a road ran east and west, bordered by high banks, while on either side were small fields and wide, flat stretches of bog. A long, thin man advanced to meet them. No one else had left the train, and he accepted them, without introduction, as his responsibility.

“The car is below in the road,” he said. “The little horse, he have an objection to the train; he’d lep a ditch sooner than face it. I’ll throw the luggage on the ass-cart, sir, before I take you up.”

The guard, still subdued in spirit, was diligently hauling out boxes from his van. A suit-case and the rod-box, failing to appear, were made the objects of fevered search, despaired of, promised by the next train, and finally discovered in an empty third class carriage, all within the space of five minutes. The ass-cart, drawn by a dispirited donkey without energy to disapprove of trains, was backed on to the platform, and the luggage piled upon it in a tottery heap, secured—more or less—by an assortment of knotted string and old rope. Then the guard and engine-driver, both of whom had assisted enthusiastically, bade an affectionate farewell, and the train disappeared slowly, while the Australians followed Patsy Burke meekly to the outside car.

Dublin had already introduced them to the jaunting-car of Ireland, and they had fallen instant victims to the fascination of that most irresponsible vehicle. English tourists are wont to regard it with fear and trembling until familiar with its ways: to hold on desperately, to sit stiffly, and, very frequently, to fall off when rounding corners. That the Linton party did none of these things was not due to any superior intelligence on their parts, but merely to the fact that the back-to-back position on the open-air cars of the Melbourne tramways proved an excellent introduction to the Irish vehicle—insomuch that the force of habit was so strong in Wally that the Melbourne gripman’s habitual ejaculation, “Hold tight round the curve!” sprang unbidden to his lips every time the jarveys took a corner on one wheel. The Dublin jarveys had liked the cheery Australians, who paid well and frankly averred that there was never any conveyance like the jingling cars with their merry little bells, and their good horses; and the jarveys of Dublin are a critical race, with quick tongues and quicker wits. They had confided to them their woes, which centred round the introduction of motor-cars and the complete indifference of pedestrians to the rule of the road—an indifference universal throughout Ireland, where the unseasoned traveller is perpetually a-shiver with dread at threatened street tragedies, perpetually averted by good luck that amounts to a miracle.