He had since found that the owner of the large herd which Mr. Levison had purchased, as another buyer would have bought a team of bullocks or a flock of sheep, had been compelled to sell on account of the sudden influx of miners upon his run. Gold—the healer, the benefactor, the deliverer, the slayer, the betrayer, the enslaver of mankind in every age, in every clime—had been discovered in the vicinity of the long-silent peaceful valleys in which Abel Drifter’s cattle had roamed for more than a generation. Now all was changed: the green dales were invaded by noisy crowds, the waters were polluted, the air was thick with the smoke of camp-fires, maddening with the barking of dogs, the crashing of falling trees. Droves of hobbled horses attended by reckless boys, who galloped and wantoned over the sacred camp, filled the woods with alarm and distraction for the confused, terrified cattle and their despairing stockmen.
Believing if he hesitated that probably half his herd would wander off the run and the other half disappear by dying, Mr. Drifter put the whole herd into his agents’ hands for sale, and, as we have named, found a prompt purchaser in Mr. Levison. It was this dread alternative of landmarks, this solemn, dismaying change of the pastoral stage into that of trade and agriculture, which Mr. Neuchamp had been curiously eager to behold.
Passing through that division of the great plain-ocean which varied in very slight degree from his own particular appointment, he entered upon a wholly different description of country, the characteristic peculiarities of which were clearly manifest to him. In the place of the torrid plains and rare watercourses which he had traversed for many days, he saw green park-like woodlands, pleasantly diversified by the long-absent hill and dale. Broad and fertile valleys adorned the landscape, from which many a harvest had been gathered since the first sod was turned. The houses of the proprietors were in some instances large and handsome, surrounded by shrubberies and orchards of ancient growth, or they bore the homely aspect of snug farmhouses, befitting the homes of sturdy, prosperous yeomen.
Fencing of a substantial and contradictory nature abounded, so that Ernest was more than once debarred from cross-country travelling, and forced to adhere to the high road. He noticed that during the morning and evening hours the air was cool occasionally to keenness. The magnificent distances to which he had become accustomed between the homesteads had narrowed to something, if not identical with British habit, at any rate to far nearer propinquity than he had deemed possible in Australia. From all these signs and appearances Mr. Neuchamp decided that he had come upon a new and different phase of colonisation, and prepared himself to investigate and analyse accordingly.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘is one of the cheering results of that human hive-swarming which we call emigration. How many of these comfortably-placed landholders, enjoying a charming climate, a fertile soil, and that abundance of elbow-room which every Anglo-Saxon needs, were peasant labourers, pinched and over-laboured, small farmers, or impoverished gentry, landless, tradeless, coinless younger sons in Europe? Here they have found their proper métier. Here they have repeated history and have peopled a new world, under the Southern Cross, where the passionate freedom of their forefathers may be handed down unblemished to the sons of the grandest of races.’
As he travelled this settled region the population necessarily commenced to show signs of alteration, both as to character and density. Instead of the sparse, sunburned, nomadic units of the waste, the more various and pronounced types of agriculture and grazing industry presented themselves frequently and unmistakably.
Mr. Neuchamp hailed with pleasure the opportunity thus afforded of conversation and companionship. He saw the neat taxed-cart, with the farmers’ wives and buxom daughters returning from the weekly market. He saw the farmer himself mounted upon a stout, not over-refined hackney, jogging along the road with the bluff confidence inspired by good crops and good prices. He marked the great fields of maize alternating with hay and cereals, while the wide-fenced pastures, with the clover, lucerne, and the prairie-grass of America, were thickly filled with thriving cattle or the long-woolled sheep, with which his eye had been familiar in his native country.
‘People in England fancy,’ he thought, pursuing his ordinary train of thought, ‘that life in Australia is principally devoted to lying under the shade of tropical forest-trees, and eating peaches or pineapples; or else that a course of violent and exciting border life is unremittingly hazarded. How little the average British mind is capable of comprehending the widely various conditions of colonial life, necessarily distinct and sharply defined, from the influences of varying soil, climate, and original settlement, with a hundred other underlying laws, by these centuries passed into the one concrete idea of “the colonist.” As reasonable would it be to mingle the attributes of the Devon or Suffolk peasant—the Celtic Irishman, the Lowland Scot, the Cockney, and the Highlander, under the general name of Englishman.’
On the day when these truly original ideas had occurred to Mr. Neuchamp he was riding contentedly along the fenced highway with the intention of reaching at nightfall the homestead of a landed proprietor of some mark in his own district, whose acquaintance he had made at the New Holland Club. He was certain of hospitality and of receiving the clearest directions as to his route. Within a few miles of his destination, as he calculated, he encountered a gentleman, on a well-bred hack, who had just emerged from a lane at right angles with the road.
He replied to the stranger’s courteous and unaffected greeting with an inquiry as to the precise distance of Mr. Haughton’s house—if perchance he happened to be aware of it.