Besides these gentlemen we had drawing and French masters. Mr. Rodius was a German artist, a painter in watercolours and a limner of likenesses in crayon. Many of the early celebrities will owe whatever immortality they may secure, to his industrious pencil. Still linger in old colonial mansions a few portraits, not obtruded perhaps, but too life-like to be lost sight of, bearing the signature 'C. Rodius.' In our family scrap-album several water-colour sketches are to be seen, showing perhaps more than the portraits—which were necessary 'pot-boilers' in that material age—the true artistic touch. He used to scold us, his pupils, for our indifference and inattention: 'Ven I was yong I did rone a whole mile every day so as to be in dime vor my bainding lezzon; I belief you would all rone a mile do esgabe it.' I don't know that he succeeded in forming artists of that generation, but possibly we may have been rendered more appreciative of the paintings which most of us were to behold in the Galleries of Europe. Mr. Stanley, our French master, knew his Paris intimately, I doubt not. He had the Parisian accent, too, very different in quality from the provincial French which, when spoken fluently, enables so many professors of the language to pass muster. He was a man of distinguished bearing and 'club' form, resembling curiously in appearance, and in some other ways, a late fashionable celebrity. Why he had come to live in a colony and teach French at a boarding-school we might wonder, but had no means of ascertaining. His life, doubtless, contained one of the romances of which Australia was at that time full. He was generous to all his pupils. No unkind word was ever said regarding him. He imparted to us a thorough comprehension of the genius of the language; and if we never fully probed the subtle distinctions of irregular verbs, it was no fault of his. Long afterwards, when at the Grand Hôtel de Louvre, or the 'Trois Frères Provencaux,' I was able to make my wants known, surrounded by British and American capitalists, sitting mute as fishes, I recalled with gratitude Mr. Stanley's faithful monitions.
One of our school games was, of course, that of 'fives.' We played against one of the high gables of the college building, where the ground had been partially levelled; but it was rather rough still. A road-party was doing something to the present College Street when a master suggested that I should ask my friend Mr. Felton Mathew, then Surveyor-General and Chief Road-superintendent, to allow the men to complete our 'fives' court. Mr. Mathew was our neighbour at Enmore; he bought the ground from my father on which he built Penselwood. My request was granted, and a party of men under an overseer soon made another place of it.
A tragical incident connected with the game occurred about this time. Some of the boys were playing in Sydney against a high wall in a court built for the purpose. It was not properly supported, for it fell suddenly, killing poor Billy Jones, who was one of the players. I don't think I remember any other accident. There was an epidemic of influenza, precisely like the 'fog fever' of recent years in symptom, cause, and effect. It was universal, severe, and troublesome, but we all recovered in due time. Even 'fog fever,' therefore, is no new thing. A certain school of weather prophets is convinced that, as they state their proposition, 'the seasons have changed; since the old colonial days they have become drier or cooler, even hotter, sometimes.' After a pretty clear recollection of most of the seasons since the 'three years' drought' of 1836-7-8, I am opposed to that belief. What has been will be again. People were justified in surmising about the time of last autumn that it had forgotten how to rain in New South Wales and part of Queensland. In this year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven that theory may be said to have exploded.
What was a really exceptional, even phenomenal, form of weather, however, did take place in and near Sydney in one of the dry years mentioned, which was a fall of snow. We made snowballs at Enmore and enjoyed the usual schoolboy amusements connected therewith. It must have been nearly as cold a day as last Monday week. There was snow on all the hills around Albury, but I did not hear of any snowballing quite so near Sydney as I refer to. If the Messrs. Chaffey Brothers succeed in their irrigation scheme, and make the Mildura salt-bush wilderness to bloom as the rose, we may attain partial security from droughts at least. Nevertheless let us pray to be delivered from the legendary visitations which grey-headed aboriginals have described to pioneer settlers. Such an one, unbroken for seven years, is now laying waste Queensland.
The sons of Sir Thomas Mitchell—Livingstone, Roderick, and Murray—were among the denizens of that old enclosure of learning, where, as Hood so truly sings—
Ay! there's the playground—there's the lime,
Beneath whose shade in summer's prime
So wildly I have read!
Who sits there now and skims the cream
Of young romance and weaves a dream