He had the features, the bold autocratic regard with which the early romance-writers were wont to depict the Norman Baron, whose part I make no doubt he would have acted creditably had Fate but arranged his existence synchronically.
The prejudices of the day being against a younger son's procuring a competence after the simple and masterful plan of his ancestors, he was constrained to betake himself with his brethren and kinsfolk to far countries and unknown seas. And right manfully had he, and they, of whom more than one name shines brightly on the pages of modern history, dared the perils of sea and shore, of waste and wilderness.
He had been an explorer, was now a pioneer squatter drawing nearer and yet nearer to the goal of fortune. He had been rich, he had been poor, had driven his own bullocks, and been hardly pressed at times. But whatever the occupation or garb in which he elected to masquerade temporarily, no one ever looked upon Evelyn Sturt without its being strongly borne in upon his mind that he saw a gentleman of high degree.
I admired him with a boy's natural feeling of hero-worship. All that I saw and heard of him heightened the idea. Not less stalwart than refined,
But in close fight a champion grim,
In camps a leader sage.
The hero besides of numerous local legends. He had leaped from a bridge into a flooded river and rescued a drowning man. He had offered to suck the poison from the wound of a snake-bitten stock-rider. He had quelled the boldest bushman in a shearing row. He was chief magistrate, universal referee, good at all arms, gallant and gay. The modern exemplar of the good knight and true.
Willie Mitchell was a different type—a more recent importation—tall, slight, delicate in frame and constitution—cultured and artistic; he was the nearest approach to the languid swell that in that robust and natural-mannered epoch we had encountered. He had been enticed to Australia by one of the Hunters, who, it appeared to us bush-abiding colonists, were always going "home." They had very properly pointed out to him that he could obtain a high interest for his money by investing it in stock, living like a gentleman the while—a point upon which he was decided. He had recently purchased a small but rich cattle run in the Mount Gambier district, where the water was subterranean, and the cattle had to be supplied by troughs.
He afterwards sold this and purchased Langa-willi from Wright and Montgomery, who never did a bit of good after they sold it, the most perfect place and homestead in the West. But this by the way.
Why Langa-willi will always be a point of interest in my memory, apart from other reasons, was that Henry Kingsley lived there the chief part of a year as a guest of Mitchell's. It was at Langa-willi that Geoffrey Hamlyn, that immortal work, the best Australian novel, and for long the only one, was written. In the well-appointed sitting-room of that most comfortable cottage one can imagine the gifted but somewhat ill-fated author sitting down comfortably after breakfast to his "copy," when his host had ridden forth with the overseer to make believe to inspect the flocks, but in reality to get an appetite for lunch.