“Well, we found the tax-cart at the station, and Rosalind’s such a terrific economist that she wouldn’t hear of us buying a carriage, as she calls it, for her. But I really must go in for a buggy, if it’s only on the governor’s account. He’s not so young as he was, and riding knocks him about, I can see. But how fast your horses are! I didn’t think Australian horses went in for trotting much. None of ours do.”
“Australian horses (and men and women too, as I think I have mentioned before),” remarked Hubert with suspicious mildness, “resemble those in other parts of the world, though the contrary is asserted. Some are good, others bad. Some of them—the horses, I now allude to—can trot. Others cannot. This pair, for instance”—(here he tightened his reins, and in some imperceptible fashion gave a signal, which they answered to by putting up their heads and bursting into sixteen miles an hour)—“can do a mile in very fair time for non-professionals.”
“So I see,” replied the young Englishman. “I wish I was not so hasty in forming impressions; however, I shall be cured of that in time. But it is awfully trying to hold your tongue when everything is new and exciting, and to talk cautiously is foreign to the Dacre nature.”
“‘Experientia does it,’ as we used to say at school,” laughed Hubert. “You’ll be chaffing new arrivals in a couple of years yourself. The regulation period is about that time, and I don’t think you’ll take so long as some people.”
“That’s a compliment to my general intelligence,” said Dacre. “I suppose I ought to feel grateful. But one can’t help a slight feeling of soreness, you know, that after being regularly educated for a colonial life, as I was, and coached in all the necessary carpentering, blacksmithing, agriculture, and so on, I should find myself so utterly ignorant and helpless here.”
“Come, come,” said Hubert; “you do yourself injustice. It won’t take more than a year to make a smart bushman of you, I can see. But I suppose it’s something like going into a strange country to hunt. You remember that when Mr. Sawyer went to the Shires he felt under a disadvantage at first.”
“Yes, but you wouldn’t, or M’Intosh, or any of the other fellows I’ve seen; that’s what makes me so savage with myself. You’d know your way about; people wouldn’t discover, unless you told them, that you had lived in England all your days, while we fellows, who came out here certainly thinking ourselves as good all round as any one we were likely to find, are always exposing our ignorance, getting laughed at, or taken in, and are marked for immigrants and tyros as far as we can be seen.”
“I observe your point, and it is a little aggravating,” replied Hubert. “But after all, it is a compliment to our mother country that we make it our business from childhood to know all about her history and traditions, manners and customs, from a thousand accurate chronicles. Our usages, modelled upon hers and religiously handed down by our parents, are identical, or as nearly so as we can make them. But our country and our trifling yet marked departures from English standards have found few close observers, accurate descriptions, and fewer narrators still. There is hardly any way of getting acquainted with us, except by actual experience.”
“It looks like it,” assented his friend, reluctantly; “but I mourn over the fond illusions Rosalind and I are doomed to lose before we complete our apprenticeship. Hope we may acquire others not less satisfactory. The outlook at Wantabalree at present might be brighter too, if what you told my father comes to pass.”
“It may not happen after all, or it may be parried and averted. All manner of chances may arise in your interest. So do not think of desponding,” said Hubert. “One of the special characteristics of Australians is, that they never despair.”