“For what we have received, etc., etc.,” continued Mr. Dereker. “Now for shawls and the carriage. Can we set you down at the club, Claude? And you can make a suitable reply on the way.”
Possibly he did, as he was wedged in, close to Sheila, and what he had to say was in a softly, murmurous tone; akin to that of the surges on the shore, which the silence of the summer night made clearly audible.
After the triumphant success of the ball, other entertainments followed in quick succession, in which the visitors, civil, naval and military, vied with each other in keeping up the excitement, so that the season of 18— was long known as the most successful, harmonious, and generally mirthful period recorded in Tasmanian annals. Races, regattas, picnics, gymkhanas, were in turn attended by crowds of visitors from all the colonies.
Of four-in-hand drags there was quite a procession. Agriculture was prospering. Stock was high in price and quality. Mining operations and investments not only in this, but in all the other colonies, were phenomenally payable. The financial glow shed by the ever increasing, almost fabulous yield of the Comstock, and of the great copper and tin mines, Mount Lyell and Mount Bischoff, gave a magical lustre to all monetary transactions. A kind of Arabian Nights’ glamour was cast over the existence of the dwellers in the land, and of all the excited crowds who had hurried to the favoured isle, where Aladdin’s Cave seemed suddenly to have opened its treasure chambers in real life and in broad day, to the favoured inhabitants of the Far South Isle.
Foremost among the gay throngs who seemed bent upon taking fullest advantage of the revelries of the period—so appropriate, so suitable, so thoroughly in harmony with the spirit of the hour, were the festive celebrities of the Victorian party, by which name they began to be known.
Mr. Blount had no notion of receiving all the benefits of his newly acquired possessions without doing something in requital. His liberality was unbounded. He subscribed generously to all charitable societies and local institutions. He gave picnics, dances and fishing parties. He even went the length of chartering a steamer and carrying off a large fashionable party to the weird, gloomy solitudes of Macquarie Harbour.
Here the frolic-minded crowd found their spirits lowered, and their imagination darkly disturbed, as they roamed amid the ruinous prison-houses, where rotting timbers told the tale of long neglect; of fast-fading memories of crime and suffering. They gazed on the immense, tenantless buildings, with hundreds of cubicles, the mouldering walls, roofless and ivy-grown, the church where it was deemed that the wretches whose lives were one long foretaste of hell, might be turned to hopes of Heaven, after completing a life of imprisonment, torture and despair. Vehicles were in attendance, besides saddle-horses and guides, under whose safe conduct the revellers made their way to the silent, deserted settlement, whence long ago the ghastly procession of chained men marched at morn to commence each day—a day in which they cursed their birth hour at dawn and eve, ending it by trusting that each night might be their last. The visitors trod the rotting planks of the stage, where fierce dogs had bayed and torn at their chains, as they scented the escaping convict—where more than one such desperate felon had been literally torn in pieces, or escaped the hounds to die a more terrible death amid the sharks which swarmed around the pier. These and other relics of the bad old days of mystery and fear, having been shudderingly regarded by the awed and whispering company, the Albatross departed with a fair wind, a smooth sea, and her much relieved visitors, who,
“Ignorant of ‘man’s’ cruelty,
Marvelled such relics here should be.”