Jack accordingly rode up to the “Lightwoods” half an hour before sunset, and seeing his friend sitting in the verandah reading, raised a wild shout and galloped up to the garden gate.
“Well, Bertie, old boy, how serene and peaceful we look. No wonder those ruffianly agricultural agitators think we squatters never do any work, and ought to have our runs taken away and given to the poor. Why, all looks as quiet as if everything was done and thought about till next Christmas, and as if you had been reading steadily in that chair since I saw you last.”
“Even a demagogue, Jack, would hesitate to believe that because a man read occasionally he didn’t work at all. I wish they would read more, by the way; then they wouldn’t be so illogical. But I really haven’t much to do just now, except in the garden. I’m a store-cattle man, you know, and my lot being well broken in——”
“You’ve only to sit in the verandah and read till they get fat. That’s the worst of our life. There isn’t enough for a man of energy to do—and upon my word, old fellow, I’m getting tired of it.”
“Tired of what?” asked his friend, rather wonderingly; “tired of your life, or tired of your bread and butter, because the butter is too abundant? Oh, I see, we are just returned from town, where we met a young lady who——”
“Not at all; not that I didn’t meet a very nice girl——”
“You always do. If you went to Patagonia, you’d say, ‘’Pon my word I met a very nice girl there, considering—her hair wasn’t very greasy, she had good eyes and teeth, and her skin—her skins, I mean—had not such a bad odour when you got used to it.’ You’re such a very tolerant fellow.”
“You be hanged; but this Ellen Middleton really was a nice girl, capital figure, nice face, good expression you know, and reads—so few girls read at all nowadays.”
“I believe they read just as much as or more than ever; only when a fellow takes a girl for good and all, to last him for forty or fifty years, if he live so long, she’d need to be a very nice girl indeed, as you say.”
“Don’t talk in that utilitarian way; one would think you had no heart; but it does seem an awful risk, doesn’t it? Suppose one got taken in, as you do sometimes about horses ‘incurably lame,’ or ‘no heart,’ like that brute Bolivar I gave such a price for. What a splendid thing it would be if one were only a Turk, and could marry every year and believe one was acting most religiously and devoutly.”