This eBook was produced by Pat Castevens
and David Widger
The stage-scene has dropped. Settle yourselves, my good audience; chateach with his neighbor. Dear madam in the boxes, take up your opera-glass and look about you. Treat Tom and pretty Sal to some of thosefine oranges, O thou happy-looking mother in the two-shilling gallery!Yes, brave 'prentice-boys in the tier above, the cat-call by all means!And you, "most potent, grave, and reverend signiors" in the front row ofthe pit, practised critics and steady old playgoers, who shake yourheads at new actors and playwrights, and, true to the creed of youryouth (for the which all honor to you!), firmly believe that we areshorter by the head than those giants our grandfathers,—laugh or scoldas you will, while the drop-scene still shuts out the stage. It is justthat you should all amuse yourselves in your own way, O spectators! forthe interval is long. All the actors have to change their dresses; allthe scene-shifters are at work sliding the "sides" of a new world intotheir grooves; and in high disdain of all unity of time, as of place,you will see in the play-bills that there is a great demand on yourbelief. You are called upon to suppose that we are older by five yearsthan when you last saw us "fret our hour upon the stage." Five years!the author tells us especially to humor the belief by letting the drop-scene linger longer than usual between the lamps and the stage.
Play up, O ye fiddles and kettle-drums! the time is elapsed. Stop thatcat-call, young gentleman; heads down in the pit there! Now theflourish is over, the scene draws up: look before.
A bright, clear, transparent atmosphere,—bright as that of the East,but vigorous and bracing as the air of the North; a broad and fairriver, rolling through wide grassy plains; yonder, far in the distance,stretch away vast forests of evergreen, and gentle slopes break the lineof the cloudless horizon. See the pastures, Arcadian with sheep inhundreds and thousands,—Thyrsis and Menalcas would have had hard laborto count them, and small time, I fear, for singing songs about Daphne.But, alas! Daphnes are rare; no nymphs with garlands and crooks tripover those pastures.
Turn your eyes to the right, nearer the river; just parted by a lowfence from the thirty acres or so that are farmed for amusement orconvenience, not for profit,—that comes from the sheep,—you catch aglimpse of a garden. Look not so scornfully at the primitivehorticulture: such gardens are rare in the Bush. I doubt if the statelyKing of the Peak ever more rejoiced in the famous conservatory, throughwhich you may drive in your carriage, than do the sons of the Bush inthe herbs and blossoms which taste and breathe of the old fatherland.Go on, and behold the palace of the patriarchs,—it is of wood, I grantyou; but the house we build with our own hands is always a palace. Didyou ever build one when you were a boy? And the lords of that palaceare lords of the land almost as far as you can see, and of thosenumberless flocks; and, better still, of a health which an antediluvianmight have envied, and of nerves so seasoned with horse-breaking,cattle-driving, fighting with wild blacks,—chases from them and afterthem, for life and for death,—that if any passion vex the breast ofthose kings of the Bushland, fear at least is erased from the list.
See here and there through the landscape rude huts like the masters':wild spirits and fierce dwell within. But they are tamed into order byplenty and hope; by the hand open but firm, by the eye keen but just.
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