Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/193

164 The first day after I got to Barladong we saw a string of equestrians, male and female, coming over the high narrow bridge, one of the ladies being mounted on a mare closely followed by a foal which had, as I afterwards learned, thus ambled forty miles in company with its parent. Our English eyes thought this sufficiently strange, but they were still more astonished when a neighbour drove up to our house in a "trap" with a foal running behind like an awkward overgrown puppy. Our experience of its vagaries did not tend to dispel the notion that we had brought from England that foals were best left at home; in fact, it seemed to us a case of too much being taken for granted on both sides, the master supposing that during his half-hour's visit to us the mare would feel it incumbent on her to look after the foal, whilst the foal, with a hypothesis of its own that there was plenty of time to spare, went making calls all round the town and looking into every farm-yard, in preference to remaining with its mother. When our visitor bade us farewell and we accompanied him to our slip-rail, where his trap was standing, to see him safely off, no foal was there; we were therefore compelled to send our man in search of the young vagabond, who found it, after an hour's chace, at the police barracks on the other side of the river.

I have already spoken of slip-rails as makeshifts consequent upon the scarcity of clever carpenters; but it sometimes happens that when one of the guild is forthcoming who can put a gate together, another obstacle arises from the difficulty of procuring hinges. In this case colonial invention supplies the place of a lower