Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/197

168 to the young colonists, owing to their habit of never passing a wattle-tree without putting a piece into their mouth.

I think it is Washington Irving who conceives butchers' boys to be the only existing type of the once famous knights-errant; a reflection forced upon him from the flying pace with which the young apprentices, meat-basket on arm, dash along the roads; but had he only extended his travels to Western Australia, he would certainly not have thought the order of headlong riders so near extinction as he had supposed. All home ideas about saving a horse's feet are set at defiance, a hand gallop on the hard road being the approved rate of speed; and the excitement of the pace seems to constitute the sole enjoyment of riding, for of any pleasure to be derived from scenery the colonists appeared to me to have little idea, which I attributed in part to the habit they have naturally acquired of regarding the bush as something to be cleared away and got rid of. It would, perhaps, be more difficult to account for the almost total exemption of their horses from spavin. We did, however, find in one young settler an exception to the nil admirari school, and the pleasure of a ride which we once took with him was not a little enhanced by the rarity of meeting a third person to whom we might express our pleasure when we saw anything beautiful with the certainty of receiving a sympathizing answer. This ride was taken shortly before the season for sheepwashing, in October, when the bush was green with grass, and water was lying in the still deep pools in the rocky beds of the gullies. There was no path, nor could my unpractised eyes discover any