Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/83

 of the long bare thoroughfare stood a red brick church (or more correctly speaking, the nave of one), which looked as if it had originally been intended to contain four or five hundred people. A blank arch constructed in the east wall gave token that the amateur designers had contemplated the addition of a chancel at some future date, to which the arch, when opened, would have formed the entrance. Apparently no sufficient increase of population had yet occurred to render this expansion of size advisable, neither had the tower, evidently required to complete the west end, yet been built, so that the nave stood alone, bearing a painful resemblance to a barn. There was not even a bell-gable to break the uniformity of the roof; but the congregation was called together by the ringing of a bell which hung in a tall gum-tree in the churchyard.

The parsonage was not far from the church, and stood in the middle of its own glebe field of nine acres, surrounded by straight rows of split posts and rails, after the hedgeless fashion of Australia. There seemed to be no regular entrance-gate into the field; but we found our way in by taking a couple of movable rails out of the notches made in two of the posts to facilitate their removal. This awkward contrivance is called a "slip rail," and is universally resorted to in all cases where the absence of carpenters of sufficient skill to manufacture proper gates renders some such substitute necessary. Such houses "over the hills" as are approached by neat and well-made gates gain almost as much importance from the fact as would, in England, be conferred by the possession of an entrance-lodge.