Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/347



' is the place; stand still, my steed, let me review the scene!' Quite correct, this is the place, though so changed that I hardly recognise the homestead which I built when I 'took up the Run' still known as 'Squattlesea Mere,' so many a year ago. Can it be possible that half a century should have passed—fleeted by like a dream—as a tale that is told and that I should again stand here, looking at the work of my hands in that old time, whereof the memory is so fresh? The huts, the stock-yards, the cottage wherein we dwelt in peaceful contentment, nearly all are there, though much decayed and showing manifest signs of old Time—edax rerum—with his slow but sure attrition. The fruit trees in the garden, planted with my own hands, are of great age and size, and still bearing abundantly in a soil and climate so favourable to their growth. I find it almost impossible to realise that in June 1844, being then a stripling of eighteen, I should have established this 'lodge in the wilderness,' now developed into a fair-sized freehold, besides supporting a number of families in comfort and respectability on the selected portions.

Well do I remember the dark night when I reached this very spot, on a tired horse, having ridden from Grasmere on the Merrai that day, nearly fifty miles, without food for man or beast. The black marauders of the period held revel on a cape of the lava-bestrewn land which jutted out upon the marsh, near the Native Dog's Well. I had stumbled on to their camp, not seeing it until I was amid their dimly-burning fires. Relations were strained between us, and as they were then engaged in banqueting upon one of my milch cows (name Matilda), there is no saying what might have happened