Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/410



æsthetic pioneer who bestowed this romantic name upon the New England village between Tamworth and Uralla probably realised a hazy similarity. Yet roses must have been few and far between, eminently suitable as are soil and climate; and the nightingale awaits the millennium of acclimatisers. The sparrow—wastrel of Europe that he is—doth first appear. The clear stream of the Macdonald, winding through the green hill-encircled valley, renders the comparison faintly apposite. On the whole, the name of Bendemeer will sound as well to our federal successors as Curra-wohbo-lah or Murra-munga-myne; and if it sets young Australia to reading Lalla Rookh, it may act as a counterpoise to overmuch devotion to wool and horse-racing may even tend to the cult which emollit mores.

These slight incongruities notwithstanding, I would counsel any Australian Beckford, in want of a site for the antipodean Fonthill, to realise the poet's dream in the vale of Bendemeer (Great Northern Railway line, New South Wales), and so immortalise himself in the minds of generations of grateful compatriots.

As I stand in front of the little hostelry in the sweet moonrise of this summer night and gaze around, my heart sympathises with the unknown sentimental sponsor. I feel constrained to admit that he had the true poetic insight, piercing the measureless spaces of the future—