Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/436

 Again the years have passed. The lurid, early goldfields are no more. Order reigns where crime and lawless violence once were rife. Handsome towns have succeeded to the crowded, squalid encampments where dwelt the fierce toilers for gold, the harpies, the camp-followers, the victims. I am seated in a commodious stage coach, which behind a well-bred team bowls along at a creditable pace over a well-kept, macadamised road. We are en route to Sandhurst, now a model town, with trees overshadowing the streets, a mayor and a corporation, gaols and hospitals, libraries and churches. Yet, as we pass Macedon, tales are told of mysterious disappearances of home-returning diggers, which recall my early association of brigands with the dark woods and lonely ravines.

'Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.' Shade of Mr. Cape, is the quotation correct, or are we doing dishonour to that great man's memory,—'building better than he knew,'—and the careful heed of quantities, inculcated by personal application to our feelings, in the days of heedless boyhood? Times have changed with a vengeance. Again in Melbourne! It is changed, I trow. Great, famous, rich, one of the known and quoted cities of the earth. We have helped to produce this triumph. But at what a price? Our youth has gone in the process. When we look at all the fine things that fill one's vision by day, by night, within its lofty halls, amid its crowded streets, we feel like the man in the old story, who for power and wealth sold himself to the Fiend. 'All that's very fine, my friend,' an unkind sprite whispers to us. 'You may or may not enjoy a part of this splendour, but you are not so young as you were. I won't mention the D in polite society, but the demon of Old Age will leave his card on you before long.'

Yes, we are still extant, not wholly invalided, in this year of grace 1884. Instead of sitting on the box of Cobb's coach in Bourke Street at 6, while the punctual Yankee driver is waiting for the Post-office clock to strike, my old friend and I, en route for his well-known hospitable home on the spurs of Macedon, enter a comfortable railway carriage at mid-day. As we are whirled luxuriously through the grassy, undulating downs and wide-stretching plains which surround Melbourne