Page:Old Melbourne Memories.djvu/193

 colt— "Chilleno" by name, own brother to my best hack "The Gaucha"—I can't forgive that one.

On my way out and back—it was some four or five days' ride—I stayed at various stations. It was de règle in those days, and I don't know a pleasanter ending to a day's ride than meeting a hospitable squatter in his own house. You have had just work enough to tire you reasonably, to make you enjoy a cheerful meal, some fresh unstudied talk (people are twice as confidential in the bush, even with strangers, as they are in town), a smoke in the verandah, and the sound, peaceful sleep that follows all. Then the awakening in the lovely fresh bush air, winter or summer, the feeling is ennobling, invigorating. As he fills his lungs and expands his breast therewith the wayfarer feels a better and wiser man. Old Mr. Robertson, a Scottish settler, had a lovely station on the Wannon. To his homestead travellers chiefly gravitated for reasons which he summarised somewhat plainly on one occasion.

"Don't think I believe you come to see old Robertson," he said. "In the summer it's the fruit that fetches you, and in the winter Mary's jam." Now, Miss Robertson's preserves and conserves were the admiration of the whole district, while the orchard in the season was a marvel for fruit of every kind and sort.

I wish I could show those good people and certain conceited gardeners who persist in pruning and cutting every lower limb of their fruit trees, the orchard at Wando Vale, as in those days. Great umbrageous apple trees with long lateral branches trailing on the ground, covered with fruit of the finest size and quality.