Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/262

252 whose infrequent traffic resounds through the world of gums, three miles away. New Hampstead—now styled Gumford—scorning the older, whose very name it cast off, seeking a lustre of its own, revels in all the luxury of two trains a day, and all the township turned out to interview them!

No "Cobb and Co." rattles now along the "straight-run" into the deserted township of Hampstead, with its one length of "macadamized" swept clean by rain and wind. No bushranger, or strange suspected character, flings now, as of old, from his horse at the shanty—once famed hostelry—and, casting down "a fiver," demands "drinks all round." No camp of blacks obtrudes itself amongst the wattle-boughs beside the sinuous, high-banked stream. The Australian "Auburn" lives alone on the memories of halycon bygone days, of which, in the long summer evening, a handful of fossilized fogies tell, beneath the once-animated verandah.

Across the long bridge at Gumford Gwyneth passed. A timorous glance she cast at the camp of nomad nonentities that ever sprawls and holds high conclave beside the friendly piers. That sacred fire, around which grizzled beards of the bush, smooth chins from the city are gathered, is never suffered to die out. Ere one weary tramp, or party of aimless wanderers, leaves the rendezvous, another old sinner from the stations, or youngster from town, not yet carrying swag as though part of him, takes up the vacated position and piles high the never-failing logs.