Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/266

256 play and read and paint. Gwyneth could be happier resting there, where the freedom and freshness of the country are associated with tastes and accomplishments of city life; but she dare not; she will, as soon as possible, hide herself in the metropolis.

The three clear-eyed, round-cheeked specimens of rustic beauty "see her off" from the platform upon which, including storekeeper King of the township, with tall hat on side of head, all Gumford, from bank-manager and mad doctor to tramp and tinker, stand; and, in the "second-class ladies' compartment," midst bottles and babies, Gwyneth pursues her weary journey towards the distant seaboard.

Past deserted "flats" and "rushes" and "gullies," where maddened thousands once dug, where the crash of "cradles" exceeded the present roar of the train as it speeds through miles of half-filled graves of golden hopes; past the gardens into which, here and there, enterprising holders of "miners' rights" have transformed the ocean of mingling mullock heaps; through now civilized Quartzopolis, where oak and elm mingle strangely with gum and curragong,—casting pleasant shade and bright streaks of green across the city, greed-for-gold left so bare; past the roaring "stampers" treading out the yellow specks embedded in milk-white quartz: past "Poppet heads," where the ringing signal-stroke of metal on metal gives the word for earth's treasures to be hauled from two thousand feet below the roaring city; now rushing through the lonely "stations," whose sheep spread over pastures where millions of human beings might prosper; through the garden of the land, across Dividing Range where rain falls oft, and the black soil yields a richer harvest than all the gold-spangled rock left behind; on, ever on, screeching past sleepy platforms