The Anthology Of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction

Acknowledgements

Colonial Australian Romance Fiction

Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver

ROMANCE is generally taken to be a women’s genre, although, as this anthology shows, a number of colonial romances were also written by men: reminding us that what is at stake in this kind of writing has implications for both sexes. The central figure of the romance, however, is invariably the woman, or, in the case of many colonial Australian stories, the girl. Romance fiction always gives us a heroine of some kind who must make her way in the world, negotiating a future for herself through an often complex network of choices and distinctions to do not only with love and relationships but with social conventions, financial security and career destinations.

For colonial women writers in particular, the themes of romance fiction must have resonated with their own predicaments in a new country. Catherine Helen Spence migrated to Australia from Scotland at the age of fourteen, becoming a governess and then a school principal and developing a literary career in journalism that saw her work published both locally and in Britain. Her first novel, Clara Morison:A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever, was published anonymously in 1854. The native-born Louisa Atkinson published Gertrude the Emigrant—the first of six novels—in 1857. Like Spence, Atkinson immersed herself in the world of colonial print culture, contributing to a wide variety of newspapers and journals. Several of her novels were serialised in newly established colonial newspapers such as the Sydney Mail and the Illustrated Sydney News—in fact, colonial women writers frequently published their fiction in serialised form. Another colonial emigrant from Scotland, Catherine Martin, found work in South Australia as a teacher, journalist and bureaucrat. In her 1910 autobiography, Spence, who had known Martin well, recalled her impressions upon meeting her:

I at first thought her the daughter of a wealthy squatter of the southeast, but when I found she was a litterateur trying to make a living by her pen, bringing out a serial tale, ‘Bohemian Born’, and writing occasional articles, I drew to her at once. So long as the serial tale lasted she could hold her own; but no one can make a living at occasional articles in Australia, and she became a clerk in the Education Office, but still cultivated literature in her leisure hours.

Martin properly began her literary career in her forties when her first novel, An Australian Girl, was published anonymously in London in 1890, and reprinted the following year. It introduces Stella Courtland, who is indeed a wealthy pastoralist’s daughter and who is asked to choose between two very different potential husbands: a rich but uncultivated local Australian squatter, and a cultured English doctor who carries a ‘small brown volume of Moliere’ in his pocket. The novel was well received by the British and Australian newspapers, with one reviewer—from the Australasian Critic— identifying Stella as ‘the ideal woman of the future’. As we shall see, colonial romance provided a crucial site for the struggle over the model of womanhood that seemed best to express the aspirations of an emergent nation.

Colonial women writers could make a living from popular genres like romance because of the large numbers of newspapers, journals and publishers available to them in Australia as well as in Britain and the United States. Literary careers might also span a significant period of time. Mary Fortune contributed over 400 stories to Melbourne’s Australian Journal from the 1860s to the end of the century. Ada Cambridge’s many novels were serialised in the Australasian, the Australian Town and Country Journal, the Age and British newspapers such as the Manchester Weekly Times from the 1870s to the 1890s. A prolific colonial Australian novelist with an international reputation, Cambridge was often published simultaneously in Melbourne, London and New York. Jessie Couvreur, who published under the pseudonym ‘Tasma’, was another widely successful colonial novelist. The Pipers of Piper’s Hill was serialised in the Australasian in 1888 and then published (as Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill) the following year in London, New York and Leipzig, giving us a sense of the transnational reach some colonial writers could achieve. Couvreur’s reputation as a popular novelist was consolidated with the inclusion of several of her novels in series such as Heinemann’s Colonial Library of Popular Fiction and Edward Petherick’s extensive Collection of Favourite and Approved Authors. Petherick had managed Australian publisher George Robertson’s London office in the 1870s and went on to establish his own Colonial Booksellers’ Agency in Paternoster Row, effectively shaping colonial reading tastes in the 1880s and 1890s.

The most prolific colonial Australian woman novelist was Rosa Praed, the daughter of a prominent Queensland pastoralist and politician. Leaving Australia for London in 1876, Praed bypassed newspaper serialisation to publish her work with major British publishers such as Chapman and Hall and Richard Bentley, whose Colonial Library also published Marcus Clarke and Catherine Martin. Her first novel, An Australian Heroine (1880), was one of a number of colonial works that created a sense of what a nationally representative woman was, or should have been. The ‘Australian girl’ became something worth defining and investing in, not just in a local context but also in relation to empire and the metropolitan centres. Another prolific colonial Australian writer, Louise Mack, established her literary career locally (writing the ‘Woman’s Letter’ for the Bulletin, among other things) before moving to Britain where, penniless, she published An Australian Girl in London (1902) with Unwin’s Colonial Library. Mack went on to develop a successful career as a popular novelist, also working as a respected journalist and war correspondent who recounted her firsthand experience of the German invasion of Belgium in A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War (1915). A series of novels about Australian teenage girls during the 1890s drew on Mack’s experiences at Sydney Girls’ School, where she and Ethel Turner—who later wrote the bestselling novel Seven Little Australians (1894)—edited rival literary magazines. Both Mack and Turner invested their literary energies in cultivating a set of girlhood ideals that play themselves out in the framework of narratives about the trials of growing up in Australia and accepting the responsibilities of adulthood. In Mack’s Girls Together (1898), the heroine Lennie Leighton goes through exactly this process, which in fact works considerably to narrow both her expectations and her social range: ‘The exuberance of early girlhood, that can gather close to it whoever is nice enough and comes near, was settling down into a more restrained and limited and careful choice’.

The colonial investment in the Australian girl seemed to take two very different directions. Alongside these narratives of social restraint and maturity—no doubt reflecting a more sober sense of the developing nation—was a series of more romantic incarnations of colonial femininity that emphasised freedom and possibility in the New World. This kind of emphasis could play itself out in the framework of empire as a way of distinguishing fresher Australian qualities from those of the less adventurous English. Rosa Praed’s rallying essay ‘A Daughter of Greater Britain’ (1899) was published in the London-based Girl’s Realm, a magazine that celebrated new kinds of femininity in England and her colonies. Here, she maps out a set of creative possibilities for the Australian girl, giving her a sense of moral and aesthetic purpose that is bound to empire even as it surpasses it:

If the Australian girl who aspires to be a novelist, poet or painter, would seek inspiration in her own forests, among the weird gum-trees and the giant chasms which suggest cataclysms of a pre-historic Titanic period; if she would listen to the voices of her own woods and streams, allow her imagination to be thrilled by the strange glamour of the Bush; commune with her own nurse, Nature—then she might become the pioneer in an entirely new intellectual region, and give the world a type of woman-worker, at once feminine and vigorous, practical and poetic, such as no other country has yet produced.

In Praed’s story in this anthology, ‘The Bushman’s Love Story’, the Australian girl is again an idealised object whose appearance in London brings with it a kind of redemption. For one of the besotted Australian men, she is ‘a model of what a woman ought to be’: capable, determined and self-possessed:

Whoever else goes under, she will always come out on top. And not a bit because she sticks out for what she supposes are her rights. She don’t care about rights … There’s nothing she can’t do—ride as well as any stockman, sit a buckjumper and cut out a scrubber on a cattle camp. And she can cook a dinner that you’d enjoy eating, and make her frocks—and look stunning in them too. And as for brains. Why, she’s taken her M.A. degree in Sydney University, and now she’s training herself to deal with the Woman Question …

This is, of course, a colonial man’s view of the Australian girl. It works to keep her in her traditionally feminine place (cooking, making dresses) while acknowledging, although placing limits upon, her nascent feminism (she is dealing with the ‘Woman Question’ but ‘She don’t care about rights’). Praed’s story in fact shows two men debating the nature of the Australian girl, revealing some level of anxiety about just how politically progressive she might be, or become. In these accounts, she is both affiliated to and distinguished from the European and American figure of the New Woman, a character type who represented emergent fin de siècle feminism and freedom of sexual expression. For example, the Australian girl is not tied to the broader suffrage movement, which was sometimes ridiculed in the colonial news-papers; in colonial romance fiction she is instead an individualised figure, and sometimes surprisingly solitary, travelling and arriving alone, as in Mura Leigh’s ‘A Romance of Coma’ or Tasma’s ‘Barren Love’. The Australian girl may be what Praed called a ‘type of woman-worker’, but in colonial romance this, too, can be feminised, as we see in Letty Kemp’s bee keeping and honey gathering in Ada Cambridge’s ‘A Sweet Day’, tasks that demonstrate her ‘pure health’ and ‘absence of self-consciousness’ to the Englishman who watches her—and falls in love with her.

Several stories in this anthology in fact show Englishmen finding themselves drawn to Australian women precisely because they seem so refreshingly different. In Francis Adams’ ‘A Bush Girl’, a young Englishman thinks that Australian girls are ‘all very thin and insubstantial’, but then he comes to reassess his view, finding beauty in one bush girl’s ‘untutored grace’—although things don’t quite go his way. The question of just how educated the Australian girl might need to be—whether or not it is a virtue to be ‘untutored’, for example—also inhabits some of the stories in this anthology. The Melbourne writer Ethel Castilla, whose story ‘The Red Kangaroo’ is collected here, is best remembered for her turn-of-the-century poem ‘The Australian Girl’ (1900), a tribute to an ideal colonial female type who negotiates a delicate path between book learning and the sheer joy of living, experience and innocence, boldness and restraint:

She has a beauty of her own,

A beauty of a paler tone

Than English belles.

The Southern sun and Southern air

Have kissed her cheeks until they wear

The dainty tints that oft appear

On rosy shells.

Her frank, clear eyes bespeak a mind

Old-world traditions fail to bind.

She is not shy

Or bold, but simply self-possessed;

Her independence adds a zest

Unto her speech, her piquant jest,

Her quaint reply.

O’er classic volumes she will pore

With joy; and some scholastic lore

Will often gain. In sports she bears away the bell,

Nor under music’s siren spell

To dance divinely, flirt as well,

Does she disdain.

Here, the Australian girl is distanced from the Old World even as she relishes its ‘classics’ and learns from them. The key point in this rallying cry for the colonial woman seems to be that she is not naive: independence and self-possession are once again the primary virtues. But she is not decadent either, and her ‘healthiness’ and liveliness also set her apart from the darker side of fin de siècle femininity. Some of the stories in this anthology bear this out. But in others, a more worldly and judgemental femininity makes itself apparent. Kathleen Caffyn’s wonderful story ‘Victims of Circe’ gives us an older, more experienced and reflective female narrator, Mrs Vallings, who caustically observes the younger romances that flourish around her. Her account of the newly arrived Miss Ariell captures a shift in perspective from Australian girlhood innocence (‘She was fresh to look at …’) to an almost sinister worldliness that threatens to destabilise the colonial social scene. Female romantic experience here is a mixed blessing, bringing insight and wisdom but also melancholy and regret. Nevertheless, Mrs Vallings is still invested in the redemptive powers of colonial girlish innocence:

If you want to punish a woman of the world,—not an evil or befouled one, but just a woman bent on the vanities and trifles and follies of a worldly life,—put her, just for a little half-hour in the evening, when the heart is soft and the trappings stripped from her soul, under the straight gaze of two sweet, pure, proud young maidens, and you may be quite sure your punishment will follow.

Other stories in this anthology trace the movement from innocence to experience for colonial women, sometimes with extreme consequences: as with the heroine in Francis Adams’ ‘Miss Jackson’ whose shipboard love affair makes her seem ‘like a rose-bud that had bloomed out into a rose’, but who becomes a troubled and then defiant figure when she is rejected. Several stories focus on solitary women as they emigrate to Australia, the journey itself either offering romantic possibilities or charting something darker, a process of corruption and loss. In Tasma’s ‘Barren Love’, Miss Leighton is the unexpected object of a cynical man’s affections as they sail towards Australia, and finds that the course of her life changes substantially as a result of their encounter. In the earliest story in this anthology, ‘The Desolate Homestead’, a young wife is seduced as she emigrates to Australia. This is a story that links romance to the making of a new home, to settlement, and for this to flourish, it seems to suggest, a certain amount of female innocence needs to be preserved. But when innocence is lost the hope for a prosperous colonial future evaporates, the young couple’s homestead ‘rapidly succumbing to neglect and decay’.

Homemaking is a central theme of colonial Australian romance, giving expression to everyday aspects of colonial social life as well as reflecting on the prevailing ideologies of settlement and nation building. We might think that romance is a frivolous and conservative genre, realising the aspirations of its heroines and achieving happy endings. The short-lived periodical Romance: The Australian Fiction Magazine (1922–23) gave precisely this view when it reassured its readers that it would ‘aim to eliminate from our pages all that is morbid and unhealthy. It is our policy to reflect the happy circumstance of life’. But in colonial romance, the circumstances of home life and settlement are often afflicted with trauma and discomfort, separation and loss, as we see in ‘The Desolate Homestead’. Similarly, JS Borlase’s ‘Twelve Miles Broad’ is a Christmas story that interrupts its promise of happiness and celebration with a series of menacing events. The daughter of a German vigneron makes the narrator welcome, but the arrival of a tramp undoes the geniality of the scene and colonial traditions of hospitality come unstuck, with devastating consequences. Romance and homemaking happen in this story but at a price, as if, no matter where they might establish themselves, colonial homemakers are always shadowed by death and guilt. In Mura Leigh’s delightful ‘A Romance of Coma’, Mary Guthrie’s arrival in a country town as the new postmistress has a kind of romantic effect on the inhabitants and turns the post office itself into a ‘gay and fragrant’ place. It seems as if the genre itself encourages hospitality and sociability, with characters stepping outside their customary roles and habits under Mary’s benign influence. But even here, the romance is fragile and short-lived, flourishing only for a moment before it gives way to a more practical outcome.

The romance genre can indeed be a matter of fleeting moments and seemingly arbitrary choices. In Mrs Patchett Martin’s ‘Cross Currents’, a young woman, Alma Belmont, impulsively marries ‘one of those gentlemanly and agreeable ne’er-do-weels whom other men characterise as no man’s enemy but his own’. The story has no interest in the marriage itself, however; instead, it puts Alma into a series of extramarital social situations, each of which draws out new romantic possibilities for her. This curious narrative plays itself out at the edges of conventional married life, as Alma Belmont travels alone from one situation to another and deals with her predicaments as best as she can. Mrs Armitage, in Mabel Forrest’s ‘The Housekeeper’, is another solitary woman with a past history that is difficult to determine. Like Alma Belmont, her domestic status is unstable: she brings order and civility to Frank Fort’s rural household, but she is also an unsettling object of desire for Fort and his friend, Percival O’Dowd. Although declared bachelors, Fort and O’Dowd find themselves caught up in thoughts of romance and marriage, with a young local girl, Rosie Glanvers, competing with the housekeeper for Fort’s affections. The story draws a contrast between these two women that is typical of the romance genre, with Mrs Armitage’s calculating worldliness at one point figuring in O’Dowd’s imagination as menacing and predatory: ‘He pictured Rosie as a little white lamb astray in the forest, with a sleek wild creature following her up from tree to tree, never showing itself in the light, but stealing gradually nearer—nearer …’ Eventually, a distinction is made in the story between those for whom homemaking and marriage come easily and those who find themselves on the outskirts of the romance genre, ‘on the wallaby again’ and solitary once more.

Colonial romance gives us a space in which various kinds of Australian femininity vie for recognition, some more overtly than others. Some of the stories in this anthology are about feminine deceptions and concealments—and disappointments—while others show a femininity that is beautifully transparent and reconciled. EW Hornung’s ‘The Larrikin of Diamond Creek’ begins in ‘idyllic’ Heidelberg, in Melbourne, where an English curate, Charles Caradoc, is held up at gunpoint by what seems to be a rather ‘pitiful’ young man. This is literally a story about feminine concealment that recalls other cross-dressing women in colonial narratives, like Nosey Alf in Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903) or the troubled young protagonist in Tasma’s ‘Monsieur Caloche’ (1890). Inexplicably drawn to the young ‘larrikin’, Caradoc rescues her from an abusive father and—with the help of the archdeacon, ‘the most sympathetic of men’—offers her the sanctuary of a paternalistic church and, eventually, marriage. Of course, in the romance genre marriage is often a woman’s final destination, a welcome refuge from the fortunes and trials of the world. But it can also be a matter of complex transactions, where women are called upon to play a more steadfast role, working hard to secure family wealth and preserve inheritances. FE Forrester’s ‘Lorna Travis’ is another Christmas story, this time taking place in the affluent Melbourne suburb of Toorak. The Travis family are already well established, able to offer their children a comfortable colonial future. But even here, fortunes can be precarious and the family’s close-knit world is suddenly vulnerable to charlatans and opportunists. This is a story about sisters and wives, where the Travis household—like the post office in ‘A Romance of Coma’—is turned into a feminine space, with its ‘floral decorations’ and so on. But the fortunes of the household also rely on men buying up shares and investing money. Romance is a ‘feminine’ genre that is nevertheless always implicated in cash flow and property, with marriage often either complicated or facilitated by financial transactions and the consequences of profit and loss.

In Alice Grant Rosman’s story ‘A Book of Verses’, Richard Branch’s up-country property requires his immediate attention since, as he unromantically notes, ‘economy is at the bottom of most things in the world’. His wife Hester remains in Melbourne and finds herself drawn to her absent husband’s study and book collection, in particular his copy of Edward Fitzgerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. A romance develops out of their correspondence over the poems, as the story negotiates a path between economic management, the ordinary duties of domestic life, and love. ‘A Book of Verses’ gives the woman a modest role in the sustaining of colonial property ownership and marital wellbeing. But in Rosa Praed’s ‘The Bushman’s Love Story’, the accomplished and independent Theodora Swifte in fact directly intervenes in the fortunes of colonial station life. The bushman himself is an abject and alienated figure, with archaic views about women and a history of loss and disappointment. Theodora, on the other hand, is able to pull the story back into a different space altogether, one that is more idealised and optimistic: tying marriage and good property management together to offer the bushman the possibility of some future prosperity.

The bushman in Praed’s story reminds the narrator ‘of a person in one of Lawson’s stories, who in the midst of a vituperative attack on things Australian, had waxed silent and afterwards sentimental …’There are two stories by Henry Lawson in this anthology, both of which touch the romance genre and infuse it with a sense of disillusionment and melancholy. In ‘An Unfinished Love Story’, Brook revisits his family’s old selection and becomes involved with the tenant’s niece, Lizzie. The story aspires towards romance at various points but offers something much harsher as the character types—passive girl, aggressive man—fail to meet the ideals of the genre. The brief sketch ‘A Love Story’ reveals a bushman’s melancholy perspective on this kind of failure, with romance operating as a lost opportunity for men who remain distanced from it but sentimentally attached to what might have been.

Colonial romance is as much about the distance between men and women as it is about their closeness and intimacy. Sometimes men can seem to be on the edges of the genre, not quite able to adapt to its principles and follow them through. In Adams’ ‘A Bush Girl’ and Forrest’s ‘The Housekeeper’ men are rejected by women, causing them to leave the frame of the story altogether. Elsewhere, men are put to the test and found wanting. In Ethel Castilla’s ‘The Red Kangaroo’, a young governess, Crystal Wilton, gets a squatter’s son to promise to kill a rare red kangaroo during a hunt. But the story refuses to make the young man heroic, while the governess herself never gains the full approval of his family. In Mrs Mannington Caffyn’s ‘Victims of Circe’, the worldly Mrs Vallings has a much more jaundiced view of colonial men, or rather, late colonial men—as if, by the time of this romance, the early promise of colonial masculinity has faded:

One wonders where all the grit, and the courage, and the adventure, and marvellous strength and patience and self-sacrifice of the magnificent old pioneers of this nation have vanished to. They don’t reappear in the sons, seemingly. Could these qualities have worn themselves threadbare, from the very force and strength and vigour of them, in one generation—fail, as it were, through their own greatness? It is to be hoped not.

Douglas Sladen’s ‘The Inside Station’ also stages this generational shift when a long-settled household suddenly finds itself threatened by a group of Aborigines. The station manager and overseer casually refuse to see the danger, leaving a young woman, Kit, to think of her absent father as ‘a better bushman’ than the men around her. A visiting Englishman, John Forest, is also ridiculed by the others. But when the household is attacked and its inhabitants massacred, the story comes to value his resourceful model of masculinity over theirs and allows him to fit the archetype of romantic hero. ‘The Inside Station’ is another colonial romance that tests its characters’ masculinity, enabling its romantic narrative to flourish only when the older traditions of male colonial strength and capability are recovered. Until that point, Kit’s proper femininity is repressed: as she goes into hiding with John, she repeatedly (and coyly) tells him to ‘regard me simply as a man’. This is the only story in the anthology that explicitly connects its romance to a brutal unleashing of colonial racist violence. In the wake of this violence, Kit’s femininity is at last able to manifest itself, as if the Australian girl is born at a moment after settlement, when colonial masculinity has done its job (albeit belatedly) and the settler domination of the bush is once again secure.

‘Hal’

The Desolate Homestead

1866

IN a certain part of the Australian bush, not a great many miles up the country, the traveller’s notice has been frequently attracted by some acres of enclosed land with a ruinous habitation standing in the midst, the soil uncultivated, the dwelling deserted. The latter, comprising two compartments, is built of large slabs and roofed with shingles; it has been tenantless for years, and is rapidly succumbing to neglect and decay. Some travellers of inquiring mind have had their curiosity somewhat excited by the desolate aspect of affairs, and turning their unwilling steeds from the beaten track, have sought a closer inspection. They can then perceive that the ground nearest to the house had been originally laid out for a garden, although at present displaying no choicer flowers than nettles. Looking through a broken window, they can also see that the rooms have once been plastered and white-washed, that the front compartment has a wooden flooring, and that the back division has been evidently intended for culinary purposes. The ruins of a dairy can likewise be distinguished. No one has ever yet attempted to seek an entrance into this forlorn domicile, although the rusty padlock on the door betokens no formidable obstacles. Most decidedly a slight vein of superstition meanders through the mind of the sturdy bushman, creating a tendency to not altogether discredit tales told by the red camp fire, concerning certain spectres of lonely shepherds who, scorning the consequences of felo de-se or victims of melancholia, had adopted hanging as a remedy for their loneliness. At all events, if superstition rendered the rusty padlock sacred in their eyes, they would have considered scruples of that nature tolerably well grounded, for at the furthest extremity of what had once been the garden, was a lonely grave securely enclosed by strong, close paling. There was no headstone, but a low wooden cross claimed the respect due to mankind’s last asylum.

A sad and mournful spectacle it was, indeed, and as a mournful requiem in a minor key was constantly kept up by two melancholy mourners in the shape of a couple of aged she-oaks that vegetated at a short distance, the visitor seldom felt any inclination to linger, and, perhaps, retreated at a slightly accelerated pace.

I have seen what I describe more than once, and being impressed by it, happened a short time since, whilst travelling in quite another part of the country, to mention this lonely scene to one of my companions; to my surprise I found that he was no stranger to it or its history. There being, he said, no one now living who could be injured by the tale being told, he would, if I wished, give me the particulars connected with the place. I should not find it easy to forget what he told me, so can now present the tale to the reader as ‘’twas told to me.’

Many years ago the estate was purchased by one Mark Stanford, a man at that time between thirty and forty. A gentleman in the true sense of the term, well brought up and educated, but who, being a big, burly, powerful fellow, preferred the axe to the pen and ledger, wherewith his father had made and lost an ample fortune with the wrecks (by the bye, this is occasionally another word for a tidy little capital) of which Mark left Old England to seek his fortune in another hemisphere. He could not afford to hire many hands to assist him in forming his bush home, but a couple of men were engaged and set to work to enclose his purchase, whilst he himself and a fellow shipmate, named Frederick Gordon, commenced building a substantial dwelling house.

Gordon, although possessed of no claim on the purchase, was eventually to have an equal share of the profits in return for his personal assistance. They had, moreover, formed for each other a strong and lasting friendship.

During the period employed in erecting their future home they occupied one of two small mud huts, the other sheltering the men. Through all their discomforts, and they had many, through all the miseries of the rainy season, Mark was sustained and invigorated by one strong incentive to endurance and energy, and that was the all powerful one—Love.

Fred Gordon well remembered the little figure that came on board with Mark; for not having any one to take leave of himself, he had had leisure to observe the different groups that usually crowd the deck on such occasions, and he had been particularly struck by the beautiful face, all white and tearless, that leaned on Mark’s broad chest; and his kind heart had ached for her when he saw her sitting in the stern of the boat that conveyed her to land, her eyes straining to keep the beloved one in their gaze; and he remembered, too, how Mark came to where he was leaning over the side of the vessel, and struck, perhaps, by the expression of sympathy in the other’s face, had pressed his hand hard with the words ‘my wife,’ and then, turning again to look down upon the sorrowing woman beneath them, murmured to himself ‘God keep her.’

Yes, Mark had a young wife in England, and when his Australian home was ready she was to come out to him. No wonder he worked with a good will.

He often spoke of her to Fred, telling him how clever she was, yet so gentle and domestic, and how she would enjoy bush life when once used to it; the poultry he would buy, the flower garden he would stock, the colt he would break in for her. Of course she would have but to superintend; her pretty hands must not be spoilt, for she was a delicate little lady he said. In fact, he was ever thinking what he could do for her benefit and pleasure.

Although nature had formed him in one of her big, rough, yet handsome models, she left the moulding of his heart to the gentle hands of angels; and they, fashioning it after their kind, had built a tabernacle within wherein religion and charity dwelt together, and night and morning his lips moved in prayer for the wife sixteen thousand miles apart from him.

A year past, and things, though far from complete, were in a fair way of becoming so. The house was finished, the garden looked promising, a neat little dairy had been erected, and a married couple hired. Mark could wait no longer, and wrote home for his wife to join him.

Toward the close of a summer day, late in August, great preparations were going on in a pretty little cottage at Brompton, the passage of the said cottage teemed with ship-traps in the shape of various trunks, hard bundles, et cetera, all corded and labeled with the information that they belonged to Mrs. Stanford, and that she was to be a cabin-passenger on board the ‘Adelaide,’ bound for Port Phillip. In the parlour, seated at a tea-table, were two ladies, one middle-aged, the other quite young, and very pretty; the latter was Mrs. Stanford, and this was her last night on shore—she was to go down to Gravesend the first thing in the morning, and from thence embark. She was now taking a ‘farewell-tea’ with the lady who owned the cottage, and who had been very kind to the young wife. Her occasional protections had been very needful, moreover, for Mrs. Stanford had few friends, and no relations, and left alone so young and pretty, she had not been without the annoyances these qualifications frequently entail upon their possessor if left without a natural protector. But she was now in the highest spirits, and talking volubly to her companion about her husband and her delight at going to him. Her joy was checked occasionally, as her friend, who had learnt to love the simple girl, wiped the tears from her eyes; but it soon recovered its tone—she had other reasons for her delight besides the joy of rejoining her husband.

She had found out the danger of being separated from him.

Admirers had not been wanting, or backward; and although she haughtily repulsed any attempted intrusion, still all her care could not shield her from annoying encounters during her walks, and occasionally hearing words of passion and admiration. She could not always have someone with her, and in the pretty gardens at Kensington, she had met one who had hovered about her ever since—one very dangerous for a woman to meet too often, and well armed with manly beauty. She had but once met his eyes, yet they haunted her ever since, and a strange sensation of fear mingled with her proper feeling of aversion; and truly glad was she that Mark, ‘dear old Mark,’ had written for her.

The next day she was seated in her cabin, with her kind friend’s hand in hers, there were embraces, tears, parting words, and then she was alone, watching the waves through the cabin-window. For two days she was very ill, but when that period had elapsed, she felt in better health than ever, and prepared to go on deck. As she put her foot on the last step of the companion-ladder, an arm was extended to assist her on to the poop; raising her head to thank the owner, she encountered the gaze of a pair of well-remembered eyes, belonging to no less a person than the gentleman whose persevering pursuit had so harassed her in London. She read astonishment and pleasure in his look, and then coldly turned from him,