The mail did not come the day it was due. It was due on three days a week, and Saturday was one of them. The local river was in flood, and, although they could still cross the bridge, there was a nasty billabong or backwater this side of it, up which it flowed, very swift and silent. It was simple enough to look at-just a smooth, swift-flowing, muddy drain-from the bank; but crossing might have been an awkward job.
That was clearly why the mail-man did not arrive on Saturday. He must have decided it was not good enough to cross. The billabong had subsided on Sunday, and then the mail-man came out.
The " mail-coach" was a sulky-that is to say, a light vehicle with two wheels and one horse, the commonest sort of trap in Australian towns. Back in the bush they favour buggies rather than sulkies, partly because, having four wheels, a buggy is less liable to be upset by bumping into a stump. However, the contractor for His Majesty"s mail on these small circuits does not necessarily run even to a buggy; we more than once found that the advertised coachwas a sulky.
The coach came out on Sunday, and in it was a boy of ten, or perhaps twelve-he looked about six. It was he who had decided it was not worth while chancing the billabong the day before, and had put it off for the day. The local races were on-probably he spent the afternoon there instead. He was the mail-man.
Drawn by Allan T.Bernaldo
"The mail-coach was a sulky."
Many of the youngsters along the Darling bank had not seen much more of the world than this; and they might seem a little simple in the superficial lore of the cities. But they could tell you how the snakes and the birds and the rabbits live, how the spiders are marked and where they are to be found. They could teach the city man for a month things in which he is a babe. And, if they have to go without the influence of great teachers in the schools, yet there are sometimes men in the back country who have seen other days and other places, men who, out of an experience that has oftener been wide than happy, can teach the youngster at their feet to make of life perhaps a better success than they themselves have made of it. I know one man of some distinction, whose early life was spent in a lonely little town, where, apart from the efforts of one harassed schoolmaster, he enjoyed only the teaching of two old employees of his father. For hours together, as they worked, they would give him the best they could of their own considerable knowledge; and it was that masterful instruction which equipped him for his success in the world.
They say that in these days the rabbit is responsible for a certain amount of truancy in the bush towns. Rabbits are so easy to shoot and trap, and the price of them for export to the cities and to England has been so good, that there have been boys who have been inclined to skip school for the sakeof making 30s. to ￡2 a week by rabbiting, and so run rather wild.
For the average bush boy rabbiting affords a valuable training in shooting. He practically always owns a pea-rifle. On many stations it is customary to allow the sons of station hands a cartridge for every rabbit scalp, and the boy will try as far as possible to keep himself in cartridges in this way.
The bush boy can always ride with that peculiar ease which makes him look a part of his horse-an ease which it seems almost impossible for those who learn later in life to attain. Also his eyes are trained so that in some cases, looking down across the plain, he can see a fence when to a city man it is actually invisible. He can see wallabies or rabbits or plain turkeys in the paddock when the ordinary man cannot pick them out from their background; he can make out distant sheep where the city boy would say there were none.
C. E. W. Bean, in The "Dreadnought" of the DarlingAuthor.-C. E. W. Bean, M.A., author and journalist, was born in New South Wales in 1879. At the outbreak of the Great War, he was appointed official war correspondent for the Commonwealth, and was attached to headquarters staff in Gallipoli and France. On his return, Captain Bean edited the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914- 1918. Previously he had written On the Wool Track, The Dreadnought of theDarling, and Flag-ships Three.
General Notes.-What is the difference between buggies and sulkies? How far does the Riverina extend? Explain "The superficial lore of the cities." Have a class debate on the question " Does the city boy know more than the country boy?"