SOCIAL LIFE, SPORTS, AND RECREATIONS 253 



a lady's hand,* will grieve that he must spend the 

 Christmas day like a savage in the isolation of a bush- 

 man's hut, and will wonder whether the cousin he left 

 behind him in England is now letting another man make 

 love to her.f The more piously disposed will bethink 

 himself with anguish on a Sunday that he is fifty or a 

 hundred miles away from a church, and he reflects that 

 the religious sentiment itself soon disappears when the 

 ordinances that nurture and express it fall into abey- 

 ance. { Often the nostalgia is so strong that it drives 

 men back irresistibly to the old country, and even men 

 who have grown gray in the successful service of their 

 colonies return to spend the evening of their days amid 

 the scenes of their youth. 



The style of living on a " station " Sir George Bowen 

 saw to be much more advanced than that of the Homeric 

 Greeks. He was struck with the signs of luxury in the 

 squatters' houses. There these lords of broad acres lived 

 in patriarchal style, dispensing a patriarchal hospitality. 

 Their days were spent in the saddle, and 400 pastoral 

 centaurs escorted him to Warwick, as, twenty years 

 later, a like number of farmers escorted Mr. Gladstone 

 to Haddo House in Aberdeenshire. Their evenings were 

 spent in refined and cultured intercourse, in aesthetic 

 enjoyment, or in innocent pleasures. The picture is 

 idealised or too rose-coloured, and to one who, like 

 Mrs. Campbell Praed, grew up in that way of living it 

 contrasted sharply with the stern reality as she knew 

 it only too well. It was truer of the nearer than the 

 remoter stations. 



Very different pictures of station life might be drawn. 

 Take first the less favourable. The station is situated 

 500 miles up country, and that country of the dreariest 

 description. It stands amid the sandy plains of the 

 Condamine River, and into the weary souls of the dwellers 

 has entered the iron of those plains and of the brigalow 



* See poem in Sladen's Australian Anthology. 

 t A. E., Overlanding, pp. 65-7. 

 t HAYGAI.XH, op. cit. 



