SOCIAL LIFE, SPORTS, AND RECREATIONS 251 



or for rowing by the willows, or for high resolve, for the 

 clearer vision or the sudden illumination, which does not 

 last.* Neither the vision nor the life could last. The 

 world has to be faced and fought with, its chagrins and 

 disappointments experienced, and its bitter disenchant- 

 ments undergone. Lady Barker, bright and happy soul 

 though she was, and Mrs. Campbell Praed, though fame 

 was to come to her, were to see the darker sides of life 

 and know something of its woe. Rolf Boldrewood, 

 who writes of pioneer station-life in lyrical strains, was 

 to find his reminiscences of it, even financially, the most 

 lucrative portion of his experiences, and Henry Kingsley, 

 who has been censured for describing station-life as " a 

 prolonged picnic," was to know dark reverses of fortune. 

 They but repeated, with much assuagement, the vicissi- 

 tudes of the most tried of Oriental patriarchs. Let «8 

 hope that, like him, they were able to justify the ways 

 of God to man in their persons and retain their faith 

 through sorrow and calamity. Those bright early days, 

 in Australia as in Chaldsea, in New Zealand as in Sicily, 

 were the days of youth, and could no more endure than 

 the youth of Tithonus.f 



The arch-opponent of the squatters, Dr. Lang, asserted 

 that very few of the squatters in the forties were married. 

 How could they be 1 we may ask. What woman, fit 

 to be a helpmeet for such men as many of them were, 

 would consent to share such an existence ? Who would 

 in^^te gently reared women to come into such solitudes, 

 where many of the necessaries and almost all the luxuries 

 of life were denied them, where dangers to health and 

 life were to be encountered ? He adds — and the state- 

 ment is the key to the other — that very few of them 

 possessed the fee-simple in a single acre of the land they 

 occupied. That was it : even their tenure of their com- 

 fortless homes and their toilsome stations was insecure. 



Yet Lang's assertion is doubtless exaggerated. Though 

 it was ten years later, the conditions were the same on 



* E. H. C, in the Sydney Morning Herald, 

 t See also Victorian Pioneers, p. 239. 



X 



