While the Billy Boils, Henry Lawson [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

of the Avetere River⁠—pronounced Aveterry⁠—from the saddle of Taylor’s Pass. Across the river to the right, the grey slopes and flats stretched away to the distant sea from a range of tussock hills. There was no native bush there; but there were several groves of imported timber standing wide apart⁠—sentinel-like⁠—seeming lonely and striking in their isolation.

“Grand country, New Zealand, eh?” said a stout man with a brown face, grey beard, and grey eyes, who sat between the driver and another passenger on the box.

“You don’t call this grand country!” exclaimed the other passenger, who claimed to be, and looked like, a commercial traveller, and might have been a professional spieler⁠—quite possibly both. “Why, it’s about the poorest country in New Zealand! You ought to see some of the country in the North Island⁠—Wairarapa and Napier districts, round about Pahiatua. I call this damn poor country.”

“Well, I reckon you wouldn’t, if you’d ever been in Australia⁠—back in New South Wales. The people here don’t seem to know what a grand country they’ve got. You say this is the worst, eh? Well, this would make an Australian cockatoo’s mouth water⁠—the worst of New Zealand would.”

“I always thought Australia was all good country,” mused the driver⁠—a flax-stick. “I always thought⁠—”

“Good country!” exclaimed the man with the grey beard, in a tone of disgust. “Why, it’s only a mongrel desert, except some bits round the coast. The worst dried-up and Godforsaken country I was ever in.”

There was a silence, thoughtful on the driver’s part, and aggressive on that of the stranger.

“I always thought,” said the driver, reflectively, after the pause⁠—“I always thought Australia was a good country,” and he placed his foot on the brake.

They let him think. The coach descended the natural terraces above the river bank, and pulled up at the pub.

“So you’re a native of Australia?” said the bagman to the greybeard, as the coach went on again.

“Well, I suppose I am. Anyway, I was born there. That’s the main thing I’ve got against the darned country.”

“How long did you stay there?”

“Till I got away,” said the stranger. Then, after a think, he added, “I went away first when I was thirty-five⁠—went to the islands. I swore I’d never go back to Australia again; but I did. I thought I had a kind of affection for old Sydney. I knocked about the blasted country for five or six years, and then I cleared out to ’Frisco. I swore I’d never go back again, and I never will.”

“But surely you’ll take a run over and have a look at old Sydney and those places, before you go back to America, after getting so near?”

“What the blazes do I want to have a look at the blamed country for?” snapped the stranger, who had refreshed considerably. “I’ve got nothing to thank Australia for⁠—except getting out of it. It’s the best country to get out of that I was ever in.”

“Oh, well, I only thought you might have had some friends over there,” interposed the traveller in an injured tone.

“Friends! That’s another reason. I wouldn’t go back there for all the friends and relations since Adam. I had more than quite enough of it while I was there. The worst and hardest years of my life were spent in Australia. I might have starved there, and did do it half my time. I worked harder and got less in my own country in five years than I ever did in any other in fifteen”⁠—he was getting mixed⁠—“and I’ve been in a few since then. No, Australia is the worst country that ever the Lord had the sense to forget. I mean to stick to the country that stuck to me, when I was starved out of my own dear native land⁠—and that country is the United States of America. What’s Australia? A big, thirsty, hungry wilderness, with one or two cities for the convenience of foreign speculators, and a few collections of humpies, called towns⁠—also for the convenience of foreign speculators; and populated mostly by mongrel sheep, and partly by fools, who live like European slaves in the towns, and like dingoes in the bush⁠—who drivel about ‘democracy,’ and yet haven’t any more spunk than to graft for a few Cockney dudes that razzle-dazzle most of the time in Paris. Why, the Australians haven’t even got the grit to claim enough of their own money to throw a few dams across their watercourses, and so make some of the interior fit to live in. America’s bad enough, but it was never so small as that.⁠ ⁠… Bah! The curse of Australia is sheep, and the Australian war cry is Baa!”

“Well, you’re the first man I ever heard talk as you’ve been doing about his own country,” said the bagman, getting tired and impatient of being sat on all the time. “ ’Lives there a man with a soul so dead, who never said⁠—to⁠—to himself’⁠ ⁠… I forget the darned thing.”

He tried to remember it. The man whose soul was dead cleared his throat for action, and the driver⁠—for whom the bagman had shouted twice as against the stranger’s once⁠—took the opportunity to observe that he always thought a man ought to stick up for his own country.

The stranger ignored him and opened fire on the bagman. He proceeded to prove that that was all rot⁠—that patriotism was the greatest curse on earth; that it had been the cause of all war; that it was the false, ignorant sentiment which moved men to slave, starve, and fight for the comfort of their sluggish masters; that it was the enemy of universal brotherhood, the mother of hatred, murder, and slavery, and that the world would never be any better until the deadly poison, called the sentiment of patriotism, had been “educated” out of the stomachs of the people. “Patriotism!” he exclaimed scornfully. “My country! The