After summer comes harvest, when the farmer gathers in the produce of his year's industry, takes stock, and counts his gains. Harvest is well over by the end of February. When I rode out to Perry's Farm, on the second day of March, I found the fields already cleared, and the grain housed. All the extra hands had gone. Only a week before, the fields had been busy with reapers, binders, and machine-men, for whom enormous meat pies had to be cooked and great joints of meat roasted,--for labouring men in Australia are accustomed to consume much larger quantities of flesh meat than at home.
The scene is now perfectly quiet. The cows are coming in to be milked, and a very fine lot they are--fifteen or more. The great stacks of straw are shining in the red sunlight, for the sun is getting low, though it is still warm. We go up to the farmhouse, having hung our horses' reins over the rail, and saunter in through the back door. Here no handing in of cards is required, for we know we are sure of being made welcome; and in Australia hospitality is boundless. We taste the grapes, which are just ripe, and wash them down with a glass of home-brewed mead. But beware of that mead! Though it looks very innocent, it is really very strong and heady.
The farmer then took us into his barn, and proudly pointed with his heavy whip to the golden grain piled up on the floor; then over his stable, to look at his horses. There we found our own nags, which had been taken in for a feed. Bringing them out, and mounting again, we rode on a little further to another farm situated on a hill-side a little higher up the valley.
The farmhouse here is a little gem of a dwelling, situated in a nice shady place, in the midst of a luxurious garden. Here, too, we dismounted and entered the house, for we knew the host--a most genial fellow, whose honest English face it was always a pleasure to see: it was so full of kindness and good humour. We took a stroll round the garden while the sun was setting, and then turned in for a cup of good tea, which "missus" had got ready for us.
One of our entertainer's greatest delights was in talking about "old times"--though they were only a year or two old after all,--yet "new chums" were always ready to sit listening to his tales open-mouthed. He had been a digger, like most of the farmers hereabout, and he told us how he was the first to find the gold at the great rush at Maryborough; how he saw the gold glistening in the gravel one day that he was out in the bush; how, for weeks, he lived quietly, but digging and gathering gold early and late, until, having made his little golden harvest, enough to buy and stock a farm, he went and gave information to the commissioner as to the find, and then what a rush of thousands of diggers there was to the ground! how streets sprang up, stores were opened, hotels were built, and at last Maryborough became the great place that it is--the thriving centre of a large mining as well as agricultural district.