LAND-TRAVEL AND SEAFARING.*

MB. MoaLET ROBERTS has certainly had some very uncom- mon experiences of life, or rather, we should say, experiences which do not commonly fall to the lot of persons capable of

describing them. He rarely has anything to relate which thousands of other men might not relate too, if they chose, and if they could. But they are just the things which the world that reads books never does hear about. Records of enterprise and adventure we have in plenty. We can follow the painful steps of many a daring explorer; we can learn what apparently insurmountable obstacles have been over- come by grit and genius; how many an ambitious lad has risen from the pit, or the loom, or the settler's log-house, to some goal of wealth or distinction which had early fired his imagination and nerved his will. But the life of the "labouring classes," which Mr. Roberts lived for some years, of the men who do the world's rough work for daily wage, working to-day that they may eat to-morrow, and looking no further ahead than Saturday night,—is not this, for many of us, a region of which we should be glad to hear a faithful and convincing account from one who had traversed it, equipped with those tastes and sensibilities through which he can appreciate, as its regular inhabitants cannot, the things that we really wish to learn about it P It was traversed a good many years ago,

in an American clipper, by the author of that admirable book, Two Years Before the Mast, wherein the present writer has

found the beat account known to him of the manner in which the human soul behaves itself under the discipline of hard and prolonged physical labour. And though Dana did not write with any ethical thesis in his head, his account is certainly encouraging to those who wish to believe, like Epictetus, in the invincible royalty of the human soul, and its power to turn all apparently hostile forces into its servants and ministers. Not so that of another American writer, Mark Twain, who declares that, while he will do as much intellectual work as any one may choose to set him, and think it mere amusement, there is not money enough in the universe to hire him to swing a pickaxe for thirty days. He asserts that he has tried both ; the physical labour, presumably, when he served on a Mississippi steamboat, and the intellectual (shall we suggest P) when he tried to learn the German language ; but in the absence of more precise evidence, his testimony is not very conclusive. Then there is Mr. Ruskin, who, in his

Crown of Wild Olive, protests against the insincerity and folly of those who pretend to think of manual labour as anything but a deplorable and humiliating necessity :— " It is of no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk to the workman about the honourableness of manual labour and the dignity of humanity. Rough work, honourable or not, takes the life out of us; and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an express- train against the north wind all night, or holding a collier's helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirling white-hot irons at a furnace- month is not the same man at the end of his day, or night, as one who lu:s been sitting in a quiet room, with everything comfortable about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or painting pictures."

That is very likely indeed, but perhaps the difference will not be altogether in favour of the butterfly-arranger. Did not Mr. Ruskin himself, with that inconsistency which is so precious a feature in his philosophy of life, set his Orford disciples to road-making ? And has he not recorded some- where how he himself once spent a morning in scrubbing down the staircase of a Swiss inn, and found that he had never sketched better than on the afternoon following that heroic experience P Mr. Morley Roberts's bard work was of a more serious character. His first taste of that kind of disci- pline was when, after landing at Melbourne, and trying in vain the effect of certain letters of introduction to business men there, he found himself obliged to seek work as a day- labourer in the sheds of the Government railway. Here he found, as perhaps a true man always does find in everything to which he can turn his hand or head, something that chal-

lenged his manhood, his "virtue," not something to which he had to lower his standard of the Ofpl#010 xxi s-piwor :—

" As the timekeeper beckoned to me, and I walked out of the long ranks of some three hundred men, something of the same curious feeling came over me that I had felt when I first saw the brown and barren land about Cape Otway from the deck of the Seringapatam.' I was going to learn something new, and ner- • Land-Traetl and Seafaring. By Morley Roberts. London: Lawrence and Balm. MK.

vously doubted my strength, and even my courage I was put outside on a platform where iron rods, machinery, bridge materials, tin-plates, pig-iron, and fencing-wire were loaded for the upper country. [What a vivid glimpse this sentence quite unintentionally gives us of the physiognomy of Australian industry!] We worked in gangs of four, two standing inside the truck to stow what the other two handedthem. To my delight I found I was almost as strong as any of my new mates, and saw that with a little experience and harder hands I should do very well. Fortunately the work I had done on board the vessel had toughened me in some measure, so no one complained that I did not do my fair share of the job. Though by night I was, of course, very stiff and tired, I was curiously pleased with the knowledge that I really could earn my living with my hands."

One of his companions was at the same time making a start in life in a very different direction. Him did the nobler paths of intellectual labour attract, and he obtained a.

classical mastership in an important school ; an appointment which his friends viewed with some surprise, until he ex- plained that he had qualified himself for the post by the acquisition of an exhaustive library of Gilea's cribs.

Mr. Roberts had come out as a steerage passenger in the Seringapatam,' where he found himself obliged to help, not only in working the ship occasionally, but also in quelling a

mutiny among the Lascar crew. It was a dangerous outbreak enough, but was ultimately put down by the reckless daring of three or four disreputable Englishmen, of whom Mr.

Roberts was the only individual who was not leaving his country for his country's good. These seafaring experiences were of some use to him, for, combined with unlimited audacity and much natural aptitude, they actually enabled him to work his way back to England as an able-bodied sea- man. But two years of bush-life were to intervene, for the bush, with its fascination of the unknown, soon drew him away from his work in the railway-sheds. He first became a " rouse-about " on a station named Dora Dora, where he had to exchange the 6s. a day which he received at the railway, for 10s. a week "with your grub." His master here was a not unamia.ble man, who controlled the rough characters in his employment by means of a terrible gift of expressive silence.

It was his habit to take all manner of accomplishments for granted, until results showed what really might and what might not be expected. In accordance with this system, he one day ordered our author to yoke a team of bullocks and fetch in fire- wood. It was part of Mr. Roberts's system never to decline to do anything for the trivial reason that he did not know how ; so he drove in the four bullocks, and succeeded in so far imposing on their ignorance of his inexperience as to make them permit him to yoke them. But at the first gate the team had to pass, omitting to take a wide enough sweep to allow for a sharp curve in the road beyond it, the wheel caught the left gate-post, the bullocks put their heads down and pulled, and the post was accordingly ripped out of the ground, levelling about a rod of fencing. This was disheartening : however, forewarned is forearmed, and at the next gate Mr. Roberts halted in due time, surveyed the ground, made elaborate calculations, and ended by ripping up the right gate-post. Finally, when he had at last succeeded in getting into the bush, and had got the waggon firmly jammed between two box-trees, and the bullocks, which had broken off the pole, hopelessly entangled round another, up rode the taciturn "boss," who surveyed the scene with his subtle smile :—

" Said he presently, 'Do you know anything about bullocks Yes, Sir,' I answered meekly.—He stared at my presumption. Pray, when did you learn it ? ' he inquired.—' This morning, Sir,' I replied more meekly than ever, and I really think I had him there. At any rate, he got off his horse, took the whip, dis- entangled the team, and dislodged the waggon without further words. We went home to dinner in silence, and I spent the afternoon at gate-repairing."

After a few months at Dora Dora, during which Mr. Roberts learned how to drive bullocks, to ride, and various other mysteries, he thought himself worth the regulation 21 a week, and went elsewhere to seek it. This was a search by no means devoid of difficulty. Actual privation from want of employ-

ment does not, indeed, appear to have been one of the possi- bilities of the situation. The " hand " in search of work in Australia, if he will only keep off the main roads, can, or could, always reckon on getting a good dinner and night's lodging gratis at any home of articulate-speaking

man. In fact, there is a class of men known by the poetic name of " sundowners," who, rising superior to the narrow alternatives of physical or intellectual labour, con- trive to avoid doing any work whatever by the simple ex-

pedient of keeping constantly on the move from one station to another. Mr. Roberts discovered, however, that it was quite possible for a man ready and able to do anything required of him, to ride for three months over some three hundred and fifty miles of country in the vain search for employment. He found it in the end, but it was never of a very permanent descrip- tion, and the avocations to which he had to turn his hand were numerous and varied. Butchering he seems to have found the most intolerable ; but he also enjoyed for some time the position which represents the summit of the ambition of an Australian station-hand,—that of boundary-rider. His duty here was to make the round daily of many miles of fencing, and to repair damage done by cattle, kangaroos, emus, and so forth. Of out-of-the-way adventure he has not much to record, though in the ordinary course of business he was often in danger of his life from vicious horses and wild cattle. Fights were pretty frequent too, but the revolver did not make its appearance on these occasions, as in the Western States. Mr. Roberts has tried rough life in those regions too, and his American experiences suggest some interesting points of comparison. The average Australian would appear to be a much more friendly and hospitable being than the American. The " sundowner " would have a very poor chance of realising his ideal of life in the States. The American, however, has much the advantage in culture. Mr. Roberts has bought —of course in pirated editions—novels by Hardy and Meredith, "on a counter covered with bearhides in a little British Columbian store by the Shushwap Lake;" but in the Australian bush an occasional weekly newspaper represents literature. Once Mr. Roberts got into terrible trouble with a gang of New South Wales hands with whom he was working, through their discovering incidentally that he believed the earth to be round,—a view which appeared to them in the highest degree impious and absurd. Certainly this is a curious relic of primitive cosmology to find among white men at the Antipodes !

Mr. Roberts took the rough and smooth of his bush-life with courage and good temper; but it is evident that no buoyancy of spirit, if not associated with a considerable gift of dour tenacity, would have enabled him to fight his way with success. Somehow one comes to understand, after reading his book, the need which seems to be so widely felt of relieving the long periods of arduous toil and self-repression by an occa- sional wild debauch. Mr. Roberts, however, had a saving measure of two precious qualities which benignly lighten for the human soul the leaden tyranny of fact. He had a sense of humour and a sense of beauty. Neither of them does he in any way obtrude upon the reader. He has simply the art of letting us see things as he saw them. And because he saw them as he did we are interested in everything he describes, whether it be a meal round the camp-fire, or a river in flood, or a drove of wild horses, or the starry heavens swinging, to the eye of the watcher on deck, above the vane of the masthead on a calm night at sea. Mr. Roberts has not, indeed, the rich literary faculty of Dana, yet there is some- thing of a true artistic touch in his writing. His plein-air vignettes of life render the truth of things with a spirit, a simplicity, and a fidelity of observation which give his book a wholesome and honest charm.