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VII.

It is not three weeks since I wrote to you last, on my way to Brisbane, but fresh experiences make the time seem long, though it passes very pleasantly. It seems years ago since we landed at Fremantle, months since I was in Queensland. Week by week I have been making new friends, and, alas! bidding them good-bye, to see them again no more. New faces, new scenes have thronged upon me, and if I can but retain in mind a little of all I have heard and learnt and seen, I shall be a richer man for the rest of my years on earth. I am only sorry that such good fortune has not fallen to the lot of some man who has more years before him in which to profit of it all. I am a poor man of business, but the little money I have spent in travelling has been a grand investment, and yields me a yearly interest secure as long as memory lasts me. And now, as I get near the end, comes to me, little as I have deserved it, this grandest opportunity of seeing and learning which thousands long for the like of and will never have. "What an interesting world it is!" as Dr. Hort said to me the last time I saw him, a few months before he died. The rocks on which it is built up, the seas and skies which close it round, the living things from lichen to mammal which dwell on it, and, above all, its men and women and little children—good, bad, and indifferent, fools and wise, those I like and those I dislike—they are all interesting, their works and ways, what page 112 they have done and what they are minded to do, what they have written and what they like to read. Is it credible that so wonderful and varied a scene, almost infinite in extent, is shown to us for just so long that we may appreciate its worth and then is blotted out for ever? No; the more I see of the world and of life the less possible do I find it to believe that death is the doom of it all—death and extinction for the individual, the desolation of everlasting cold and darkness for the earth which has been his home.

It was unfortunate that in three States out of the six, I arrived just after a dissolution of Parliament, when all the leading men were engaged on the business of the elections, and all interested in State politics too busy to give much heed to a mere preacher of the Gospel of peace and goodwill. So at Brisbane, as at Perth and Sydney, I missed the patronage of Ministers of the Crown who sympathised with us, and had to be content with the expression of their regret. Other coincidences besides, were unfavourable to the success of my mission in Queensland, and neither my lectures nor services were well attended. But to the few Unitarians, men like Mr. Burkitt, the Chairman of the Committee of Reception, who during fifty-two years that he has been in the Colony has stood to the faith in which he was brought up at home without ever having the opportunity of attending worship after his own heart, and brought up his family in the same principles of free and reverent inquiry in which he was himself nurtured—to such as these my visit was, I page 113 believe, one of real value. I could do no more than just to leave behind me what will, I hope, be a permanent committee, who will now and then hold a service among themselves, and be always ready to welcome any Unitarian who may go there on a visit or seek a permanent settlement among them.

Here the kindness of our good friends obtained for me what I have been desiring ever since I came to Australia—a glimpse of real life in the bush. Accom-panied by Mr. Charles Loftus, whose name is well known in our congregations in Hull and Leeds, I took the early morning train northward. The journey of sixty miles took three hours, but it was by no means wearisome. The way was cut through the forest, and the monotony of the ever green, or never green eucalyptus was relieved at every one of the many gullies we passed over by the most graceful palms I have yet seen. A slender trunk, perhaps three inches in diameter, rises to a height of twenty or thirty feet, and then breaks over into a spray of beautiful leaves. A single one would be the pride of an English hothouse, and here they crowd wherever there is a little water to feed them. At Nambour, one of the many little stations on the line, we got out, and took the road up into the hills. We were hospitably received at the "humpy" of a friend. A humpy is the beginning of a house, a beginning which, as in this case, may be left for years unchanged. It consists of one small room, with open gable roof, of corrugated iron or shingles. There is a door at either side, and one end is boarded off to make a compartment for a page 114 bed. There was no room to sit till the cases of oranges which were being packed for market had been cleared away, and then we were entertained to a cup of tea and the best lunch the house could afford. While I dozed, my companion went in search of horses, and returned with Mr. Robert Blair, who rode barebacked and lent us his saddles and animals. So we started, my first ride since a long day I had thirty-two years ago in West Indian forests. There was no road, only a track which, without a guide, we should have lost again and again. Now we had to dismount to lead our horses down into a narrow gully and make them clamber up on the other side. Then, again, because a great tree had fallen across the path and lay too high to step over, and too low to bend under Then we made slow way up a steep rocky hill. Alone I would not have attempted it, but I trusted my horse and his owner and followed where he led. Presently we came out on The Saddle Back, a narrow pass sloping on each side down into the deep valleys beneath, and so to the summit, where lived an old couple from Manchester. Rugged like the bush in which he had spent half his life was the old man, and he gave us no welcome till he had assured himself who we were and what we had come for. Then he gave a hand to each of us, and invited us into his cottage for a cup of tea. The view was magnificent in its suggestiveness—impenetrable forests stretching to the sea on the one side, and to the broken horizon on the other. Here and there tiny green patches of sugar-cane or lucerne, or an orange grove, or clearances page 115 with a little cluster of houses. What will it be in a hundred years' time? What might it not be even now, if only there were the men to take possession of it, and subdue the land to their service. I do not wish, nor do I feel competent, to form a decided opinion on vexed questions of local politics, but I could not help asking myself as I surveyed the wide scene, the like of which is common all over Australia—where were the harm or the risk of inviting a million Chinese over from their crowded country to come as free settlers and till the ground as only they can, making a green kitchen garden where had been only bush or scrub? But the Chinaman is like, a leper to the Australian working man, and he is barely tolerated where he has got a domicile and not tolerated at all as an immigrant.

Then, as the sun was setting, we went down the hill an easier way. Indeed, I doubt if I had the courage or foolhardiness to return in the dusk by the way we had come. Presently we struck off the road into the bush or open forest. It grew darker, till I could only guide my horse by the light of my friend's white jacket. It was nearly 8 o'clock when we reached Mr. Blair's house. A humpy with additions, a verandah in front, one end of it boarded off for a brother and his wife who had lately joined them from Philadelphia, a lean-to behind for kitchen and another bedroom. Our hostess had prepared for us their own room, and somehow the household of seven adults, including ourselves, and four children were variously disposed of within about the limits of an ordinary page 116 drawing-room. But there was plenty of air, each room was open to the roof, and probably the inmates slept more healthily and as decently as in most of our houses at home. We should call them "poor" in England, but the distinctions which follow on the amount of a man's income don't hold their value to the same extent here. Our host and hostess received us as friends, and gave us of all they had without a suggestion that it was anything but right and natural that we should come to them.

Breakfast came before seven, and then we went with Mr. Blair to see his strawberry beds just ripening for the Sydney market. The strawberries seemed to me as good as any I have had in England, and he helped me to them liberally. Then through the bush and cane-fields and past the huts of the Kanakas to the sugar mill getting ready to begin work on the Monday, and so to the train and back, passing on the way the strange "Glass Mountains" which look like a huge ebullition of molten glass-like substance shot up to a height of 1,200 feet, and there cooled and become solid. Such is the common explanation, but I believe it is incorrect.

We returned to Sydney for a week after two Sundays at Brisbane. I wish my stay could have been longer, both for the sake of Mr. Walters, who never gets a holiday nor even an exchange, and also because I think I was of some service to the church, which has had a bad time these last few years. But the worst is over now, and it would be merely mischievous to go back upon past scandals. I think I know all page 117 that is to be known, for I have talked the subject over with all the principal, members of the congregation, and I am convinced that Mr. Walters is not to blame (or the past, and that it is through his later action that the church has been saved. When he left to start "The Australian Church," he only did what any self-respecting minister would do; and when, in changed circumstances, he undertook the charge again, he gave himself, and continues to give himself, whole-heartedly to the work. I had heard of the church being merely a lecture-hall; I believe there were connected with it at one time those who would have made it so, could they have had their way, but that is an old story. From all I could see and hear, judging from the hymn-book of Mr. Walters' own compiling, and the order of service, I should say that it is quite as much "a place of worship" as is my own or any other of our chapels. If it be a charge against the minister that he has a popular style, and can fill his church of an evening, it is certainly not to his discredit that he is so far successful.

The great difficulty which remains over from the past is a debt (not a large one) and there are no rich members of the congregation. I trust the means will be found to get this settled, and in that case Sydney will have a fair claim to the first place among the Unitarian churches of the Southern Hemisphere.

This letter will go on by the Sierra to San Francisco. We leave at Auckland, and shall stay for six weeks in New Zealand.

C. H.