Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/292

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
MOURNFUL HISTORIES.
263

right track, but also saw her safely to the end of her journey.

But to meet help in need thus quickly, was one unusually happy instance to set against many a tale of agonizing distress, and to contrast with other cases in which human bones are the only records of what has been endured. Twice whilst we lived in Barladong were such dismal relics brought in from the bush and given Christian burial, with none but mere shreds of circumstance to warrant a guess as to whose were the remains; and once my husband buried, as an unknown corpse, the body of a man who might have been recognized had any friend been near, and to whose identity the discovery of a bottle of medicine in his coat-pocket ought to have furnished an additional clue.

No histories of this kind are so full of misery as those which are told by parents whose children have perished in the bush. The details of such narrations vary but little, and one instance will serve as a specimen of them all. In most cases the home has been a lonely hut, erected, perhaps, near some spot where the father has been employed in felling and sawing the huge mahogany-trees, the place approached by a track almost invisible in summer-time, when the wagon wheels that come so seldom leave but little impression in passing over the dried-up flowering plants. The cleared space about a hut is as it were an island in the vast surrounding oceanlike wilderness, into which if a little child ventures alone death from privation is generally the consequence, even though so short a distance as a few hundred yards only may separate the sufferer from its heart-broken parents.