Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/321

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292
SKETCHES IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA.

for carrying it out could be provided. Even the suggestion that one of the party should repair to Europe, on a begging expedition, was impracticable for want of money to pay his passage thither, and Father Salvado could devise no other means of surmounting the difficulty than that of proposing to open a music school in Perth, fraught with the bold condition that all who enrolled themselves as his scholars must pay him a year's teaching in advance.

Offers of pupils flowed in notwithstanding such an unusual form of advertisement, but the project of the music school was rendered unnecessary by the opportune arrival of a remittance to the bishop from the "Propaganda," with a promise of future help. A large part of this timely succour, namely five thousand francs, was devoted to the establishment of the monastery, and, all difficulties being now removed, the foundation stone, with a medal of St. Benedict beneath it, was laid upon the 1st of March, 1847, the Mission thenceforward receiving the name of New Norcia in honour of the "patriarch's" birth-place. The chapel was dedicated to the Holy Trinity.

No money was expended on masons' or carpenters' wages, the builders being all volunteers from Perth, who were kept well supplied with meat by a kangaroo dog under the charge of a native whilst the work lasted. Pompey lived to see the day, though with only one eye left him, when the Benedictines owned a flock of sheep, and needed not his services in hunting down kangaroo for their guests. He did not seem to take in good part this complete deposition from office, and sometimes asserted himself by killing a sheep, which the monks, on issuing from their monastery at early dawn to labour in the fields,