he exclaims, and wishes that his own end could be fair as that of one
'who died in his stirrups there.'
Gordon seemed not only to be reconciled to his Bush life, but to have
become attached to it. He once declared it to be better in many
respects than any other. He was temperate, skilful in his work, and as
popular as one of reserved manner can be. Most of the squatters of the
period made it a practice to receive into their social circle any
companionable and educated man, whether their equal in position or not.
It was a generous custom, typical of the most hospitable country in the
world, and worked well on the whole. But Gordon, unlike Henry Kingsley
and others of the same class, took no advantage of it. That the
squatters did not themselves recognise the worth of one so unassertive
was not to be wondered at. He saw this, and never blamed them. They
could not, as he remarked on one occasion, be expected to know that he
was as well born as any of them, and perhaps better educated. One of
them saw there was 'something above the common' in him; but that was
all. At length he was discovered by a good-natured and scholarly Roman
Catholic priest (the Rev. Julian E. Tenison Woods), who, though he does
not say so, evidently took a pleasure during the five years of their
acquaintance in making the merits of the solitary Englishman known in
the colony. Their tastes accorded excellently. They talked 'horses or
poetry' as they rode together, or smoked by their camp-fires. Gordon's
reserve thawed for the first time. He had a well-trained memory, and
occasionally would recite Latin or Greek verse, or a scene from
Shakespeare, or passages from Byron and other modern poets. Greek he had
taught himself in lonely hours after his arrival in Australia, having
neglected it while at college.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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