[Illustration: "BENEATH THE BOUGHS AND RAFTERS OF THE FALLEN HUMPY--KICKING, CURSING, AND SHOUTING--STRUGGLED FORTY OR FIFTY MEN." SEE PAGE 110.] +The Wide World Magazine+ Vol. XXII. NOVEMBER, 1908. No. 128. BARMAID'S STEEPLECHASE. +By C.C. Paltridge.+ The story of an exciting race, incidentally giving one a vivid glimpse of the humours of an Australian bush meeting in the 'seventies. I have never been a jockey, but I have ridden races under divers circumstances, having--as is the case with most of us Australians--put in a considerable time in the saddle one way and another. [Illustration: THE AUTHOR, MR. C.C. PALTRIDGE. _From a Photograph._] My people have been mixed up more or less with racing ever since it started in our State--two uncles and a cousin have been crack amateurs over the "big sticks," and my brother and myself have each done his little bit in the same direction, though never attaining to notice in the cities. My own riding has been confined principally to obscure bush meetings, and undertaken on the spur of the moment, generally as a substitute for an absent or "hocussed" jockey. This was the case at Orroroo, then a newly-surveyed and only partially-settled district in the north of South Australia, and the episode took place at the very first meeting held in that now prosperous and comparatively populous community. Let me describe the scene, for probably few readers of this magazine outside Australia have ever beheld anything like it, though many of the middle-aged and old men "down under" will slap their thighs and say, "Jove! I've seen it hundreds of times." Picture to yourself first of all a wide, undulating plain, dotted here and there with clumps of needle-bush growing in loose reddish sand, with lignum and ti-tree not altogether absent, while in the distance could be seen the mingled greens and blues of the salt-bush and blue-bush. Beyond that, miles away, was a long semi-circular line of black--the untouched acacia scrub. In such a scene as this were gathered, one day in 1877, a small crowd of two or three hundred men, a sprinkling of women and children, and a multitude of dogs, while horses of every size, shape, and colour, from the great draught stallion, brought there to advertise his points to the new settlers, to the slim, clean-limbed thoroughbred, whose business was to make the sport, were tied to trees or being led up and down, awaiting their turn to run. Rogues and vagabonds of every description were among that small crowd--three-card men, purse-trick men, and all the lower strata of the criminal class, for in those days the bush race-meeting was a small goldmine to men for whom the cities and larger towns had become temporarily too warm.