BOY ADVENTURER.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 24 November 1925, Page 6

BOY ADVENTURER.

A N ‘ •EXPRESS-J UMPER.' ’ RODE UNDER. CARRIAGES. In the blood of Bornaud Augustine McGartiii, a 13-year-ohl Malvern (Melbourne) boy, there is a flaming spark of adventure. A few weeks ago. lie left his home and boarded the express from Melbourne to Sydney, not by the orthodox method of entering by a carriage door, but by swinging himself on to the bars beneath the carriages. In that position lie rode all the 570 miles to Sydney in a fashion that would give a backache to people who find even the carriage cushions too hard, at the thought, of it. The police had been warned of his disappearance from home, and Bernard’s liberty in Sydney was short lived. He was sent back to Melbourne, but he repeated his experiments in train travelling by “riding the bar” from Melbourne to Adelaide. He was again soon laid by the bee's, and friends put him on the steamer Zealandia for return to Melbourne. But Bernard’s love of freedom from home control was not go easily curbed. His father, mother and brother went down to the wharf to meet the Zealandia, but they found that the steamer had already been berthed an hour, and in that time the boy had disappeared. Quite a few days passed before he was again under the parental roof. The boy is not wayward. His mother says he is intelligent beyond his years, and is imbued with a love of adventure. Trains fascinate him. They always have, for when he was two years of age he used to stand for hours on a railway bridge near his home, peering through the pickets at the trains going by. He had dipped deeply into romantic literature, and is seized with one desire —to se© the world. When a reporter visited his home lie found on a table ill the boy’s bedroom “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Swiss Family Robinson,” a .romantic sidelight on the War of the Roses, “The Sea Hawk,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Around the World in Eighty Days”—all well thumbed. He lived in a world of his own —the atmosphere of liis books — without resorting to the company of other boys. He looks a frail little chap, and no on e would gues s that lie has the stamina to undergo the nerveracking experience of riding under a train.