BELLAMY'S (AN AUSTRALIAN IDYLL.) LUCK

Otago Witness, Issue 2285, 16 December 1897, Page 11

BELLAMY'S (AN AUSTRALIAN IDYLL.) L UCK

By Bernard Espinasse.

(Specially written for the Witness Christmas JYumber of 1597. ) 4* was lost. The bush, awful in its profundity and hopeJ less in its silence, was all around. Before him rose the I purple ranges, high above the level of theguntree forests, and he was such a very little boy and the great mountains were so big that they seemed to tower above him, ready to crush his little heart out.

Tot's father was a " hatter." That is what the diggers call a man who buries himself, hermit-like, in the hills, searching for the gold that Mother .Nature hides so well in her ample bosom. Bellamy was a man who knew how to wait. When he was a boy. with a hard step-father and a haider master, he waited till he was old enough, and then van away to sea. In Australia he waited for his chance, took it it came, and made money. He got a wife by waiting for her. In fact he waited so patiently, so long, but withal so doggedly, for her to change "No" to "Yes," that at last she took pity on him and consented. Still he waited — only now he waited on her. For she was exacting, and did not love as he loved. Her light affection, incapable of long endurance, sood waned, and might have died out entirely; but another term of Bellamy's waiting came to an end just then, and a child was born to him. The human tie bound these unfitted souls together again for a time, and he was too slow-witted, too trusting, to see that it was only for a time. When Tot was three years old his mother reached the last stage of weariness with her surroundings, and ran away with a handsomer, brighter, and cleverer m,an than dull John Bellamy. She had always looked upon Tot as being more

or less in the way, so she lent him as her only love- token to his father. Bellamy by his habit of waiting for most things till they came was quiescent enough by nature to take his loss philosophically; it might not even have made much seeming outward difference in his life but for one thing — his wife had taken most of his money with her in her flight, and he must begin the world over again. He had made it originally by mining, and he sought to replace it hy the same means. He took the boy, now the one care and object of his lonely life, and went out into the wilderness, and since he might not take with him the mate he had chosen he took none other.

In the lap of the great grey hills he dug and delved through weary days, when the sun was hot on rock and leaf, till the dark came and the stars kept faith with God. He was very lonely, but Tot was his constant companion, and the tendrils of his heart had twined themselves round his child. For Bellamy was waiting still. He was waiting for his luck.

His one dream, waking and sleeping, was that he might strike a vein of gold, and so leave his son a rich man when he died. But that which comes to every man who waits — heart-hunger alone — came to Bellamy, and his pick turned up nothing beyond a scanty living. Tot thrived well in the free air- of quiet gullies, and when he lay down at night beside his father in the bark hut that sheltered them both, the flush of health was on his cheeks. He was a slender little fellow, with deep, dark eyes that were like sunny pools of quiet water, and his brown hair had the glimmer of sunlight in it. And so Tot grew to be five years old, and still Bellamy waited for his luck. One day Tot grew tired of chasing butterflies up and down the glen, and wandered away on a voyage of discovery. Bellamy was following a "lead," and he stayed below longer than usual. Bye-and-bye Tot came to the great jagged gap in the ranges through which he saw the sun, red and angry, sinking into the swamp. Tot went down the gap till he found himself amid the cool shadows of the trees. Darting forward to pick a bright heath-blossom that he saw in the distance, and running after a speckled

lizaid that he saw sunning itself on a rock till it disappeared in the grass, Tot strayed farther and farther away, taking no heed oPtime or of return. It was only when the gathering twilight and the hush of evening fell upon him with a faint chiil of fear that he turned to hurry back. - • ' But the trees stretched out in endless procession, and the darkening hills seemed to be closing in around him,'' and his poor little beating heart cried out that he was lost. He "ran fast in the direction in which he fancied he had come, but still the gaunt trees, turning grey and ghostly now, fled away before him, and the waving litie ; of the hil|ssank in as- the dark finger of night touched them, and a.t last he-fell panting and exhausted. Presently the moon peeped over the scrub at the edge of the swarrip, and then Tot thought he saw his father coming over the hill towards him, aud stretching out his hands he started to run to him, crying " Father!"' Then he stumbled over a stone and fell again. And maybe his Father heard him beyond the great ranges that we all must climb. Bellamy's luck was in at last. It was early morn of the third day, and the leaves were amber and the sky was pink, when he came across, his boy. Tot lay at the foot of a giant eucalyptus, his head pillowed up on "a stone. As the father bent over him a gleam of gold sparkled in the sunlight. Tot's pillow was the outcrop of a quartz-reef, and underneath a fortune waited for the pick-stroke. Bellamy laid down by the side of his boy, as if he were waiting for him to wake. And waiting thus he fell asleep.

In the north of England — notably at Durham —the bakers were formerly in the habit of presenting their customers with "Yule doughs" at Christmas. These were little images in the form of a child, and evidently intended to represent the infant Saviour. According to an ancient church calendar, " sweetmeats" at this season used to be presented to the clergy, and all kinds of little images were prepared and exposed in bakers' shops. The '-sweetmeats" were doubtless the origin of the subsequent mince-pies, a real holiday delicacy, when austerity of living and weekly fast-days were ostensibly observed by clerics and forcibly inculcated as a duty upon all their congregations.