Page 21 - An Australian Lassie

CHAPTER V

JOHN BROWN

John Brown's life had hitherto been a curiously rough and tumble sort of existence. There had been a season,
brief and entirely unremembered by him, when his home had been in one of Sydney's most fashionable
suburbs; when a tender-eyed mother had watched delightedly over his first gleams of intelligence, and a proud
father had perched him on his shoulder for a bed-time romp. When he had been taken tenderly for an "airing"
by the trimmest of nursemaids, and in the daintiest of perambulators. When he had worn tiny silk frocks and
socks and bonnets. When hopes and fears had arisen over "teething-time." When he had been carried round a
drawing-room, to display to admiring friends, his chubby wrists, his dimpled fat legs, his quite remarkable
length of limb and growth of bone.

Then Death slipped in unawares, and called the sweet young mother from that happy home, and little John
Brown became a perplexity and a care to a grief-maddened father.

For a space it was conjectured that the baby, pending the arrival of a step-mother, would be handed over to the
cook, a rotund motherly person who was fond of asserting that she had buried thirteen children and reared
one.

But conjectures have a way of falling beside the mark.

One morning an old schoolmate of poor little Mrs. Brown's arrived from "out back," packed up the baby's
things with her own quick brown hands and returned "out back" the same evening.

The perambulator, the cradle, the cot, the dainty baby basket and a multitude of other things were sold the
next week along with the tables and chairs and other "household effects," and Mr. John Brown, senior, a cabin
box and a portmanteau, left by a mail steamer for Japan.

And the small suburban house became "to let." Thenceforward the pattern of little John Brown's existence
became altered. He was one of three other children, and not even the baby, although scarcely one year old.

His elegant lace-trimmed silken and muslin garments were "laid by." He wore dark laundry-saving dresses
and neither boots nor socks. He was never carried around for admiration, for the very good reason that visitors
were few and far between--and there was (except to doting parents, perhaps) very little to admire about him.
He lost his chubbiness and his pink prettiness and became thin and wiry, brown faced and brown limbed.

He was always abnormally tall and abnormally strong, so that he became almost a jest on the station. He
learned to fight at three, to swim at four, shoot at seven, ride, yard cattle, milk, chop wood, make bush fires
and put them out again, ring bark trees all before he was eleven. Tn short, to do, and to do remarkably well, the
hundred and one things that make up a man's and boy's existence on an Australian station.

At thirteen he learned that his name was Brown, and that he had a father other than the bluff squatter he had
grown up with. And at thirteen he was taken from the station-life he loved, and, after much travelling,
delivered by a station-hand into his father's care in Sydney.

Before he could form any idea as to what was about to happen to him, and to this grey-bearded father of his,
he was taken across the blue harbour water, and thence by coach to the little township over the northern hills.

They walked past the small weather-board school together, and few, if any, words passed between them. For
the man's thoughts were away down the slope of many years, and the boy's were away in that flat country "out
back" where he had been brought up.