More than once, complaining of a mouth like sawdust, Purdy alighted and
limped across the verandah of a house-of-accommodation; but they did not
actually draw rein till, towards midday, they reached a knot of
weatherboard verandahed stores, smithies and public-houses, arranged at
the four Corners of two cross-roads. Here they made a substantial
luncheon; and the odour of fried onions carried far and wide. Mahony
paid his three shillings for a bottle of ale; but Purdy washed down the
steak with cup after cup of richly sugared tea.

In the early afternoon they set off again, revived and refreshed. Purdy
caught at a bunch of aromatic leaves and burst into a song; and Mahony.
. . . Good God! With a cloudless sky overhead, a decent bit of
horseflesh between his knees, and the prospect of a three days' holiday
from storekeeping, his name would not have been what it was if he had
for long remained captious, downhearted. Insufficient sleep, and an
empty stomach--nothing on earth besides! A fig for his black thoughts!
The fact of his being obliged to spend a few years in the colony would,
in the end, profit him, by widening his experience of the world and his
fellow-men. It was possible to lead a sober, Godfearing life, no matter
in what rude corner of the globe you were pitchforked.--And in this
mood he was even willing to grant the landscape a certain charm. Since
leaving Ballan the road had dipped up and down a succession of swelling
rises, grass-grown and untimbered. From the top of these ridges the view
was a far one: you looked straight across undulating waves of country
and intervening forest-land, to where, on the horizon, a long, low
sprawling range of hills lay blue--cobalt-blue, and painted in with a
sure brush--against the porcelain-blue of the sky. What did the washed-out
tints of the foliage matter, when, wherever you turned, you could
count on getting these marvellous soft distances, on always finding a
range of blue-veiled hills, lovely and intangible as a dream?