SHADOWS: BEING BRIEF NOTES OF THREE YEARS' EXPERIENCE OF SOCIAL, LITERARY, AND POLITICAL LIFE IN AUSTRALIA. BY FRANK FOWLER, LATE OF HER MAJESTY'S CIVIL SERVICE, NEW SOUTH WALES. No hay campo segada que no tenza alguna espiga olvidada para los espiga- There is no cornfield, which, even after the Mundys and the Howitts does LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, SON, AND CO. 47, LUDGATE HILL. 1859. 203. d. 263. THESE FEW GLEANINGS FROM THE LAND OF GOLDEN HARVESTS, Are Dedicated TO THE SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SEVEN CITIZENS (LEADING WHOM, IN A GRATEFUL RECOLLECTION, ARE N. D. STENHOUSE AND S. H. SMYTH, ESQUIRES) WHO, AT THE LAST ELECTION FOR SYDNEY, RECORDED THEIR VOTES FOR THE AUTHOR. NOTE INTRODUCTORY. THE following pages were put together at sea, having been written in my bunk during a threedays' stiffish gale off the Falklands. On reading the Thing over, I see much that requires revision— many a line that reads flippant or flashy enough— but remembering the genesis of its compositionthose awful lurches which threw ink-horn, paper, and writer upon the floor-I have some affection for the MS. as it stands, blots, blurs, salt-water stains, and all. F. F. SOUTHERN LIGHTS AND SHADOWS. INTERESTING must it be to the English reader to mark how large an Australian element is gradually working itself into our current literature. Our fictionists have fallen upon the soil, like so many industrious diggers, and, though merely scratching and fossicking on the surface, have turned up much precious and malleable stuff. Jerrold-who sent young Jericho "out," said of the country long ago, that it was a land so kind that if you tickled it with a hoe, it laughed with a harvest; Bulwer, surfeited of Bohn and Pompeii, could find no better place than the Antipodes for Uncle Jack and Pisistratus; Howitt, in a "Squatter's Home," has charmed us more of late than he ever did in the home (or haunt) of a poet; Charles Reade, facile as he was in his English descriptions, has shown, by those nervous Australian touches, that even with him and his art it is never too late to mend; می B |