Читать книгу Rambles in Australia онлайн

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Here the station fly was waiting. It was shaped like a French diligence and drawn by two ruminative old white horses. The driver, surprised and startled at the apparition of a fare, climbed down, and lit a candle inside the fly, the light of which disclosed white lace curtains at the windows tied up with red ribbon. A few minutes jolting drive, and we were at our destination, and, jumping out, plunged immediately into soft, deep sand, before the entrance to a large one-storied house, its corrugated iron white-painted roof shining in the starlight as if it were covered with snow.

Our hostess, who had waited dinner for us an unconscionable time, had neither allowed that, nor her welcome to get cold in the interim, and took us to a room sweet with the scent of a great bowl of wattle, and a bunch of very large, deep purple violets—a room that seemed strangely quiet after the long-heard straining and cracking of the timbers in our cabin. Here our sleep was lulled only by the fitful creaking of the little windmill in the garden.