Читать книгу An Australian Ramble; Or, A Summer in Australia онлайн

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J. Ewing Ritchie

Published by Good Press, 2021

goodpress@okpublishing.info

EAN 4066338077097

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The Orizaba—Reasons for Travelling—The Bishop—Soda and Whisky—The Spanish Coast—Heroic Memories—Gibraltar—Wickedness of Naples—Port Said.

I send this from the Orizaba, one of the finest, if not the finest, of the fine steamers of the Orient Line that keep open the communication between this country and Australia; and this is how it came to pass. One day last summer I was standing on the deck of a steamer, when a gentleman remarked to me, ‘I come from a country where they have had no rain for nine months.’ ‘Where is that?’ said I. ‘Australia,’ was the reply; and immediately I made up my mind to go there. As is the custom of most of us, I talked the matter over with my friends, some of them in the first rank of the medical world. ‘You can’t do better,’ was the unanimous reply; ‘you will come back ten years younger,’ said they all. Well, surely it is worth taking a little trouble and incurring a little expense, for a man—not to put too fine a point on it—presenting daily a more venerable appearance, to put back the clock, as it were, and to regain somewhat of his manly prime. ‘What can I do for you?’ said the family doctor to the mother of the Rothschilds, when he was summoned to her side; ‘I cannot make you grow young again.’ ‘No,’ was her ladyship’s reply; ‘I know you can’t, doctor; but I wish to continue to grow old.’ And here, just by taking a trip to Australia, and escaping the hardships of an English winter and spring, actually I shall achieve what the mother of the Rothschilds did not dare to hope for. Surely the attempt is worth an effort, especially when, owing to the kindness of a certain firm of publishers who shall be nameless, the question of expense was satisfactorily solved.