Читать книгу The Last Chance: A Tale of the Golden West онлайн

86 страница из 92

And the sons of the house, destined in days to come to work in distant States, or ‘outside’ regions, calling for leaders in the various industries of a great, almost boundless continent, would be found not unequal in brain or muscle to the duties imposed on them. Sons and grandsons of pioneers, they inherited the thirst for adventure which had brought the founder of the family, sea-borne in his own galley, like a Viking of old, so far across the restless main, to the new world under the Southern Cross. And now the abiding-place of the Bannerets was again to be changed. Leaving on former occasions their established residences in or near the principal cities of the coast, where flower-gardens bloomed, and orchards bore their annual store of tropical or British fruits, they had voyaged, or journeyed, to new, unpeopled regions. The same experience had been repeated—the building, the planting, the rearing of stock, the turning of waste land into fields and gardens, vineyards and olive-yards—sometimes for the benefit of the exiled family, more often for the use and reward of others when the route was given once again.