John Whitney had now made his hut a comfortable cottage. In the centre
of the room stood a neat table, shelves were arranged over a
bush-dresser, and at one corner of the room could be seen a neat little
plate-rack. A young carpenter in Australia cannot make these things
without thinking of matrimony; and the one in Whitney’s cottage was
beautifully made, evidently intended as a bridal gift. At the opening of
the small window was a neat box of mignonette; whilst a footstool, a
salt-box, a board, a rolling-pin, afforded sufficient evidence that a
wife was all that was wanted to make this abode a happy home.
Nor did the exterior lack any of those embellishments that are required
to invest a cottage with those charms which the hand of nature alone can
fully set forth. The tasteful mind and apt hand of Whitney mingled art
and nature so well that the first could hardly be distinguished by the
luxuriance of the latter. The workman laid first the train, and then
allured nature in a manner to follow and adorn his handy-work. He first
erected an open verandah of posts, saplings, and laths along the whole
front of his cottage, leaving three or four door-ways, or spacious
apertures for entrance. Against these posts he planted rose-trees, which
in Australia grow to an extraordinary height; and around them he
carefully trained beautiful creepers, passionflower, and other wild
plants of the Bush, so that in the course of a short time the framework
became almost invisible. The posts seemed to have grown into pillars of
rosebush, thickly entwined with flowery creepers, threading their way
the whole length and height of the verandah, and here and there forming
the most fanciful festoons over the doorway, or round the tiny windows,
thus throwing a coolness and a freshness of shade into the inmost
recesses of the little cottage. There also might be observed two or
three well-trained vines intermixed with all, which produced the most
tempting clusters of grapes, as they could be seen to hang through the
open lattice of the verandah; while, all over the roof of the house grew
fine water-melons, the strong stems of which closely encircled the
chimney.
It was truly delightful to view this sylvan cottage in the calm and
balmy coolness of a dewy morning, and to behold this structure, as it
were, of rose-trees and creepers, as the warmth of the morning sun
opened those closed flowers that seem thus to take their rest for the
night, and the fresh-blown rosebuds that were hardly to be seen the
evening before; most of those could now be observed to be tenanted by
that busy little creature, the bee, sent “as a colonist,” from England
to Australia, humming, in all the active vivacity of its nature, a
joyful morning carol to the God of Nature. Indeed, were it not that
there were appearances of some more substantial domestic comforts to be
seen in the background—such as rows of beans, sweet peas, beds of
cabbages, &c., set in the garden, and some young fruit-trees; while near
a shady corner might be noticed young ducks feeding under a coop, and
“little roasters” gambolling outside the pig-stye, which by the way was
deeply shaded by large bushy rose-trees, this cottage at a distance
might have been mistaken for a green-house. We ought not to omit that a
number of fowls could be observed quietly roosting in some trees at the
end of one of the outer buildings.
Truly, it was a little fairy home, with no rent, no taxes, no rates, to
disturb the peace of the occupier; and no one, who has not lived in
Australia, can conceive with what ease and little expense such rural
beauties, such little paradises, and domestic comforts can be formed and
kept up in that country. Notwithstanding, however, the beauty of all
this—the variety of flowers—the magnificence of the creepers—the
stillness and quietness that reigned around, it must be frankly
confessed there was a certain vacuum that required filling up. If the
animal senses were gratified, the mind felt somehow dissatisfied. There
was a coldness, a death-like silence, which hung over the place; there
appeared to be a want of rationality in the thing, for there seemed to
be no human beings to enjoy it, or not a sufficient number. Yes, this
spot of beauty, to make it a delightful happy home, required, what one
of our favourite poets, and the poet of nature, calls nature’s “noblest
work”—woman. ’Tis but too true—John Whitney wanted a wife to make his
home a fit habitation for man. What is John Whitney without her? He may
be an excellent carpenter, but he is at the same time a desolate, morose
being, incapable of enjoying these beauties of nature. Poor John Whitney
keenly felt this; and it was the hope alone, warming and clinging to his
heart, that some day he could call himself the father of a family, that
inspired him to gather all these beauties and comforts around him.