It was a happy time then, with occasional exceptions, for the years of early youth that the children spent at Carjagong; for the parents also, though work was constant, and the just soul of Proconsul Paterfamilias was often vexed by malign editors and Radical demagogues, who stirred up strife in his kingdom, but he was supported by the more thoughtful of the mining population, as well as by the gentry of the district, with whom the family were always on good terms. A yearly or biennial visit to the cities of the coast gave all hands a taste of social life, and, with a breath of the sea breezes, a sight of the ocean wave and the world-famed harbour. So the family grew up: the girls into vigorous, independent maidens, riding and driving, reading and dancing alternately—with equal enthusiasm, as is the wont of the country-reared damsel, whether in Britain or Australia, Galway or Goulburn. There is, it must be allowed, in both hemispheres a note of freshness, vigour, and vitality observable in the country cousins, to which the town denizens, _blasées_ with unnumbered dissipations, rarely attain. Added to the ordinary accomplishments, in which they were fairly proficient, they had from time to time personal experience of the household duties, which the dearth of female domestics—then as now a grave matter of concern on the part of matrons—rendered necessary. Thus it must be allowed that for the position of chatelaine, to which, in due course of time, they might reasonably aspire, they were fairly equipped.
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.