And what more innocent pleasure? So very seldom comes it in the long months of inland farming life, that no moralist need grudge it to his fellow-creatures for whom fate has not provided the proverbial silver spoon. That brown-cheeked youngster believes that his bay Camerton colt, broken in by himself, will make a sensation on the course; perhaps pull off a ten-pound sweep in the Hurry-scurry Hack-race (post entry), and he looks forward with eager anticipation to the running for the Town Plate and the steeplechase. Besides, he has not been in town since he took in the last load of wheat. It is slow at home sometimes, though there is plenty of work to do; and he has not seen a new face or heard a new voice since he doesn’t know when.
In sister Jane’s heart, whose cheek owns a deeper glow this morning, what unaccustomed thoughts are contending for the mastery.
‘Will it not be a grand meeting, with ever so many more people there than last year? And the gentlefolks and the young ladies, she does like so to see how they dress and how they look. It is worth a dozen fashion books. Such fun, too, is a sweeping gallop round the course, and to feel the breeze blow back her hair. Everything looks splendid, and the lunch in the pavilion is grand, and every one so polite. Besides, there is Ben Anderson that she knows “just to speak to”; she saw him at a school feast last year, and he is certainly _very_ nice looking; he said he would be sure to be at the Yass races. She wonders whether he _will_ be there; nobody wants him, of course, if he likes to stay away—but still he _might_ come; his father has a farm away to the westward.’
So the rhythm of human life, hope or fear, love or doubt, curiosity or sympathy, chimes on, the same and invariable in every land, in every age.
Thanks to the occasionally too fine climate of Australia, ‘the morning rose, a lovely sight,’ and if the sun flashed not ‘down on armour bright,’ he lit up a truly animated scene. Grooms, who long before day had fed and watered their precious charges, were now putting on the final polish, as if the fate of Europe depended upon the delicate limbs and satin-covered muscles. Owners, backers, jockeys, gentlemen riders, all these were collecting or volunteering information; while the ordinary business of the town—commercial, civil, or administrative—was suffered to drift, as being comparatively unimportant.