Explore "The Call of the Southern Cross, A Romance of Australia" by John Sandes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Unusually heavy and continuous rainfalls marked the early thirties throughout New South Wales, and the iron gangs working on the road over the Blue Mountains suffered terribly, but they kept the road to Bathurst open, and the little city made steady progress. Bathurst even possessed the civilising and refining influence of the town stocks, and one of little Syd. 's earliest recollections was connected with those same stocks in which a drunken man was confined.
Verner had taken Tom and little Syd. into Bathurst when he went there to transact some business with the Bathurst Bank, an enterprising little institution which had been started by six of the leading men of the district, among whom Verner was included. While their father was in the bank, the two boys wandered along the main street to investigate, and speedily arrived at the town stocks in which the town drunkard was shut up as usual, with his feet sticking out through two holes in a stout board. Two or three urchins were jeering at the unfortunate prisoner, and just as Tom and Syd. came upon the scene one of the urchins picked up a handful of mud and threw it at the defenceless confinee.