Explore "The Call of the Southern Cross, A Romance of Australia" by John Sandes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Rising at dawn from their blankets spread under the dray, they found the whole of the party ready to start, Brannigan and Jim Dunn had aching brows, as a result of their potations on the previous evening, but after sluicing their heads in a couple of buckets of water they speedily recovered. Con. Burke arranged to share his horse with Syd., riding turn and turn about, and the others set out to walk beside the dray, which the big powerful draught horse pulled easily.
The road lay through the grassy glades of North Melbourne, where the prospective streets were marked out, and alignments indicated, though houses were few and far between, it was at the foot of the North Melbourne hill that Syd. Verner's party saw their acquaintance of the previous day again--Dr. Leslie Smallpage of Bloomsbury. He was belabouring that dejected animal, Smoker, with a heavy strap, and using most unprofessional language at the same time. Four other men, all members of Dr. Smallpage's party, and all equally ignorant of horse-craft or practical horsemanship, stood beside him vituperating the patient beast in the shafts of the waggon that, with its load, must have weighed nearly a ton. The beating had no effect whatever upon Smoker. He merely offered a passive resistance to the tyranny of his tormentors.