Explore "Bush Hospitality" by Rolf Boldrewood on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In the pioneer period of the pastoral industry, which has since known such phenomenal development and, alas! no less phenomenal declension, the hospitality of the dwellers in the wilderness was proverbially free and unchallenged. But even then there were 'metes and bounds. ' Like Colonial society-though apparently 'a free and a fetterless thing'-there were lines of demarcation. These, though unsubstantial and shadowy to superficial observers, were nevertheless discovered by experiment to be strangely hard and fast.
In those Arcadian days the stranger, on arriving at the homestead of a man whom he had never seen, and whose name possibly he had scarcely heard, was warranted by custom, on riding up to the door, in proposing to stay all night. It was the rule of the period. If there was no inn within a dozen miles, it became an unquestioned right.