Explore "The Caves of Shend" by David Hennessey on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The further investigations which Beatrice made that morning, in company with her maid and coachman, were not at all satisfactory. She was upset and nervous, and everything seemed to be at cross-purposes. The fact was, that the establishment generally was suffering from a complaint common to newly arrived English people in Australia. Miss Ballantyne and her English servants were only four days off the steamer, and every one of them was home-sick.
The coachman's wife, who was also laundress to the household, had been crying in her laundry for quite half an hour. She felt 'lonesome and miserable,' she said, at the thought that she was all them miles from dear old England. She knew she would never see Bristol any more, nor her sister Barbara, nor her brother Ben as lived in sight of the Wrekin in Shropshire. She would not have let her William come out to such an upside-down, vile country, let alone have come with him, if Mrs Brotherton, the mistress's aunt, had not bothered her into it. Why could not Miss Ballantyne have brought her maid, and got other servants in Australia, without bringing decent English people right away from all belonging to them?