Explore "Rigby's Romance" by Joseph Furphy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love. Make up my sum. --"Hamlet," Act V., Scene 1.
On a summer morning, twenty-three years prior to this encounter, a Victorian ratepayer sent one of the arrows out of his quiver to muster some cows on the common, eight or ten miles from home. In the seclusion of the ranges this missile gathered as much wattle gum as he could eat; then leaving his horse to feed about with the saddle on, he lay down in the shade, and became immersed in a work of blood-and- thunder fiction, which his foresight had provided. After reading himself stupid, he took a swim in an adjacent water-hole, then basked in the sun for an hour, and finally dedicated his attention to a likely-looking place, where the age--abraded apex of a small rise showed abundance of shattered and weather--beaten quartz. This was his style of mustering cows.