Author: William Hay

Publisher:

Published: 2015-07-02

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9781330572764

Excerpt from An Australian Rip Van Winkle: And Other Pieces; Being a Sketch-Book After the Style of Washington Irving In some states of Australia - especially in the South - there are those curious survivals to be seen as you thread the wild ranges in motor or coach - the roads that lead nowhere. Many will recognize the phenomenon indicated. There used to be scores of them threading the hills and flats that rise immediately over Encounter Bay. And it is the same to-day; as you flash along the fine valley causeways, you see winding up into the uninhabited bush-land on either side, these tracks of white sand, just wide enough to take a vehicle, and choosing one, you can sometimes trace it with the eye before you are away - ribboning for miles over the silent piney ranges. Of course those neat little roads leading so persistently where by all human conjecture there is nothing and never was anything, of permanent consequence (appearing so startlingly in the boundless scrub like a path in an enchanted shrubbery) have quite a steady romantic interest for youth, and a certain family of children which this story concerned, who sometimes took their pleasure on these high flats over the sea, would often turn their cobby little horses into some specially inviting road to nowhere only to find it breaking off into lesser new ones, or threading unalteringly into the unknown, beyond their courage or the daylight. The charm of these roads may be painted in a paragraph. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.