y for the last time before reaching
Solong--the one to run round by the ends of the western spurs that
spread fanlike, and the other to go through and over, the rough country.

The train reached Capertee about midnight in broad moonlight that
was misty in the valleys and round the blue of Crown Ridge. I got
a "box-seat" beside the driver on the old coach. It was a grand old
road--one of the old main coach-roads of New South Wales--broad and
white, metalled nearly all the way, and in nearly as good condition
as on the day when the first passenger train ran into Solong and the
last-used section of the old road was abandoned. It dated back to the
bushranging days--right back to convict times: it ran through tall dark
bush, up over gaps or "saddles" in high ridges, down across deep dark
gullies, and here and there across grey, marshy, curlew-haunted flats.
Cobb & Co's coach-and-six, with "Royal Mail" gilded on the panels, had
dashed over it in ten and twelve-mile stages in the old days, the
three head-lamps flashing on the wild dark bush at night, and maybe
twenty-four passengers on board. The biggest rushes to richest
goldfields in the west had gone over this old road on coaches, on carts,
on drays, on horse and bullock wagons, on horseback, and on foot; new
chums from all the world and from all stations in life.

When many a step was on the mountains,
Marching west to the land of gold.

And a few came back rich--red, round-faced and jolly--on the box-seat
of Cobb & Co's, treating the driver and all hands, "going home" to
sweethearts or families. (Home people will never feel the meaning of
those two words, "going home," as it is felt in a new land.) And many
came back broken men, tramping in rags, and carrying their swags through
the dusty heat of the drought in December or the bitter, pelting rain in
the mountains in June. Some came back grey who went as boys; and there
were many who never came back.

I remembered the old mile-trees, with a section of bark cut away and the
distances cut in Roman letters in the hardened sap--the distance from
Bowenfels, the railway terminus then. It was a ghostly old road, and
if it wasn't haunted it should have been. There was an old decaying and
nearly deserted coaching town or two; there were abandoned farms and
halfway inns, built of stone, with the roofs gone and nettles growing
high between the walls; the remains of an orchard here and there--a few
gnarled quince-trees--a