s daring and gallant spirit loved.
Had he not ridden as well as written the rides related by his 'Sick
Stockrider,' he might have been foremost in that more glorious one so
often present to his fiery fancy, and have wielded

'The splendid bare sword
Flashing blue, rising red from the blow!'

Gordon was a true soldier in sentiment all his life, as he was also a
true Englishman, and it is the soldier and the Englishman in him far
more than the Australian that the people of his adopted country,
consciously or unconsciously, admire. It is yet difficult to consider
his work as a writer apart from his personality. And it is natural that
this should be so in the case of a man whose career was itself a
romance, who led as strange a double life as ever poet lived, and who,
through all, retained the marked essentials of a gentleman.

In his character as a sportsman and a rider there is an element of the
ideal which largely helps to commend him to the majority of Australians.
Though his liking for horses and the turf became a destroying passion,
there was never anything sordid in it. He was not a gambler, for long
after he had won recognition as the first steeplechase rider in a
country of accomplished riders, he declined payment for his services on
the race-track, accepting it only when compelled at last by poverty to
do so; and the distaste with which he had always viewed the meaner
associations of the sport latterly became dislike and scorn. In the
period of disappointment that preceded his death he refused a
remunerative post on the sporting staff of a leading Melbourne journal
because he wished to dissociate himself completely and finally from
everything connected with the professionalism of sport.

As a Bush rider he became noted for the performance of feats which no
one else would think of attempting. The Australians often speak and
write of it as courage absence of fear--but it surely had a large
admixture of pure recklessness. It is at least evident that danger had a
certain irresistible fascination for him. 'Name a jump, and he was on
fire to ride at it,' is the description given of this curious
predilection which made his company in a riding party a somewhat
exciting pleasure. The day in 1868 when he won three steeplechases at
Melbourne is still remembered; and at Mount Gambier, in South Australia,
a granite obelisk marks where once he leaped his horse over a fence
surmounting the headland of a lake, a