Australian Tales - Setis

How Goliah Trump Cured Widow Blunt's Lazy Donkey.
MR. GOLIAH TRUMP was a man of his word, and if he promised to
do a good turn for a friend, it was not his fault if it were not done in due
course. He was not a highly polished man, and at first sight did not
always make a favourable impression; still he was a good-natured fellow,
and that quality compensated for his minor defects and peculiarities with
those who knew him intimately.
Though Goliah moved in a good position, was a thriving merchant, and
a good mark in a mercantile sense, his nativeborn idiosyncrasies did not
alter with his improved circumstances. He very lightly esteemed the
conventionalities of refined life, and rather prided himself on the
provincial idiom, the honest bluntness, and the eccentric manners of his
worthy old sire, who was as jovial an old English gentleman as ever
enjoyed a mug of sharp cyder or a squab pie, or rode after a pack of foxhounds.
Goliah was a portly man approaching to middle age, with rather a
handsome face, and eyes full of fun and frolic. There was a dash more of
the latter in his manner than thoughtful persons would approve of, but he
would not try to alter his nature to please the taste or fancy of any one;
indeed, I doubt if he could have done so for more than five minutes, had
he been promised a prize medal for the exertion. It would take too much
space to detail the virtues of Mrs. Trump, so I simply say she was one of
the excellent of the earth, “respected most by those who knew her best.”
Goliah was a man of impulse. He rarely thought long or deeply on any
subject, so when he conceived an idea of going home to see his “dear old
daddy,” he was not long in deciding to do so, as the “ways and means”
were within his compass. In three weeks' time his comfortable
establishment was broken up, and he was on shipboard with his loving
wife and family bound to old England. After enduring the blasts of Cape
Horn and other inevitables of the long homeward voyage, he arrived
safely in the land of his birth.
Previous to leaving Sydney, Goliah had promised his friend Sam Blunt
to go and see his widowed mother, who lived in a rural village less than a
hundred miles from London. But an afflictive event prevented his
fulfilling his promise for several months. At length he wrote Widow
Blunt that she might expect to see him on the following Tuesday.
Some of my readers will easily conceive the widow's joy and gladness