Australian Tales - Setis

slightest resistance. She is struck too, and forthwith becomes enamoured
of sentimental songs, set to die-away music, begins to study the language
of flowers, and to indulge in moonlight reveries and rhapsodies. The
stricken pair meet again very soon, for love always manages to effect
those little amatory contretemps; when the swimming eyes of Horace
Hawthorn softly declare his heart's overladen condition, and the dovelike
glances, and rising blushes of Miss Daffodil, plainly evidence that
the tender feeling is mutual. Horace's love soon grows violent, and
impatient: he boldly sues for the heart and hand of his inamorata, and is
accepted at once with appropriate tears, and gushing expressions of
never-dying constancy. How can two such fond hearts exist apart?
Impossible? With such a fierce flame within them they would soon be
burned to death. They are speedily married, and revel for a fortnight on
holiday fare and love, in their temporary lodgings at Kissing Point. Oh!
What a delightful time that is! Comparable to nothing in every-day-life;
and only to be rightly estimated by poets. They have nothing to do but
ramble about and listen to the pretty birds, and gather bush flowers; or sit
beneath a sweetbrier hedge, and mutually confide all the secrets they
have ever had in their hearts, and tell each other everything they know,
even to their own follies and foibles — which candour they will possibly
regret before they are a month older. But the golden days speed by; alas!
too swiftly for love and them. Their honeymoon wanes. They sigh over
departing joys, and wish that honeymoons were perennial. At length,
Horace's leave of absence expires, and they go home to begin married
life in earnest; he to earn the necessary funds for bread and sundries and
she to the matter-of-fact duty of managing her household economy, and
examining for the first time the mysterious depths of his trunks, and
discovering the shortcomings of his bachelor's buttons, &c.
I shall not accompany this hastily-matched pair through the short
stages of their conjugal progress, up to their first quarrel. By an elaborate
computation it has been settled that the average duration of amity and
peace in such households is six weeks. The satiated lovers then begin to
discover what they should have been careful to find out before the fatal
knot was tied, viz., that they are wholly unsuited to each other, in every
way; which fact they loudly confess with tears and angry recriminations;
and in less than six months Horace Hawthorn may be heard, ten times a
day, saying in effect, to his pouting spouse — “I wish we were
unmarried.”
That is a short but far from an over-wrought sketch of flaring affection
and precipitate unions; and though it is drawn from fancy, I have only to
give my memory a slight rub, to cause many sadder examples from real
life to arise. But I am about to draw a far more pleasing picture of
wedded life. Leaving young lovers' downy dreams, and their waking
flights, to be chronicled by persons who understand them better; I will