ARCHIBALD FORBES.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1147, 11 September 1883, Page 3

ARCHIBALD FORBES.

Mr Archibald Forbes thus writes ef a younger brother of his, who, after knocking about Queensland for some twenty years, eventually died in the Toowoomba Hospital in that Colony. The picture is both graphic and pathetic, the work of a master hand :—Up among the hills of Northern Scotland two brothers were reared together in a Presbyterian manse. They went to the parish sphool together, and thence to the University. Both had rebellious, froward blood in their veins. The elder, after two years at college, went out into the world. It was for him a rather turbulent world, or rather he made it so. From the boat of a wrecked timber drogher from Quebec he slid into the saddle of a heavy dragoon, out of that into the career of a war correspondent, and in that profession saw so great a variety of stirring martial life that he has ventured -to tell of its episodes from the lecturing platform. JThe younger, and by far the more brilliant brother remained at the University until 'sent down' for some mad-cap piece of folly. In shame for this mishap he must needs be run off to sea, and sailored all over the world, till at length, some twenty years ago, he stranded somehow on the shore of Queensland. Since then but vague and piecemeal tidings of him reached his relatives —for ten years past none at all. It has happened now to the elder brother—the war correspondent lecturing brother to pay a visit to Queensland ; and he naturally betook himself to search out the career of the errant son of his father. The story of that career came in scraps. Now the scapegrace was on a cattle station up north ; now shepherding on the Burnett; now reefing on the Mornish goldfield, itself all but a memory ere now ; again in sugar at Mackay ; later, roadmaking at Roma, and then another spell of shepherding at Mount Abundance; still later in the washpool about Toowoomba ; and last of all the graveyard of that place after a long illness in its hospital. The old, familiar, sad story of a wrecked life and a premature death. Yet no voice anywhere to utter aught save kind and loving words of the brilliant, reckless waif, always cheery, always a true friend-—to all save himself, alas ; strewing his vagabond path with blythe humor, with yet remembered scraps of verse, here humourous, there tenderly pathetic. To the searching brother came men from afar off, just to testify the love they bore to * poor old Alick ;' rugged miners from Charters Towers, bush hands from the Downs, station managers who had ' bossed' him, and had been chaffed or praised id his over ready verses ; and the hospital warder, too, in Toowoomba, who had closed his eyes (his own somewhat dim as he told the sad, simple story) ; and the old Presbyterian minister, also, to whom as the sands were running out, the son of the manse turned with rekindled instinct of his boyhood. There were vague stories of a little book of poems that had been published somewhere ; but that trail was faint, until at length a Rockhampton man who had known and loved him whose name among his fellows was ' Alick the Poet,' brought to the brother the little green volume, whose title page bore ' Voices from the Bush, by Alexander Forbes.'