Road to Adventure
Road to Adventure is an utterly charming story set in New South Wales during the late 1800s. Hugh is nine years old and things are not going very well for him. His mother died when he was just six, and his father has not made a success of his orchard, and is broke.
Then a miracle happens! A circus comes to stay over at Hugh’s farm, and he makes friends with lots of the performers and animals, and with Nita, the Ringmaster’s daughter. Then his father disappears and he joins the circus.
And so the adventures begin!
The way led across an open plain covered with tussocks of rough grass, among which the elephants picked their way carefully, as if knowing that in any might lie the possibility of a coiled-up snake. Hugh watched the movements of the great feet.
“I like to see the way they move.’
“They’re wonderful noiseless in the bush,” George said. “You’d never think big things like them could move so quiet. They pick up their feet clean; then they put them down perfectly straight, an’ very gentle, so that anything gets crushed softly. My father told me you could be right up against a herd of ’em feeding in thick jungle, an’ you’d never know they were there.”
“Was that in India, George?”
“Yes. There’s elephants in Africa, but my father never took any interest in ’em. ‘Cause why, you can’t train an African elephant. At least, no one ever I heard of could, though I often wonder if those black kings and chiefs hadn’t ways of their own. But they beat white men if they had.”
The Trustee of The Mary Grant Bruce Family Trust owns the extant copyrights to this story.
First Published in: 1932
First Publisher: Ward, Lock & Co. Limited
Places First Published: London and Melbourne