Excerpt from The Call of the Southern Cross: A Romance of Australia If that energetic young ensign, Tom Brisbane, of His Majesty's 38th Regiment of Foot, had not been quartered in Galway in 1790, and had not shouted a ringing hooray when a long-nosed young officer on a raking bay mare flew over a formidable stone wall that had pounded most of the field, Sydney Verner would not have been born at Parramatta a good many years later, and this veracious chronicle of his strange experiences would never have been written. That is at least as certain as anything can be in this uncertain world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.