In no way does the proof more plainly reach us of the sadly shortened space of mortal life than by the distinct stages of experience and mental growth.

Looking back upon the ideal fruition of a few years, we are startled to find how far we have progressed from a given starting point. The store of ripened experience would almost overwhelm with its garnered richness, did not fate, with a malicious pleasure, forbid our profiting by it.

A few lustra have rolled over, marked by fast whitening or receding locks, and lo! we have attained to exact conclusions concerning many things. No further fees are necessary. Cautious are we now who once were so heedless. Regular and methodical in business, erst unpunctual and dilatory, we preserve our acquittances. We are industrious without spasmodic energy, cool with the discretion, not the madness, of valour! But one bright-haired goddess has departed with our golden youth. Hope lends no gladness to the summer breeze, gilds not the glowing eve, smiles not on the flowers, beckons not from the cool shadows of the murmurous glade.

Mr. Neuchamp was far on the hither side of these autumnal effects, so it chanced that on one fine day— there had been no rain for about two months—he found himself mounted on Osmund with his face turned towards the Sydney road, and with an unwonted feeling of exultation in or about the cardiac region. He was accompanied by Jack Windsor, who had invested a portion of his shearing cheque in the purchase of Ben Bolt, on favourable terms, as that interesting animal had thrown every other one who had ever ridden him, causing Mr. Jedwood to be honestly glad to be rid of him.

Mr. Windsor had completed what he called a very fair spell of work, for him, and having secured a prominent cheque and a high character at the settlement, after shearing, was in charity with all men, even the police, and much minded to have a pleasure trip ‘down the country,’ as he phrased the transmontane towns. Hence, when Ernest invited him to accompany him to Sydney, having extracted a confession that he had never seen that ‘kingdom by the sea,’ or indeed had been a stroller by the ‘poluphloisboio thalasses’ at any time, he readily and gratefully accepted the offer.

‘Seems queer, sir, doesn’t it, that I’ve never seen our main city or the big waterhole, as the blacks call it. Somehow I’ve always had the luck to miss it. Not that I had any powerful great longing to go. I’ve always had some pleasant place nigh home to spend my Christmas in, after I’d made a bit of money; and somehow, when I was once comfortable I didn’t care about stirring.’

‘But I wonder that an active, intelligent fellow like you, Jack, never made up your mind to go all the way to Sydney, out of curiosity.’

‘Well, it is a wonder, sir; only, somehow I’ve had no eddication, as I told you before, and chaps like me, as don’t know much except about bush things, haven’t as much curiosity, I think, as other people. Sydney’s only a bigger town than Campbelltown, or Yass, or Goulburn, and what’s there to see in them if fifty of ’em was rolled up together? That’s the way I used to talk.’

‘But the sea, Jack, the sea! you haven’t the sea in Yass or Goulburn.’

‘Oh! I know that, sir. Bless you, now I am quite different, since you took the trouble to learn me to read and write a bit.’ (Mr. Neuchamp had so utilised the evenings at the cattle station and other quiet places.) ‘I’m always thinking what a stupid beggar I’ve been to have been contented with the life I used to lead. Just like an old working bullock in a lucerne field, grubbing away and never raisin’ his head till it was time to lay down. You’ve made a man of me, sir, that’s what you have. I hope I’ll be able to make you think some day—“Well, he wasn’t a bad fellow after all.”’

‘I think so now, Jack; I always have thought so from the first time I saw you.’

Mr. Windsor here groaned out a curse upon some one of Eve’s daughters unknown to this chronicler.

‘What a regular more-pork I was to be sure, to go and run my neck agin’ a roping-pole, and all for a—false jade, who’d have come to see me hanged, I believe, and laughed at the sight—blank her.’

‘You are not the first man, Jack, and will not be the last,’ quoth Ernest, ‘who has been started on the downward road by the same agency. But I hope you will always perceive, when accusing another, that unless you had been that particular sort of fool that bad luck is exciting one to turn into a rogue, her influence would have been quite insufficient. We may as well drop the subject, for ever; but it will do you no harm to look sometimes, without witnesses, at the precipice you passed so closely.’

Mr. John Windsor, naturally one of the cheeriest of mortals, for which temperament he had to thank a Milesian ancestress, showed no inclination to revert to this painful topic. On the contrary, as they approached the more settled country which lay between Garrandilla and the railway terminus, he entertained Ernest much by his naÏve and acute observations. His companionship was always valuable in other respects. He knew all the by-tracks and short cuts, by availing themselves of which the road was materially shortened.

At nightfall, wherever they happened to be, Jack took all charge and responsibility as to the horses out of Ernest’s hands. He saw that Osmund received full justice in the inn stables, if they happened to stay at one of the village hostelries; or if compelled to turn out he affixed the hobbles, and following the track (slotwise) at dawn of day, regularly and efficiently produced the hackneys saddled and accoutred at the proper after-breakfast hour. Full of anecdote, flavoured with the purest Australian slang, all unconsciously used, he was a never-failing mine of interest and amusement.

They passed the railway terminus, as Ernest had decided to ride down the whole distance, being not unwilling to exhibit Osmund, now ‘prompt in his paces, cool, and bold,’ and after the summer grasses of Garrandilla, sleek and ‘on his top’ in point of condition. He pictured himself cantering along the pleasant seaside ways around Sydney, and if a vision occasionally mingled with his reveries of a fair girlish shape, all the more graceful in the riding-habit of the period, not far from his side, was it not the natural outcome of the double summer time, the pleasant season of the land, and the fairy-time that comes but once—the thrice golden spring of youth? With these ‘companions of Sintram’ not ominous and threatening, but full of high hope, of purpose, and of all mighty dreams, pleasantly he paced on over the rocky, fast descending mountain tracks.

‘Rum road this, sir, for coaching,’ said Mr. Windsor. ‘I’ve been up and down here many a time, by night and day, good weather and bad, in the old times, many years before the Zig Zag was chopped out of the sidelings. I’ve been glad enough to see the bottom of the hill at Mount Victoria, once or twice, with a queer team and the brake not over good.’

‘I should say if anything happened to that,’ said Ernest, looking over the sheer drop of a couple of hundred feet which overhung the rugged boulders below, ‘the insured passengers would have a chance of realising on their policies, as a Yankee would say.’

‘Things went something in that line one night, when I was aboard,’ answered Jack, a little thoughtfully. ‘I never want to see another start like it. Once is enough of that kind of fun.’

‘What was that?’

‘Well, sir,’ commenced Jack, settling himself on the watchful, untamed animal, who thereupon promptly assumed an attitude of armed vigilance, which caused Mr. Windsor to dig the spurs into him and adjure him to do his worst, ’it was this way—

‘It was a dark, wet, stormy night, the roads fearful; we were that heavy loaded that it took all Sacramento Ned could do (he was a Californian, and the best whip I ever saw that’s seen a few, and that before King Cobb was heard of on the Sydney side) to keep from going over in some of the waggon tracks. I was on the box with him, and we’d made friends like, as he could see I was a bit in the horse line.

‘He was a great tall, powerful chap, with a big fair beard, and the way he could rattle five horses and a loaded coach in and out of the creeks and winding bush tracks, was a sight to see. Well, he’d been very downhearted all day about something, and at last he says to me, “Jack, old man, I can’t tell what in thunder’s come over me this trip; it’s my last one on this line, for I’ve saved up a fairish pile and I’m going back to my people, to turn farmer in the old state for the rest of my days; I suppose it’s the infernal weather. Well, here we are; look alive there, you chaps. Hold the reins for a minute, Jack, while I look at the brake.”

‘Well, the fresh team was waiting by the door; they’re desperate punctual those American chaps, and the time was none too much as they had allowed them then.

‘I could hear him sing out for the blacksmith, whose forge was nigh the inn—he contracted for their work. When he came, he swore at him in a way that man hadn’t been used to; by George, he could swear when he tackled it, though he was a quiet chap as didn’t talk much generally.

‘Well, he made him put in another bolt, and said he should report him to the road manager; then he took hold of the reins the three leaders was hitched to, and away we went.’

‘He wasn’t intoxicated, I suppose?’ inquired Ernest.

‘As sober as we are now, sir. For when he got up, he says, “I’d have been all the better for a nip, Jack, but just because of the place being risky, and the night extra bad, I wouldn’t have one.” We had the five lamps, of course—two on each side, two higher up, and one atop of all. Ned lit a cigar, pulled on his gloves, and off we went.

‘The team was in grand order, three leaders and a pair of great upstanding half-bred horses at the wheel, all in top condition and fit to pull any fellow’s arm off. However, they’d a man behind ’em, and when they jumped off he steadied ’em as easy as a pair of buggy horses.

‘You know what the road’s like. We rattled along a fair pace, but well in hand, though the horses pulled like devils, and I had my foot on the brake, on the near side, just to help him.

‘We were about half way down, and I was wondering what time we should make Penrith, when I felt the near wheeler make a sudden rush, and Ned said in a thick, changed voice—

‘“By——, the brake’s gone!”

‘“You don’t say so,” says I; “it can’t be.”—“You’ll darned soon find out, Jack,” says he, gathering up the reins and bracing himself for the struggle with death. “Blast that infernal blacksmith, he ought to be along with us now.”

‘By this time the team had broken into a wild gallop, and were racing down the narrow, winding road, with a couple of feet, sometimes less, between us and a five hundred feet drop among the rocks. There was no breeching harness on the wheelers; Americans don’t use it, but trust all to the brake. Ours was gone. And the pace we were going down that road was enough to scare the boldest man that ever handled leather.

‘Ned was as cool and determined as if it was a saltbush plain. He held the mad team true and straight, and trusted, I could see, to pulling them up on the long flat at the bottom of the hill. If we got there. If! Of course, the only little chance was to let them go best pace and guide them. The slightest pull up would have sent us sideways over the black rocks, half a mile below.

‘It was a strange sight, I tell you, sir. Ned’s face was pale but set hard, the muscles of his arms showed like cords, his eyes shining and steady, looking forward through the dark; the great lamps swinging wide with the rolling of the coach. As we turned one corner we hung nearly over the cliff, just shaved it. The women inside kept up a dismal screaming; the men looked out and said nothing.

‘“We may do it yet, Jack,” he said, “if we can clear those cursed guard-logs near the bottom.”

‘“Right you are, Ned,” says I, to cheer him. I was afraid of them myself.

‘Now a’most at the bottom of the hill the road had been new metalled, and as the track was broader and clear of the sideling, the road contractor, damn him, had placed a whole lot of heavy logs on both sides of the metal. I never could see the pull of it myself, except to make accidents easy.

‘Well, at the last corner, Ned had to keep as near as he dared to the edge to turn the coach. The pace was frightful by this time, the coach on the swing; and before he could get in from his turn she hit one of these ugly butts and, balancing for a bit, fell over with a crash that I can hear now, dragged for a second or two, then lay on her side with the top wheels still going round and the team struggling and kicking in a heap together.

‘I don’t know how many rods I was pitched. But when I found I wasn’t killed I picked myself up and went to help out the insides. It was an ugly sight. Some were frightened to death, and wouldn’t stir. Some had broken limbs. Two were dead—one woman with her baby safe in her arms. We got ’em all out of it with the help of those passengers who, like me, were only shaken a bit.

‘“There’s something wrong with Ned,” says I, “or he’d have been among us by this time. There’s one lamp alight, fetch it along.” So we looked about and round, and after a bit we found him lying on his face with his whip in his hand, stone dead. Poor Ned!’

‘A sad and terrible accident,’ said Ernest. ‘What did you all do?’

‘We straightened the horses after a bit—there was two dead and one with a broken leg of them; and I rode horseback to the next stage and sent a team back for ’em. They got in next day. But I shall always think poor Ned had a kind of feeling beforehand.’

‘It was not his fault, poor fellow.’

‘Fault, sir? he was the carefullest chap I ever see. It all lay between that idle rascal of a blacksmith and the wooden-headed road contractor that put them guard-logs down.’

‘It is safer on horseback, as we are,’ remarked Mr. Neuchamp, ‘unless we travelled as I did coming up. I rather prefer a horse, though, I must say.’

‘Well, it seems more natural like,’ said Jack reflectively, giving Ben Bolt a playful touch with the spurs, which caused that tameless steed to jump on one side in a fashion that might have been dangerous to a less resolute horseman. ‘Nothing like a good horse under a man; then he’s ready for anything or anybody.’

Once more the great meadows and broad river, majestically winding, which needs but the ruined castle on its scarped sandstone cliff to render it in some aspects equal in picturesque beauty to the ‘castled Rhine.’ Once more the semi-tropical warmth; the soft, luscious, enervating breeze of the southern seas; the half-effaced traces of ancient labour; the patient, plodding industry and general evidence of village life.

Ernest pressed on until they reached Walton’s inn, where he took it into his head to stop for the night before they reached Sydney. Drawing rein at the door, he left Osmund in charge of Mr. Windsor, and marched into the clean taproom with a considerably altered air and general expression from those of his first visit.

The old woman was absent, but Carry, hearing some one in the room, came hastily in and stared for a moment in astonishment.

‘Well, I declare,’ said she at length, ‘if it isn’t Mr. Newchum! How you have altered; got so sunburned too. I hardly should have known you. Well, it’s very good of you to come and see us again. Mother will be ever so pleased.’

‘I thank you for your welcome, Carry,’ said Ernest, smiling at the honest pleasure so clearly shown in the girl’s face; ‘I have a servant with me and two horses—can you put us up for the night?’

‘Oh yes. George will be round directly, if your man will take the horses into the yard. So you’re not walking now?’ asked she, with rather a mischievous look.

‘No, Carry, it takes too much time, not that it isn’t pleasant enough; but I suppose I shall get into all your lazy ways in time. Mind you take care of my man; he’s a capital fellow and a favourite of mine.’

‘Is he a native?’ asked the girl.

‘Yes, a countryman of yours,’ said Ernest.

‘Then he can take care of himself,’ said the damsel decidedly. ‘I’ll show you your room, sir, and see about your tea.’

It may be safely held that nothing is much more enjoyable in its way than a snug roadside inn, where the host and attendants are cheerfully willing to minister to the comfort of the wayfarer. The food may be plain, the cooking homely, but the prompt and unchilled service atones fully for want of artistic merit; and if the traveller carries with him the inimitable condiments of appetite and reasonable fatigue, the simple meal is a banquet for the gods, and sweet sleep arrives without delay to lull the satisfied traveller into luxurious dreamless rest.

Mr. Neuchamp thought that no club dinner had ever more thoroughly satisfied his every sense than the broiled steak, the fresh butter, the toast and eggs, all placed upon a snowy tablecloth, which the neat-fingered Carry put before him.

Before retiring, Ernest made a point of visiting his horse, as should every horseman worthy of the name. He found that trusty steed and the uncertain Ben Bolt up to their knees in straw, with their racks full of well-saved oaten hay, than which no horse, from England’s meads to the sand-strewn pastures where the desert courser roams, can desire better provender.

In returning from his excursion he chanced upon a partie-carrÉe composed of George Walton, his mother, sister, and Mr. John Windsor, who was evidently the lion of the evening, to judge by the way he was holding forth, and the respectful admiration with which his tales of flood and field were received. Among these moving adventures Ernest caught the sound of some reference to a sailing match, in which, as usual, fortune had smiled on the brave. Knowing that the mighty ocean was as yet a wonder unwitnessed by the bold Australian, this experience struck him as improbable, to say the least of it. However, he always permitted Master Jack to encounter his monde after his own fashion, not doubting but that his ready wit and fertility of resource would bring him forth unharmed of reputation.

On the following morning, therefore, after a breakfast worthy of the glorious supper which he long afterwards recalled, horses and riders in exuberant spirits, they set forth for the easy concluding stage.

The household turned out to witness their departure.

‘It puts me and my good man in mind of old times,’ said the aged hostess, ‘to have a gentleman stay the night and see horses like them in the stable again. Not as I like that chestnut willin.’ (Ben Bolt, by the way, had nearly settled George Walton’s career in life, permanently if not brilliantly, as he unguardedly approached the ‘irreconcilable.’) ’It’s done us all good, sir, and I hope you won’t forget to give us a call when you’re leaving town.’

‘It has done us good, I can vouch for,’ said Ernest heartily, as he observed his follower’s bold eyes fixed upon Carry’s features with unmistakable admiration. ‘I shall always think of you all as my earliest friends in Australia. Good-bye, George; good-bye, Carry—we must pay you another visit when we start back, after our holiday is up.’

‘That’s something like a place to stop at,’ observed Mr. Windsor, in a tone of deep appreciation, as they passed cheerfully onward, after a mile or two’s silence. ‘Real nice people, ain’t they, sir? What a house they must have kept in the old coaching days! One thing, they wouldn’t have had time to have waited much on us then, with the up coach leaving and the down one just coming in, and the whole place full of hungry passengers. How did you ever come to find the old place out, sir?’

‘It was the first inn I saw in Australia that took my fancy, Jack. I had had many a cruise on foot in England; gentlemen often take a walking tour there for the fun of the thing; you know the distances are not so great, the weather is cooler, and there is every inducement for young strong men to ramble about the green hills and dales of old England, where you may sit under the walls of a ruined castle a thousand years old, or watch the same sort of trout in the brook by the monastery that the monks loved on their fast days centuries ago.’

‘That must be jolly enough for a gentleman with his purse full of money and his head chock-full of learning, knowing all the names of the people as lived and died there before he was born. But for one of us chaps, as can’t see nothing but a heap of old stones and a lot of out-and-out green feed, why, there’s no particular pull in it.’

‘But there’s nothing to hinder a man like you from knowing as much as other people in a general way, if you can read. Books are cheap, and plentiful, Heaven knows.’

‘Well, sir, it does seem hard for a fellow like me to know very little more than a black fellow, as one might say; that’s how lots of us takes to drink, just for want of something to think about. Sometimes it’s easy to do a chap good.’

‘But it always ruins a man in the long run, perhaps kills him right out.’

‘That’s all very well, sir, only look at his part of it: a man comes in from a long spell of bush work—splitting, fencing, dam-making, cattle-droving, what not—into one of these bush townships. He’s tired to death of sheep and cattle or gum-trees; or perhaps he’s been in some place, all plains for a hundred miles with never a tree or a stone; all he’s seen has been the overseer to measure his work, his mates that he worked with, the regular tea, damper, and mutton, day after day; perhaps flies and mosquitoes enough to eat him alive. Well, he’s had a year of this sort of thing, perhaps two; say he’s never smelt grog all the time.’

‘All the better for him too,’ said Ernest; ‘see what splendid hard condition he’s in; fit to go for a man’s life.’

‘That’s all right, sir, but he’s so precious dull and hungry for a change that he feels ready to go to h—l for a lark, as the saying is; so he comes to the public-house bar, in some hole of a bush township, and the first glass of grog he gets makes him feel like a new man, in a new world.’

‘Well, why doesn’t he stop there?’

‘He can’t,’ continued Jack, ‘else he’d slip back, so of course he takes another, and the stuff is ever so bad, rough, very like tobacco in it, or some rascally drug, but it’s strong, and it’s the strength he craves for, from the tips of his fingers to the very inside of the marrow of his bones; when that glass is swallowed he has forgotten that he is a poor, ignorant, working man; he knows he’s a sort of king; every good thing he’s thought of in his life is a-coming to him; he’s to be rich, happy, clever, able to marry the girl he likes; if any man looks at him he can knock his head off—ten men’s heads off! Drink? Fifty glasses wouldn’t make him drunk! Capital grog it is too; feels more sober every glass he takes; landlord’s splendid fellow; must have some more drink; and so on.’

‘But how do you know a man has all these grand ideas? I grant it’s enticing.’

‘Because I’ve passed through it all myself,’ said the henchman grimly, yet with a half air of shame and regret. ‘I’ve been on the burst, as we call it, more than once or twice either, worse luck.’

‘I hope you never will again, Jack.’

‘I think not, sir, if I know it. But a man shouldn’t be too sure. It’s an awful craving, by——. It drags you by your very heart-strings, once you get it right.’

‘But you don’t mean to say there’s any fun in a week’s drink at a wretched pot-house, even if the first hour is as good as you say. Then the waking up!’

‘But there is fun in it,’ persisted the poor relation, ‘else why do hundreds and thousands do it? All these chaps are not fools, much less lazy; it’s the hardest workers and best hands among us working chaps that’s the worst drinkers, by odds. As to the waking up, as you say, it’s bad enough, but a strong man gets over it in a day or two, and tackles his bread and meat, and his work, pretty much as usual till the time of the next spree comes round.’

‘But what a fool a man must think himself,’ said Ernest, ‘at the end of a week, when he finds that he has spent all the fruit of a year’s labour, and is obliged to begin another solitary weary year.’

‘It is bad, as you say, sir. You’re quite right; but right’s one thing and human nature’s another, in the bush, anyhow. I remember coming to myself in the dead-house of a bush inn once, and I felt like a dead man too; the parson had been preaching at our woolshed the week before, and that text came into my head, and kept ringing through it like a hundred bullock bells.’

‘And what was it, Jack?’

‘“In hell he lifted up his eyes.” I ain’t very likely to forget. He gave us a great dressin’ down for drink and swearing, and bad ways, and so on. We deserved it right enough, and his words struck.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I just crawled into the bar, sir, and when the landlord gave me a nip I put it on the counter and bent down to it; blessed if my hand wasn’t too shaky to hold it.’

‘“How much is left of my cheque?” says I. “Forty-three twelve six, it was.”

‘“Not a blessed shilling,” says he; “you’ve been treating all round, and having champagne like water; it ain’t likely a small cheque like that would last long.”

‘“Give me a loaf,” says I, “and we’ll cry quits.” A bushman never disputes his grog score. If he’s been a fool, he’s willing to uphold it. So off I went and walked straight along the road, and slept under a tree that night. Next day I was better; and the third day I got a billet, and was as well as ever I was in my life. I had one or two sprees after that, but never such an out-and-out desperate one again.’

Ernest Neuchamp looked at the clear eyes and healthy bronzed skin of the man as he spoke, noble in all the marvellous grace and strength of godlike youth, and thought how deep the pity that such a spirit, such a frame, should sink into the drunkard’s nerveless, hopeless, shapeless life in death.

He rode onward more than a mile in silence and deep thought, then he spoke—

‘I cannot say with truth, Jack, that I feel inclined to abuse and condemn wholesale everybody and everything connected with intemperance, casual or habitual. I see in it a habit—say a vice—to which the most energetic, intelligent, and industrious of our race have been prone since the dawn of history. Where circumstance is invariable there must be an underlying law. I forget, you don’t understand this sort of talk. But, you will admit that it’s a bad thing—a thing that grows upon a man till it eats out his will, like a grub in the root of a plant, and then, man or plant withers and dies. Now you’re a practical man of wide experience, you know that I mean what I say chiefly, and I want to see my way to do good in this matter. What’s the likeliest cure, in your opinion?’

‘As to that, sir,’ said Mr. Windsor, settling himself so suspiciously in the saddle that Ben Bolt arched his back and made ready for hostile action, ‘I should be cock-sure that having an empty cobbra, as the blacks say, was on the main track that led to the grog-camp, only that the best eddicated chaps are the worst lushingtons when they give way at all. Perhaps they remember old times too well, if they’ve come down in the world. But I’ve noticed that a working man as likes reading, and is always looking out for a new book, or thinks he knows something as will alter the pull of money over labour—he’s a very unlikely card to drink much. If he gets a paper with a long letter in it, or a working man’s yarn in a book, he goes home as happy as a king, and reads away to his wife, or sits up half the night spelling it out. He don’t drink. Even if he spouts a bit at the public, he talks a deal more than he swipes.’

‘I am quite of your opinion, Jack; the more a man knows, the more he wants to know. Then he must read; if he reads steadily all his spare time, he finds his drinking companions low and dull, and thinks it a great waste of time to be shouting out foolish songs or idle talk for four or five hours that would put him half way through a new book. Besides, he has become good company for himself, which your drinking man is not.’

‘That’s the best reason of all, sir,’ heartily assented his follower. ‘It is hard lines on those chaps that can only talk about horses or cattle, or crops, or bullock driving. When they’re by themselves they can only sulk. It’s natural that they should want other men to talk to, and then it’s hard work to make any fun without the grog.’

‘And there’s another very powerful beverage,’ continued Ernest, ‘that has been known to preserve men from the snare of strong drink, when nothing else would.’

‘What’s that, sir?’

‘The influence of a good woman, John. The hope to win her some day by prudence and self-denial; the endeavour to be worthy of her; or the determination to give the best part of one’s life to the comfort and happiness of her and her children, after she is a wife.’

‘By the holy poker, sir,’ shouted Mr. Windsor, roused out of his usual cool demeanour, ‘you’ve just hit it there; there’s no man worth calling a man as wouldn’t work himself to skin and bone, and suffer thirst till his tongue hung out, if he could make himself of some account in the eyes of some women I’ve seen. There’s a girl that we saw no later than last night, sir—you know who I mean; by George, if she’d only hold up her finger I’d live on rice and pickles like a Chinaman to the end of my days, and sniff at a glass of grog like old Watch does.’

‘Very good resolution, Jack; and Carry Walton is as nice a girl, and as good, I’m sure, as ever tempted a man to make good resolutions. I quite approve of your taste. Indeed, she’s a great friend of mine, and if you like to show what stuff you are really made of, I’ll see what I can do to give you a helping hand.’

John Windsor did not speak for some time. He looked before him for a few seconds as if watching the far sky-line on the great primeval wastes where his youth had been passed. Then he turned with a grave and sobered expression, very different from the one habitual to his somewhat reckless demeanour. ‘I don’t like to say much, sir—talking isn’t my line, when I mean anything—but if you’re good enough to be bothered with me for a year or two, and if I get that girl for a wife, and keep her as she ought to be kept by my own industry, you’ll have a man as will work for you, ride for you, or fight for you, as long as you want any one on this side.’

‘I know that, Jack,’ said Mr. Neuchamp, looking feelingly at the heightened colour and speaking expression of his follower; ‘and if I have any claim beyond gratitude, you cannot repay it more effectually, and more agreeably to my mind, than by acting in such a way as to make people talk of you by and by as an industrious, steady, and I am sure they will add, clever and successful man.’

Jack’s manly face glowed, and his brown eyes glistened at this encouraging statement; but he refrained from further speech until they reached the broad arterial thoroughfare which, from all the great western and southern provinces, leads into the most beautiful city in Australia.

‘This looks something like a crowd, sir. What a mob of houses, people, cabs, teams, men, women, and children! What in the name of fortune do they all do, and where do they all go at night? Well, I never thought the town was as big as this. Confound the horse’ (this to Ben Bolt, who lashed out at a passing hansom), ‘he’ll kill some one yet before he’s safe in the stable.’

Perhaps a city is never seen to such advantage as after a considerable sojourn in the provinces, at sea, or in any such other distant or isolated abode, where the dweller is necessarily debarred from the required licenses of civilisation. At such a time the sensations, keenly sharpened by abstinence, do more than justice to the real, even to the apparent, advantages of that aggregation of human atoms known as a city.

The returning or arriving traveller revels in the real and supposititious treasures of this newly-discovered fairyland. The predominance and accessibility of wonders; the daily presence of friends, acquaintances, strangers, and notables, dazzle and deceive the eye long accustomed to the rare presentment of such personages; the public buildings, the parks, the intellectual and artistic treasure-houses, the higher standard of appearance, dress—all combine to excite and animate the mind.

Mr. Neuchamp had been familiar with divers capitals of considerably greater pretensions, and of world-wide historic rank and reputation. London had been his home, Paris his holiday retreat; Rome, Venice, Vienna, his occasional residence. But he thought he had never before felt so high and genuine a degree of exhilaration when returning to any of those great cities after an absence, as he now acknowledged in every vein and pulse, as he rode up the not particularly gorgeous avenue of Brickfield Hill, and passing the railway station, decided to thread George Street and, depositing the horses at a snug stable he knew of, find his way once more to the office of Paul Frankston and Co.

It would be unjust to Mr. Neuchamp to say that this name and its concomitant associations had not been many times unquestioned and sole possessors of his thoughts. Many a time and oft had he wondered whether the household remained exactly in statu quo. Did the old man return nightly to his dinner, his cigar, his seat in the verandah, and his unfailing request to Antonia to play and sing? He could fancy her pleasant smile as she sat down to the instrument, and her cheerful performance of the somewhat old-fashioned tunes and melodies that her father loved.

And had she made any fresh acquaintances? Were any other newly-arrived colonists kindly greeted and put upon terms of familiar hospitality like himself? That sort of thing might be carried too far. Extremely entertaining young fellows emigrated, and a few that he could name were unmistakably ‘bad eggs.’

However, he would very soon see if anything of the kind, any shadow of the falcon, was imminent. He had heard from time to time from old Paul, who occasionally furnished a message from Antonia of a new book she had been reading, a visit she had paid, a sailing excursion that she and her father had enjoyed together; and lastly, something had been said about an Austrian nobleman—Count or Baron, or of some such objectionable rank—who was the acknowledged lion of Sydney just then, and who had been several times at Morahmee.

This piece of information did not cause any of the pleasure almost visible on the letter relating it to be conveyed to Ernest Neuchamp. ‘Count be hanged!’ he was English enough to say. ’I hate these foreign fellows. Ten to one there’s something not quite correct about a foreigner on his travels. Not that there’s any logical necessity for it. I trust I am not sufficiently insular to deny a foreign nobility all the graces and virtues that add lustre to our own. But we can always find out and trace our “heavy gunners.” But in the countless (I mean no harm) multitude of Counts and Barons, Grafs and Vons, who can possibly tell whether the bowing, broken-Englished, insinuating beggar that you introduce to your wife and daughters is Von Adelberg himself, or his valet or courier levanted with the cash and purloining the title as well as the clothes of his master?’

Osmund and Ben Bolt were safely bestowed in a snug but unpretending stable not a hundred miles from Bent Street, and Mr. Windsor, as a man who ’knew his way about,’ even in a strange city, was left temporarily to his own guidance, merely being requested to report himself at Morahmee.

Every Englishman knows what important step Ernest took next. His hair reduced to the smallest visible quantity, and the luxuriance of his beard, which he had lately permitted full liberty of growth, rationally restricted, he betook himself to the well-known counting-house.

The grave head clerk, who had acquired such solemn doubts as to Mr. Hartley Selmore’s final destination, smiled, under protest, when he announced ‘a gentleman on business,’ by Ernest’s request. Old Paul looked up with his usual good-natured expression, then stared in unrecognising blankness at the bronzed and bearded figure before him, finally to burst into a perfect tempest of laughter and chuckling, shaking Ernest’s hands violently with both of his, and making as if he could throw himself on the neck of his safe returning protÉgÉ.

‘Ha! ha! ha! so you’re back again, are you, Ernest, my boy? By Jove, I’m glad to see you; burnt brown enough too—shows you’ve been working; like to see it—none the worse looking for it, either, I know the girls will say. But, I say—ha! ha! ha! known by the police, eh? Captain Jinks, alias Gentleman Jack, and the other prisoner, eh, my boy? How I roared at that till Antonia was quite savage—for her you know. Didn’t take your photo, did they? generally do, you know. Got an album, for reference, at all the chief police stations. You’re coming out, of course, to-night. Antonia will be awfully glad; don’t tell her I said so.

‘Look here, my dear boy, I was just bothering this old head of mine about some business matters—hang them. You run away out to Morahmee, and tell Antonia to have dinner ready to the minute, or I’ll murder the whole household. Now off with you!’

Ernest departed, nothing loath, and as he whirled out, hansom-borne, along the well-remembered road, and gazed once more upon the blue waters, the frowning headland, the green villa-dotted shores of the unequalled harbour, he mentally contrasted these with the gray monotonous plains of Garrandilla, or the equally monotonous waterless woodlands.

‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘I feel like a schoolboy home for the holidays, or a sailor back from a cruise; and all for the pleasure of returning to Sydney, a place I had scarcely heard of a couple of years since. Am I the same Ernest Neuchamp that knew Paris pretty well before he was of age, and Vienna to boot?

‘However, all this sort of thing is like your club dinners. The menu goes for little except you have the appetite; if you have that, you can renovate soul and body upon bread and cheese.’ Here he deserted the region of philosophic parallels, and began to picture the expression of satisfaction, perhaps of unrestrained pleasure, that would illumine Antonia Frankston’s countenance upon his arrival. ‘What a charming thing a perfect friendship between two persons of different sexes might be made!’ he thought, ‘if people would not insist upon complicating the highest, noblest, and most exalted sentiment of which our nature is capable with that ridiculous, half instinctive, undignified, inferior passion which men call love. Of course inferior. Why, friendship must necessarily be based upon an equality of culture, of social aims, principles, and sympathies, while the other violent, unreasoning, and unreasonable monopoly may exist between persons of the most widely differing ages, positions, standards of refinement, and intellectual rank; between the dotard and the maiden, the duke and the dairymaid, the peeress and the parvenu, the rustic and the courtier, the spotlessly pure and the incorrigibly base.’

From this it may be gathered that Mr. Neuchamp was not a man addicted to falling violently and promiscuously in love. In point of fact, he had a stupendously high ideal, which, not expecting to realise it in everyday life, seemed to keep the subject a good deal out of his mind. Then he thought a man should do some work under the sun first, and set about a quest for the ‘sangreal’ afterwards. He regarded Antonia Frankston with a deep feeling of interest, as a dear and highly sympathetic friend. He had given her the advantage of many criticisms with respect to the course of reading, very unusual for a girl of her age, that she was pursuing when they first met, and since then had advised and directed her intellectual progress.

Insensibly the natural sympathy between the master and a promising pupil was quickened and intensified by the originality of mind which Antonia evinced. When Ernest Neuchamp magnanimously departed for the interior, he had commenced to notice the awakening of an unacknowledged feeling that the hour’s talk and make-believe school at Morahmee was the period of the day he was most eager to seize, most unwilling to relinquish.

And now how altered and strengthened as to her intellectual grasp must she be—this unsophisticated, unwon child of the fair south—with the brooding fancies and absolute simplicity of a child, the instinctive dignity, the curious aplomb, of a woman. As he reached this not unpleasing stage of his reverie the wheels of the hansom ground viciously the matchless gravel of the drive at Morahmee, and grazed perilously close the snowy sandstone steps in front of the portico.

Ernest recalled the old delicious sense of stillness, the

broken only by the calmly murmurous rhythmic plash of the wavelets on the beach.

It was not a house where people were always coming and going, and he did not remember often to have found Antonia otherwise than alone, on the occasion of his former visits. What was she doing now? Should he find her reading in the library, that pleasant room with the bay window, in which slumberous calms the smiles and storms of ocean were pictures set as in a frame? in the drawing-room? in the shrubbery? in the rose garden? in the morning-room, which she usually affected, and which, having a davenport, her favourite authors, and a cottage piano, was able to supply, indifferently well, the distinguishing features of three more pretentious apartments?

As he passed through the hall the notes of the piano, not of the boudoir, but the grand Erard, with a bass of organ-like depth of vibration, informed him that in the drawing-room he would probably find the youthful chÂtelaine.

Almost simultaneously he heard the rich, deep notes of a strange male voice accompanying the instrument, and recognised the concluding words of a duet which he himself had sung with Miss Frankston full many a time and oft.

As the second performer dwelt with perhaps unnecessarily tender expression upon Heine’s thrilling ‘Bis in den tiefsten Traum,’ Mr. Neuchamp became conscious of a distinct change of feeling—of a sudden painful sense of disenchantment.

There was no tangible cause for uneasiness. A young lady was merely singing one of Mendelssohn’s loveliest duets with an accredited musical acquaintance. By the merest accident, no doubt. Still, let but a single cloud darken the summer sky, the chill breeze once sigh, how faintly soever, and the heart, that sensitive plant, shrinks instinctively at nature’s warning. So smote the melody, albeit effectively rendered, upon Ernest’s highly-wrought mind with a savour of bode and of dread. And as he entered the open door of the apartment he knew himself to be deeply changed from the eager visitor who had but a few moments since so joyously alighted at the portals of Morahmee.