As Mr. Neuchamp turned, he saw an expression so fell and deadly upon Jack’s changed face that he instinctively recalled the day when he first stood before him with levelled weapon and the same stern brow.

‘What is the matter, John?’ said Ernest kindly. ‘Any had news?’

‘Bad enough,’ said the man gloomily. ‘Never mind me, sir, for a minute or two. I’ll come to the house, and tell you all about it directly I’ve saddled Ben Bolt.’

Then, repressing with an effort all trace of previous emotion, and permitting his features to regain their usual expression, he proceeded to catch and lead to the stable that determined animal, whose spirit had by no means been permanently softened by adversity, as was exhibited by his snorting and trembling as usual when the rein was passed over his neck and the bridle put on. Having done this, Mr. Windsor carefully saddled up, and shortly afterwards appearing in his best suit of clothes, strapped a small roll to the saddle, and rode quietly up to the verandah of the cottage.

‘I see that something unusual has happened,’ said Mr. Neuchamp, with sympathy in his voice. ‘Tell me all about it.’

‘You’ll see it here,’ said his retainer, handing over a short and simple letter from Carrie Walton, in which the impending tragedy of a woman’s life-drama was briefly told. In a few sorrowful words the girl told how that worked upon by the continuous persuasions and reproaches of her parents, she had consented to marry Mr. Homminey on the following Friday week. She had not heard from him, John Windsor, for a long time—perhaps he had forgotten her. In a few days it would be too late, etc. But she was always his sincere friend and well-wisher, Caroline Walton.

‘You see, sir,’ began Mr. Windsor, with something of his old confidence and cool calculation of difficulties in an emergency which required instant bodily exertion, ‘it’s been this way. I’ve been so taken up with these new cattle, and the way everything’s been changed lately, since the weather broke, that I’ve forgot to write to the poor thing. I was expecting to go down with the first lot of fat cattle next month, and I laid it out to square the whole matter, and bring her back with me, if you’ll give us the hut by the river bank to live in. I’ve been a little late—or it looks like it—and they’ve persuaded her into marrying that pumpkin-headed, corn-eating Hawkesbury hog, just because he’s got a good farm and some money in the bank. But if I can get down before the time, if it’s only half an hour, she’ll come to me, and I think I can win the heat if Ben Bolt doesn’t crack up.’

‘What time have you to spare between this and the day of the wedding?’ inquired Ernest.

‘It’s to be on Friday week,’ said Jack.

‘You can never be there in time—it is impossible!’ cried Ernest in a tone of voice which showed his sympathy with his faithful servant. ‘I pity you sincerely, John!’

‘Pity be hanged, sir. You’ll excuse my way of talking. I’m a little off my head, I know; what I mean to say is, I ain’t one of those chaps that can grub upon pity, and the likes of it. But I can do it, if the old horse holds out, and luckily Joe’s been riding him regular since the feed came, and he’s fit to race a mile, or travel a hundred, any day.’

‘Why, it is a hundred and eighty miles to the mail-coach station, and unless you get there by to-morrow night, you can’t get down for another week.’

‘I shall get there,’ replied Jack slowly and with settled determination. ‘Ben can do a hundred miles a day, for two days at a pinch, and I have a good bit of the second night thrown in. The mail don’t start until midnight. If we’re not there, I’ll turn shepherd again, and sell Ben to a thrashing machine; we won’t have any call to be thought horse or man again. I shall get to Mindai some time to-night—that’s eighty miles—and save the old horse all I can; then start about three in the morning, and polish off the hundred miles, if he’s the horse I take him to be. He’ll have easy times after, if he does it, for I’ll never sell him. Good-bye, sir.’

‘Good-bye, John; I wish you good fortune, as I really believe my young friend Carry’s happiness is at stake. Here are some notes to take with you—money is always handy in elopements, I am informed.’

‘You have my real thanks, sir,’ said Jack, pocketing the symbols of power; ‘I’ve been a good servant to you, sir, though I say it. I shan’t be any the worse if I’ve a good wife to keep me straight—that is if I get her.’

Here Mr. Windsor gave a short groan, followed by an equally brief imprecation, as he pictured the shining-faced giant, in a wondrous suit of colonial tweed, leading Carry away captive to his Flemish farm, evermore to languish, or grow unromantically plump, in a wilderness of maize-field varied by mountains of pumpkins.

Ernest watched him as he mounted Ben Bolt, whose ears lay back, whose white-cornered eyes stared, whose uneasy tail waved in the old feline fashion, sufficient to scare any stranger about to mount. He saw him take the long trail across the plain at a bounding canter, which was not changed until horse and rider travelled out of the small Rainbar world of vision, and were lost amid the mysteries of the far sky-line. Much he marvelled at this Australian edition of ‘Young Lochinvar,’ only convinced that if that enterprising gallant had been riding Ben Bolt, when

On to his croupe the fair ladye he swung,

the layers of the odds might have confidently wagered on a very different ending to the ballad. He did not anticipate that the reckless bushman would attempt to ‘cut out’ his sweetheart from the assembled company of friends and kinsfolk. Yet he could not clearly see how he proposed, so close was the margin left, to possess himself of the fair Carry. But that, if Ben Bolt did not break down, Jack Windsor would, in some shape or form, effect his purpose, and defeat the intended disposal of the Maid of the Inn, he was as certain as if he had witnessed their arrival at Rainbar.

It is not placed beyond the reach of doubt whether or not this matrimonial adventure in any way led Mr. Neuchamp to considerations involving similar possibilities. It may, however, be looked upon as an authenticated legend that although several letters of a congratulatory nature had passed between Paul Frankston and Mr. Neuchamp, ‘since the weather broke,’ the latter thought it necessary to write once more and acquaint him with the fact that early next month he should commence to send off fat cattle, and that he would come down himself in charge of the first drove.

In the austere boreal regions of the Old World all nature, dormant or pulsating, dumb or informed with speech, waits and hopes, prays and fears, until the unseen relaxation of the grasp of the winter god. Then the ice-fetters break, the river becomes once more a joyous highway, echoing with boat and song, and gay with ensigns. Once more the unlocked earth receives the plough; once more the leaf buds, the flower all blushing steals forth in woodland and meadow; once more the carol of bird, the whistle of the ploughman, the song of sturdy raftsmen, proclaim that the war of Nature with man is ended. So beneath the Southern Cross the unkind strife which Nature ever and anon wages with her children is accented not by wintry blast and iron frost-chain, but by burning heat and the long-protracted water famine. The windows of heaven are locked fast. The thirsty earth looks anguished and sorrow-stricken, daily, hourly, witnessing the torture, the death of her perishing children.

Then, wafted by unseen, unheard messengers, as in the frozen North, the fiat goes forth in the burning South. The soft touch of the Daughter of the Mist is felt upon plant and soil, pool and streamlet. They listen to the sound of softly-falling tear-drops from the sky, and, lo! they arise, rejoicing, to regain life and vigour, as the sick from the physician, as the babe from the mother’s tendance.

Once more was there joy in the broad Australian steppes and pastures, from the apple orchards of the south to the boundless ocean-plains of the far north-west, where the saltbush grows, and the myall and the mulgah, where the willowy coubah weeps over the dying streamlet, where the wild horse snorts at dawn on the lonely sandhill, where the emu stalks stately through the golden clear moonlight.

Now had arisen in good sooth for Ernest Neuchamp a day of prosperity and triumph. By every post came news of that uprising of prices which Mr. Levison had foretold, in stock and stations, in horses and in cattle, in land and in houses, in corn and in labour. This last consideration, though serious enough to the owners of sheep, in the comparatively unenlightened days which preceded the grand economy of fencing runs, was not of much weight with Ernest. His adherents were tried and trusty, and neither Charley Banks nor Jack Windsor would have abandoned him for all the gold in Ballarat and all the silver in Nevada. Piambook and Boinmaroo, incurious and taking no thought for the morrow, with the characteristic childishness of their race, dreamed of no adequate motive which should sever them from the light work and regularly-dispensed tobacco of Misser Noochum. With his own assistance they were amply sufficient for all the work of the establishment, now that the ‘circle dot’ cattle, thoroughly broken to the run, had taken up regular beats, and divided themselves by consent into mobs or subdivisions, each with its own leader.

Many a pleasant ride had Ernest now that all things ‘had suffered,’ not ‘a sea-change,’ but none the less an astounding metamorphosis, into ‘something rich and strange.’

Daily he made long-disused excursions into the mysterious, half-unknown land of ‘the Back,’ only to find, after each fresh day’s exploring, richer pasture, fuller watercourses, stronger, more frolicsome cattle. These last had grown and thriven on the over-abundant pasture, ‘out of knowledge,’ as Charley Banks averred. Again were the old triumphs and glories of a cattle-station re-enacted. Again he saw the heavy rolling droves of bullocks come panting and teeming into camp. Again he witnessed the reckless speed and practised wheel of the trained stock horses. All things, indeed, were changed.

Charley Banks was never tired of sounding the praises of the glorious season, and of the splendid fattening qualities of Rainbar, with its extraordinary variety of plant-wealth, herbs, grasses, saltbushes, clovers, every green thing, from wild carrots to crowsfoot, which the heart of man, devoted to the welfare of his herd, could desire.

‘I never saw anything like those “circle dot” cattle for laying it on,‘ he would say. ‘They’re as big again as they were. And those crawlers of Freemans’—they’ll pay out and out. We’ve branded as many calves from ’em as will come to half the purchase money, at present prices. It will soon be time to move the fat cattle; in another month or two Rainbar will be full of ’em.’

The only persons to whom the rain had not brought joy and gladness were Freeman Brothers. These worthy yeomen began to consider that after all this hard work, as they expressed it, they had been shamefully outwitted and deceived. The travel-worn cattle-dealer, who had driven so hard a bargain with them, had turned out to be the great Abstinens Levison, no less. Their stock had been handed over to Mr. Neuchamp, with whom, doubtless, he had been in league. Now they were growing and fattening fast, prices rising faster, and not a shilling for them, out of it all. Then they had to wait idle on their land till November, or less lose the cash agreed on.

‘Then to hand everything over—most likely for the benefit of a young fellow who knew nothing about the country—a —— blessed “new chum”—hang him. The country was getting too full of the likes of him. It was enough to make a man turn digger.‘

Abraham Freeman and his wife were the only contented individuals of the once peaceful co-operative community. They would have secured sufficient capital upon the payment of the coming instalments to purchase a well-improved farm in their old neighbourhood, to which they proposed immediately to return, and there spend the remainder of an unambitious existence.

‘They had seen quite enough of this far-out life,’ they said. ‘Free-selecting here might be very well for some people; it didn’t suit them. They liked a quiet place in a cool climate, where the crops grew, and the cows gave them milk all the year round—not a feast or a famine. If they had the chance, please God, they would know next time when they were well off.’

One afternoon Charley Banks came tearing in, displaying in triumph a provincial journal, the Parramatta Postboy, directed to him in unknown handwriting. Pointing to a column, headed ‘Elopement extraordinary,’ he commenced with great difficulty, owing to the frequency of his ejaculations and bursts of laughter, to read aloud to Mr. Neuchamp the following extract, from which it may be gathered that Mr. Windsor ‘was on time,’ in spite of all apparent obstacles:

It is seldom that we have to chronicle so dramatic an incident as that which has just occurred in our midst, and which was fraught with deep interest to one of our most respected residents of old standing in the neighbourhood. We refer to the sudden and wholly unexpected matrimonial arrangement made by Miss C—y W—n, the daughter of mine host of the old-established well-known family hotel, the ‘Cheshire Cheese.’ It would appear that Mr. Henry Homminey, the successful Hawkesbury agriculturist, was about to lead the blushing fair one, with the full consent of the family, to the hymeneal altar, on Friday last. ‘All went merry as a marriage bell,’ till on Thursday evening Mr. John Windsor, cattle manager at Rainbar for Ernest Neuchamp, Esq., appeared at the ‘Cheshire Cheese,’ and joined the family party. He had been formerly acquainted with the bride-elect, but stated that he had merely come to offer his congratulations, and pass a pleasant hour. He was warmly welcomed, and the evening passed off successfully. At the appointed hour next morning the happy bridegroom appeared with his friends, who had mustered strongly for the occasion, but, to their dismay and disappointment, they were informed by Mr. W—n that the bride’s chamber was empty, and that she had not attended the family matutinal repast. Mr. Homminey’s feelings may be imagined but cannot be described. He at once started in pursuit of the fugitives, but after riding a few miles at a furious pace, his horse showed signs of distress, and he was persuaded by his personal friends to wend his steps in the direction of Richmond. Much sympathy is felt for his loss and disappointment. But, since the days of earliest classic records, the man of solid worth has occasionally been eclipsed, in the eyes of the fair, by the possessor of the more ornamental qualities with which Mr. Windsor is credited.

‘Well done, Jack!’ shouted Mr. Banks, as he finished the concluding editorial reflection; ‘and well done, Ben Bolt! He must have polished off that hundred and eighty miles, or else Jack would never have been up to time. It’s a good deal to depend on a horse’s legs. Well, Carry Walton’s a stunning girl, and it will be the making of Jack. He’ll go as straight as a die now.’

‘I must say I feel much gratified also,’ assented Ernest. ‘I should have been afraid of some of the old reckless spirit prevailing over him, if he had lost our friend Carry. How I feel assured of his future prosperity. He is a fine, manly, intelligent fellow, and wants nothing but a sufficient object in life to make him put out his best energies.’

‘Jack’s as smart an all-round man as ever stepped,’ said Mr. Banks, ‘and with a real good headpiece too, though there’s not much book-learning in it. He’d fight for you to the last drop of his blood, too. I know that.’

‘It is well to have a faithful retainer at times,’ said Mr. Neuchamp thoughtfully. ‘It carries a mutual benefit, often lost sight of in these days of selfish realism.

‘How shall we manage with the cattle without him?’ queried Mr. Banks.

‘I must take the two black boys,’ said Mr. Neuchamp, ‘and you must do the best you can on the run by yourself; for business renders it absolutely necessary that I should visit Sydney.’

‘I daresay I’ll manage, somehow,’ said Mr. Banks. ‘I must get Tottie Freeman to help me, if I’m hard pushed. She’s the smartest hand with cattle of the lot.’

‘I do not think that arrangement would quite answer,’ quoth Mr. Neuchamp gravely.

Within a fortnight after this conversation Mr. Neuchamp and his sable retainers might have been observed making the usual stages with a most satisfactory drove of fat cattle in front of them. They were not, perhaps, equal to the first lot he recollected despatching from Rainbar; but ‘cattle were cattle’ now, in the language of the butchers. There were plenty more coming on, and it was not thought advisable to wait longer for the ultimate ‘topping up’ of the beeves. They were good enough. The demand was prodigious; and purchasers did not make half the critical objections that were used in the old days, when cattle were not half the price.

In the appointed time the important draft reached Sydney, and before Mr. Neuchamp could look round, it seemed to him, they were snapped up at eight-pounds-ten a head, no allusions made to ‘rough cattle,’ or ‘very plain on the back,’ ‘old cows,‘ ‘light weights,’ or any of the usual strong depreciations customary on former occasions. No; a new era seemed to have set in. All was right as long as the count was accurate. So satisfactory was the settling that Mr. Neuchamp at once wrote to Charley Banks to muster and send down another draft, even if he had to put Tottie Freeman in charge of Rainbar while he was on the road.

Then came the immediate rush to the office of Frankston and Co., and a meeting with old Paul, that made up for much of enforced privation and protracted self-denial.

‘My dear boy! most glad to see you, at last; thought that we should never see your face again. Knew you couldn’t come before the rain did. Can’t leave the ship until tide serves and the wind’s fair. But now the voyage is over, first mate’s in charge of the ship, and the skipper can put on his long-shore toggery and cruise for a spell. Of course you’re on your way out to dine with us?’

Ernest mentioned that, presuming upon old acquaintance, such had been his intention.

‘Antonia will be ever so glad to see you; but she must tell you all the news herself. You will find your cousin at Morahmee. She and Antonia are wonderful friends—that is——’

‘That is,’ said Ernest, completing Paul’s sentence, over which the worthy merchant appeared to hesitate somewhat—‘that is, as close as two people very widely dissimilar in taste and temperament can ever be.’

‘Perhaps there may be a slightly different way of looking at things, and so on,’ said his old friend cautiously; ‘but all crafts are not built out of the same sort of timber, or on the same lines. Some are oak, some of American pine, some of teak, some of white gum; some with a smart shear, some with a good allowance of beam; and they can’t be altered over much. As the keel’s laid down, so the boat’s bound to float.’

‘H—m!’ replied Ernest thoughtfully, ‘that involves a large question—several large questions, in fact. Good-bye for the present.’

How many memories crowded upon the brain of Ernest Neuchamp as he once more trod the massive sandstone flags underneath the portico of the verandah at Morahmee! The freshly raked gravel walks, the boscage of glowing green which formed the living walls of the renovated shrubberies, the well-remembered murmur of the low-toned restless surge, the odour of the unchanged deep, all these sharply contrasted sights and sounds after his weary sojourn in the desert composed for him a page of Boccaccio, framed a panel of Watteau-painting. He was a knight in an enchanted Armida garden. And as Antonia, freshly attired in evening dress, radiant with unmistakable welcome, appeared to greet him on the threshold of the open door, he felt as if the knight who had done his devoir was about to receive the traditional guerdon, so necessary to the perfect equilibrium of the world of chivalry and romance.

‘Welcome from Palestine!’ she said, unconsciously following out his train of thought, as she ran forward and clasped him by the hand. ‘I don’t know whether one can call any part of the bush the Holy Land; but you have been away quite long enough to have gone there. Had you vowed a vow never to come back till rain fell? People may stay away too long sometimes.’ Here she gazed at Ernest with a long, searching, humbled gaze, which suddenly brightened as when the summer cloud catches the partially obscured sun-ray. ‘But here is Augusta, coming to ask you if Rainbar won’t be swallowed up in a second deluge now that the drought has broken up, as she is credibly informed is always the case in Australia!’ A mischievous twinkle in her mirthful eye informed Ernest that his cousin’s peculiarities had been accurately measured by the prepossessing reviewer before him.

As Miss Neuchamp, also attired in full evening costume, approached, while not far behind, with the air of a confirmed habituÉ, sauntered Mr. Jermyn Croker, Ernest thought he had never seen that young lady look to greater advantage. Something had evidently occurred with power to revive an attention to the details of dress which had been suffered of late to lie in abeyance. There was also a novel expression of not unbecoming doubt upon her resolute features which Ernest had never observed before. It soon appeared, however, that her essential characteristics were unchanged.

‘I am truly glad to see you, my dear Ernest,’ she said, offering him her cheek with proper cousinly coolness. ‘I hear that a beneficial change has taken place in your shocking climate. Mr. Croker says that prices have risen to their outside limit, and cannot possibly last. Of course you will sell out at once and go home?’

‘Of course I shall do no such thing,’ returned Ernest, with such unusual animation that Antonia could not help smiling. ‘I should consider it most ungrateful, as well as impolitic, to quit the land which has already done much for me, and may possibly do more.’

‘Well done, Ernest, my boy!’ said Mr. Frankston, who had just joined the party. ‘Never quit the ship that has weathered the storm with you while a plank is left in her. Now that we have our country filled with the sweepings of every port under the sun, we want the captain and first officer to act like men, and show the stuff they’re made of.’

‘I take quite a different view of my duty to Jermyn Croker, about whom I have felt much anxiety of late,’ drawled out that gentleman. ‘I see before me a chance of selling out at an absurdly high price, and taking my passage by next mail for one of the few countries that is worth living in. A madman might neglect such an opportunity for the sake of a few thousand roughs scrambling for gold at California, or Ballarat, but not Jermyn Croker, if I know him.’

‘And suppose stock rise higher still?’ queried Mr. Frankston, smiling at the magnificent dogmatism of his unsentimental friend.

‘My dear Frankston, how a man of your age and experience can so blind himself to the real state of affairs is a marvel to me. Cattle can’t rise. Five pounds all round for young and old on the station is a price never before reached in Australia. You must see the crash that is coming. Really, now, without humbug, don’t you know that there will be a change before Christmas?’

‘So there will,’ answered Paul, ‘but it will be for the better. We have not half the stock in the country to feed the great multitude that are, even now, on the sea. But if you will sell, you might give me the offer.’

‘Sold out of every hoof to Parklands this morning!’ answered Mr. Croker, looking round with a triumphant air. ‘I was standing on the club steps before breakfast when he came in from the northern steamer, and made me an offer before he got out of his hansom.’

‘And you took it?’

‘Took it? of course. We went into the library, where he wrote me out a cheque then and there for twenty thousand pounds, and I gave him the delivery note. Booroo-booroo and Chatsworth, with four thousand head of cattle, taken, without muster, by the book, everything given in. Something like a sale, wasn’t it?’

‘First-rate for some one—I don’t say who. But I’ll take three to one that Parklands knocks five thousand pounds profit out of it before the year is over.’

‘I take you, provided he doesn’t sell to Neuchamp,’ answered Croker. ‘I must say I think one bargain with him ought to satisfy any man, except Selmore.’

‘I’ll bet you a level hundred,’ said Paul, a little quickly, ‘that in five years Ernest here will be able to buy you up—horse, foot, and dragoons—without feeling the amount.’

‘Particularly if he has the invaluable aid and counsel of Paul Frankston,’ sneered Mr. Jermyn Croker. However, I shan’t be here to see, as I never intend to cross the Nepean again, or to see Sydney Heads except in an engraving.‘

‘We’ll all go and see you off,’ said Antonia, who with Ernest suddenly appeared as if they had not been listening to the conversation, which indeed they had not, but had taken a quiet walk down ‘an alley Titanic’ with glorious araucarias. ‘But whoever goes or stays, we must have dinner. I really do believe that it’s past seven o’clock.’

At this terrible announcement Paul’s ever robust punctuality asserted itself with a rebound. Seizing upon the fair Augusta he hurried her to the dining-room, where all conversation bordering upon business was banished for the present.

After the ladies had retired, the fascinating topic of the changed social aspect of the country since the gold crop had alternated with those of wheat, maize, wool, and tallow, which formerly absorbed so large a share of interest, again came uppermost. Upon this point Mr. Croker was grandly didactic.

‘Mark my words, Frankston,’ said he, throwing himself back in his chair, ‘in two years you will see this country a perfect hell upon earth! What’s to hinder it? Even now there’s hardly a shepherd to be got; people are talking of turning their sheep loose—that, of course, means ruin to wool-growing. Cattle will soon overtake the temporary demand; all the new buyers—nothing personal intended, Neuchamp—will be ruined. Tallow will fall directly the Russians have settled their difficulty. I know this from private sources. Flour will be a hundred pounds a ton again; of course there will be no ploughing for want of hands. These digger fellows will take to cutting their own throats first, and when in good practice those of the propertied classes for a change; and lastly, you’ll have universal suffrage. The scum will be uppermost, and you’ll end suitably with an unparalleled Jacquerie.’

Mr. Croker, having completed this pleasing patriotic sketch, filled his glass and looked round with the air of a man who had just demonstrated to inquiring youth that two and two make four.

‘Australia was always a beastly hole,’ he continued; ‘but really, I think, when—even before—it comes to what I have outlined, it will cease to be fit for a gentleman to live in.’

‘You must pardon me for expressing a directly contrary opinion,’ replied Ernest, who had been gradually girding himself up to answer Mr. Croker according to his humour. ‘I hold that this is precisely the time, and these are the exact circumstances, which render it a point of honour for every gentleman who has past or present interest in the land to live in it, to stand by his colours and lead his regiment in the battle which is so imminent. Now is the time for those who have felt or asserted an interest in this glorious last-discovered Eldorado, far down in the list of English provinces which have a way of changing into nations, to uphold with all the manhood that is in them her righteous laws, her goodly customs, her pure yet untrammelled liberty. In my mind, he who takes advantage of the rise in prices to quit Australia for ever at this hour of her social need, deserts his duty, abandons his post, and confesses himself to be less a true colonist than a sordid huckster!’

As Mr. Neuchamp delivered himself of this perhaps slightly coloured estimate of the duty of a pastoral tenant, unheeding of the implied rebuke to the last speaker, he raised his head and confronted the company with the air of the captain of a sinking ship who has vowed to stand by her while a plank floats.

Jermyn Croker coloured, but did not immediately reply, while the host took occasion to interfere, as became his position of mediator between over-hasty disputants.

‘I think you are both a little beyond the mark,’ he said; ‘if you will allow me, who have lived here since Sydney was a small seaside village, to give you my ideas. No doubt, as Croker says, we shall have a queer crew, with every kind of lubber and every known sort of blackguard to deal with. But what of that? Discipline has always been kept up in old New South Wales,—in times, too, when matters looked black enough. The same men, or their sons, are here now who showed themselves equal to the occasion before. We have Old England at our backs; and though she doesn’t bother us with much advice or short leading strings, she has a ship or two and a regiment left which are at the service of any of her colonies when need is.’

‘Every country where gold has been discovered up to this time has gradually degenerated and come to grief,’ asserted Croker, recovering from his dissatisfied silence; ‘not that much degeneration is possible here.’

‘You are thinking of the Spaniards, the Mexicans, and so on,’ said Paul. ‘I’ve been among them, and know all about their ways. They are not so much worse than other people. But even so: English people have always managed to govern themselves under all circumstances, and will again, I venture to bet.’

‘I came out here thinking Australia a good place to make money. I always knew England was a good place to spend it in,’ averred Mr. Croker. ‘I’m a man of few ideas, I confess. But I have stuck to these few, and I think I see my way.’

‘I suppose we all do,’ said Mr. Frankston; ‘but some have more luck or better eyesight than others. Our friend Levison wouldn’t make a bad man at the “look-out” in dirty weather, eh, Ernest? What do you think of him, Croker?‘

‘Think? why, that he’s an immensely overrated man; he has made a few hits by straightforward blundering and kept what he has got. I give him credit for that. But who’s to know whether all this station property that stands in his name is really his? The banks may have the lion’s share for all anybody knows.’

‘Highly probable,’ assented Ernest, with fierce sarcasm; ‘and Levison’s steady prophecy that the season was going to break just before it did was an accidental guess! His purchasing stock, stations, and town property for the rise, which no one else believed in, was a chance hit! His uniformly good sales when every one else was holding! His large purchases when all the world was selling! His unostentatious gifts, at the rate of two to a thousand pounds, to church buildings were unredeemed parsimony! His advice to me to buy and his actual purchases of stock for my benefit, every pound invested in which has furnished a profit of ten, were selfish mistakes! You must excuse me, Croker, for saying that I think you have reared a larger crop of prejudices in Australia than any man I have seen here.’

‘It’s a fine climate!’ quoth Paul; ‘everything grows and develops; even experience, like Madeira in the voyage round the Cape, ripens twice as fast here as anywhere else. A whitewasher, Croker? I really believe this is a bottle of the Manzanares you prefer, and we’ll join the ladies, which means adjourn to the verandah.’

If happiness, at any period or season, did dwell upon the earth, she must have sojourned, about the month of September 185—, so near to the New Holland Club, so near to the person of Ernest Neuchamp, as to have been occasionally visible to the naked eye. Had a company of savans been told off to view the goddess, as in the far less important matter of the transit of Venus, success had been certain. But society never recognises its real wonders—its absolute and imperious miracles. Therefore for a little space that earthly maid glorified the dwelling and precincts of the untrammelled, rejoicing, successful proprietor. She sat by Mr. Neuchamp at the daintily prepared refections of the club, and gave an added flavour to his moderate but intense enjoyment of viand and vintage, so wondrous in variety, so miraculous of aroma, after his long endurance of the unpalatable monotony of the Rainbar cuisine. She whispered in the mystic tones of the many-voiced sea-breezes, as they murmured around his steps when, with Antonia at his side, he roamed through the mimic woods of Morahmee, or gazed with never-ending contemplative joy on the pale moon’s silver tracery o’er wave and strand. She rose with him in the joyous morn, telling him the ever-welcome tale that all cause for anxiety had fled, that a new ukase had gone forth, bringing unmixed joy to every man of his order, always excepting the sheepholders and Jermyn Croker. She sat behind him, on Osmund, displacing ‘the sad companion ghastly pale’ even ‘atra Cura,’ who had been the occupant of a croup seat on that gallant steed for many a day. Once more the rattle of flying hoofs was heard upon the sandy downs and red hill-roads which, near Bondi’s ceaseless surge, overlook the city’s mingled mass, the ocean’s fresh eternal glory. In this season of joy and pride—the natural and becoming pride of him who has suffered and struggled, waited and warred for no mean reward, which at length he has been permitted to grasp—the bright goddess smiled on every act, thought, and hope of Ernest Neuchamp. In that fair brief bygone day of unalloyed triumph, of unclouded hope, it is a truth most absolute and indisputable that she stood by his side in serene and awful beauty; but, like her austere sister of old who cried aloud in the streets to a heedless generation, ‘no man regarded her.’

Through all this halcyon time no definite pledge or vow had passed between him and the woman whom he had slowly, but with all the force of an inflexibly tenacious nature, come to consider as the embodied essence of that mysterious complement to man’s nature, at once the vital necessity, the crowning glory, of this mortal state, the vision of female perfection! Proud, fastidious, a searcher after ideals, prone to postpone the irrevocable decision by which man’s fate here below is for ever sealed, he was now face to face with Destiny. Even now he felt so utterly fascinated, so supremely content, with the graduated intimacies of which the daily process which draws two human hearts together into indescribable union is composed, so charmed with the undreamed-of treasures of mind and heart which each fresh casket unlocked displayed to his gaze, that he felt no desire to change the mode of bliss. Why hurry to an end this sojourn in the land of Faerye, while the bridle-reins of the Queen of Elf-land and her troop were ringing still through the haunted woods, while feast and tournament still went merrily on, while stream and emerald turf and bosky glade were still touched with the glory of successful love, while the glamour still held sea and sky and far-enpurpled mounts, upon which, let but once the knell of disenchantment sound, no mortal may again gaze while life endures?

During all this time of joy and consolation Mr. Neuchamp had regular advices from his lieutenant, Charley Banks. That young gentleman complained piteously of his lonely state and solitary lodging in the wilderness, for which nothing compensated, it would appear, but the increasing beauty of the season (pastorally considered) and an occasional gossip with Tottie Freeman.

Now that the rain had found out the way to saltbush land, there seemed to be but little variety of weather. It rained every other day, sometimes for nearly a week, incredible to relate, without stopping. The creeks were full, the flats were soaked, spongy, and knee-deep in clover. The river was high, had come down ‘a banker,’ and any further rainfall at the head waters, or even the melting of the snow, might bring down a flood such as the dwellers in those parts had not seen for many a day. The Freemans were uncomfortable enough. They had found that their huts and fencing had been placed on land too low for comfort in a wet season, and even for safety if the threatened floods rose higher than usual.

In November, the third spring month of the Australians, another despatch of greater weight and importance reached Mr. Neuchamp, who apparently was not hasting to quit the land of French cooks and Italian singers, of pleasant day saunterings, of cheerful lunch parties, and moonlight rambles by the murmuring sea. Mr. Banks had the distinguished honour of entertaining Mr. Levison, but lately returned from Melbourne, and engaged in starting two or three thousand head of fat cattle for that market. He had come round by Rainbar, he said, on purpose to take delivery of the Freemans‘land, but he, Charley Banks, thought it more likely that he wanted to see old ‘BI’ (who looked splendid, with a crest like a lion), and whom he rode away in triumph. He handed over the deeds of all the Freemans‘conditional purchases to him to give to Mr. Neuchamp, saying that he hoped he wouldn’t do that sort of thing again, as he might not come out of it right another time.

Mr. Banks further related that he had volunteered as his deliberate opinion, from what he had noticed about the Victorian gold mines, that the yield of gold would last many years, during which time stock would continue to be high in price, although there might be temporary depressions. As a consequence of which state of things, the sooner every one bought all the store stock they could lay hands on the better. ‘“My word,” he said, “it was a lucky drop-in—not for them though—that I picked you up those Freeman cattle, not to speak of the ‘circle dots.’ There will be no more eight-and-sixpenny store cattle, or fifteen-bob ones either—two pounds for cows, and fifty shillings and three pounds for good steers and bullocks will be more like it, and they will pay at that price too. But what I want you to tell Mr. Neuchamp is this. I’d write to him, but I’m in a hurry off, and you can do it quite as well, if you’re careful and attend to what I tell you.

‘“I’ve just had information that the Sydney people who have got the agency of the Mildool run, that joins you, are going to sell. They’ve got it into their wise heads that cattle have seen their top, because they’re worth five pounds all round, that is, with stations; and because they’re old-fashioned Sydney-siders that never heard of such a price since the days when they used to bring buffaloes from India.

‘“They believe that Victoria is choke-full of Yankees and diggers, stowaways and emigrants, and that the whole thing will ‘bust up’ directly, and let down prices everywhere to what they were before the gold.

‘“People that travel, and keep their eyes open, know what foolishness all this sort of thing is. A regular Sydney man thinks all Victorians are blowers and speculators. A regular Victorian thinks all Sydney men are old-fashioned, slow prigs who wouldn’t spend a guinea to save five pounds. The truth is pretty near the middle. Don’t you stick at home all your life, like a mallee scrubber, that has only one dart, on the plain and back to his scrub, and then you won’t run away with the notion that because a man is born on one side of a river and not on the other, he ain’t as clever, or as sensible, or as good a hand at making money or saving it, as you are. It’s only country-bred, country-reared folks that think that way.

‘“What I want you to tell the boss is this. He’d better set old Paul Frankston to get a quiet offer of this Mildool with four thousand odd head—it will carry about seven or eight—and if they’ll take four-fifteen or five pound all round, ram ’em with it at once. Tell Neuchamp he can send that native chap to manage it, and it will be the best day’s work he’s done for some time. Tell him Ab. Levison said so. Good-bye. You take a run down to Melbourne next chance you get of a holiday, and don’t stay out here till you get the Darling rot. Good-bye.”

‘And so he cantered off on old “BI.” Levison don’t go in for much talk in a general way, but when he once begins he don’t leave off so easy. I thought he was going to talk all night, and so lose a day. But catch him at that. I think I’ve told you every word he said, for I went and wrote it down as soon as he went away.‘

So far Mr. Banks. Upon the receipt of his artless missive, Ernest went at once to Paul Frankston, and communicated to him the substance of the message of Mr. Levison.

‘This is putting on the pot, my dear boy,’ said he. ‘If anything happens to shake stock, Rainbar and Mildool will tumble down like a house of cards. But now the wind is dead fair, and we may venture on studding-sails—crowd on below and aloft. I back Levison’s opinion that it is the right time to buy before Sticker and Pugsley’s notion that it is the right time to sell.’

‘What sort of terms do you think they will require?’ asked Ernest, who was fired with the idea of consolidating into one magnificent property the two crack cattle runs of Rainbar and Mildool, the latter a grandly watered, splendidly grassed station, but wofully mismanaged according to old custom.

‘Half cash at least, and not very long dated bills either,’ said Paul, ‘but we can manage the cash on your security, as your name now stands high in the money market. As to the bills, tell them that I will endorse them. They won’t make any objection then.’

‘How much heavier is the load of my obligations to you to become?’ asked Ernest. ‘I feel as if I should never live to free myself from the debt I owe you already.’

‘Don’t trouble yourself, my dear boy,’ said the liberal endorser. ‘If things go well, nothing’s easier for you than to clear off every stiver of debt. See how you have been able to pay off Levison, principal and interest, out of that last lot of cattle, without a shade of difficulty. If the rise takes place which Levison and I and some more of us anticipate, why you, I, and he stand to win something very respectable. You can then give us all a cheque for the amount advanced, and the whole thing is over and finished. Until the drought broke up, I don’t deny that we all had to be very close-hauled, and lay-to a good deal from time to time; but now, with bullocks eight pounds a head, and fat sheep ten shillings—wool up too, and real property rising,—not to mention the shipping trade doubling every month,—why, if we can’t clap on sail, my boy, we never can, and what the ship can’t carry she may drag.’

The old man looked so thoroughly convinced of the truth of his convictions as he spoke, with the kindling eye and elevated visage of one resolved upon a hazardous but honourable enterprise, that Ernest Neuchamp, always prone to be influenced by contagious exaltation of sentiment, caught fire from his ardent mien and tone.

‘Well, so be it,’ he said; ‘I am content to sink or swim in the same boat with you and yours. We have Ab. Levison for a pilot, and he knows all the rocks and soundings of the pastoral deep sea from Penrith to Carpentaria, I should say. As you say there’s a time for all things, I think this is the time to back one’s opinion in reason and moderation. I will go and confront the agents for Mildool.’

Messrs. Sticker and Pugsley were steady-going, precise men of business of the old school. As stock and station agents they had always steadily set their faces against all outlay except for the merest necessaries of life. Bred to their business in the old times when stock were plentiful, labour cheap, and cash extremely hard to lay hold of in any shape or form, they struggled desperately against these new-fangled notions of ‘throwing away money uselessly,’ as they termed the comparatively large outlay which they occasionally heard of upon dams, wells, fencing, woolsheds, and washpens. Large profits had been made in the good old times, when such speculations would have gone nigh to have furnished a warrant de lunatico inquirendo. They did not see how it was all to be repaid. They doubted the management which comprehended such sinful extravagance; and they proposed to continue their time-honoured system, which made it imperative upon all stockholders who were unlucky enough to be in debt to them, to spend nothing, to live upon shepherds‘wages, and not to think of coming to town until times improved.

One wonders if it ever occurred to these snug-comfort loving cits, as daily they drove home to pleasant villas and luxurious surroundings—did it ever occur to them, after the second glass of old port, to what a life of wretchedness, solitude, and sordid surroundings their griping parsimony was condemning the unlucky exile from civilisation, who was hopelessly chained to their ledger? For him no beeswing port, no claret of Bordeaux. He drank his ‘Jack the Painter’ tea milkless, most probably, and flavoured with blackest sugar, occasionally stimulating his ideality with ration rum or villainous dark brandy. Though his the brain that planned, the hand that carried out long desert wayfarings of exploration—long, toilsome drudgeries of stock travelling to lone untrodden wilds; his the frame that withered, the eye that dimmed, the health that failed, the blood that flowed, ere the process of colonising, progression, and commercial extension was complete. Thus land was occupied, villages sprang up, inter-communication was established, and the wilderness subdued. All the magnificent results of civilisation were brought about over territories of incredible area by the intelligence, enterprise, and energy of one individual. And he, too often, when the battle was won, the standard hoisted, and the multitude pouring over the breach, found himself a beggared and a broken man.

Mr. Neuchamp, after due preliminaries, entered the office of Messrs. Sticker and Pugsley, with whom he had an interview by no means of a disagreeable character. The senior partner, an elderly, gray-haired personage, showed much of the formal politeness which is commonly thought to distinguish the gentleman of ‘the old school.’ He received Ernest courteously, begged that he would take a chair, alluded to the weather, deplored the arrival of the mosquitoes, to which the rain and the spring in conjunction had been jointly favourable, requested to know whom he had the honour of receiving, and finally desired information as to the particular mode in which he could be of service to him.

‘I have been informed,’ said Ernest, ‘that your firm are agents for the Mildool station, and that it is in the market. I have come to request that you will put it under offer to me, as I have some intention of purchasing a property of that sort.’

‘We have not as yet advertised it,’ replied Mr. Sticker; ‘still, you have been rightly informed that the station and stock are for sale. But we do not think of offering it upon the usual terms; our own opinion is, I do not disguise it from you, that present prices will not last. I have been many years in the colony, and such is my belief. Mr. Pugsley, whose opinion of the permanence of present high rates is better than mine, also believes that, with the properties entrusted to us, it is as well to be safe, and to take advantage of an opportunity that may never occur again. Our terms for Mildool are briefly these: We offer four thousand head of mixed cattle, above six months old, with, of course, the M[D] brand, at five pounds per head, everything given in. I am informed that the improvements are scanty and in bad repair; there are twenty stock horses, and a team of bullocks and dray, two huts, and a stockyard. But, perhaps, you know the property, and the appearance of the buildings.’

‘The huts are old and bad,’ said Ernest, smiling; ‘and as for the stockyard, the Mildool stockmen have for the last few years brought their cattle to our yard for safety, as you could kick down the Mildool yard anywhere. But what is your idea of terms?’

‘Half cash, and the balance in approved bills, at one and two years, secured upon the stock and station.’

‘Rather stiff,’ said Ernest; ‘but will you put the offer in writing, and leave it open for a week? I will before that time give you a decided answer.’

Mr. Sticker would have much pleasure in doing so. As Ernest preferred to wait for the important document, it was soon prepared, and he finally marched away with a fortune, as it turned out (fate and opportunity are queer things), in his waistcoat pocket. He was not too quick in his conditional annexation of this desirable territory. Ten minutes afterwards Mr. Hardy Baldacre dashed into the office on the same errand, quitting it with a curse which shocked Mr. Sticker, and provoked Mr. Pugsley, who was young and athletic, to inform him that he must not suppose that his money provided him the permission to be rude, though it did procure him consideration far beyond his deserts. Altogether, Mr. Baldacre felt as if his brandy-and-soda had been scarcely so efficacious as usual that morning.

When Mr. Neuchamp produced this small but important document to Paul Frankston, that commercial mentor rubbed his hands with unconcealed satisfaction.

‘You’ve got ’em, Ernest, my boy, hard and fast. I believe you might make a pound a head, say four thousand pounds out of it, in a month. Sticker is a good man, according to his light, and Pug’s a sharp fellow. But they don’t see, and won’t see, the signs of the times. They’re always remembering the old boiling-down days, and they fancy that the least change in markets will send us back to it. You did right to get the offer in writing, and for a deferred time. We’ll keep it a day or two, and then you shall go and accept the terms like a man.’

‘But how about the money?’ inquired Mr. Neuchamp with a shade of natural anxiety. ‘Twenty thousand pounds are no nutshells, however little it may sound in these extravagant days.’

‘Look here,’ said Paul, ‘find this ten thousand down; any agent will give you five thousand on the security of your year’s draft of fat stock from the two runs; it will come to more, I daresay, but we must be as careful as we can. I think that you will have to give a mortgage over Rainbar and Mildool—a second one—and then you may draw a cheque for the ten thousand as soon as you like.’

‘And what about the “approved” bills?‘

‘Well, the day after to-morrow you can go to old Sticker and pay him the half cash. I’ll put the cash part of it through; ask him to make out the bills, with interest added at 8 per cent; bring them to me, and I will put a name on the back which will render them legal tender, whatever may come of them after.’

‘The old story since I came to Australia,’ said Ernest. ‘It seems that I can do nothing without your advice; and that your help follows me as a natural consequence—whatever I do, and whatever I buy.’

‘Well, if this shot turns out badly,’ said Paul, ‘I’ll promise not to back your bills any more. Will that satisfy you? But Levison seems quite determined, “just this once,” as the children say, and I generally take his tip if I see a chance. I think our money is on the right horse.‘

‘I hope so,’ said Ernest, thinking, respectfully, of the lovely condition of Rainbar at the moment, and fearing lest, by any financial legerdemain, it might be taken away from him in time to come.

Before the week was ended, during which the offer of Mildool was open for his acceptance, Mr. Neuchamp had the satisfaction of handing Mr. Sticker a cheque for ten thousand pounds, which he had been obligingly permitted by his banker to draw against certain securities, and also two bills, with interest added at the rate of 8 per cent, for the balance. Upon which somewhat important documents being well scanned and examined, and further submitted to Mr. Pugsley, who was on that occasion introduced, Ernest received an order to obtain delivery of the Mildool station, having twenty-four miles frontage to the river, and going thirty miles back, with four thousand head of cattle, more or less, depasturing thereon, the same to be mustered and counted over in six weeks; any cattle deficient to be paid for by Sticker and Pugsley, at the rate of two-pounds-ten per head, and all cattle in excess to be taken by the purchaser at that price. When this transaction was concluded—on paper, Mr. Neuchamp began to realise that he was having pastoral greatness thrust upon him.

Speculation is a grandly exciting occupation, when all goes well. When the bark is launched, mayhap with tremulous hope, perchance with the reckless pride of youth, there is a wondrously intoxicating triumph in noting the gradual, ever-deep, engine-flowing tide, the steady, favourable gale before which the galley which carried CÆsar and his fortunes ‘walks the waters like a thing of life,’ and finally conveys the illustrious freight to one of the fair havens of the gracious goddess Success. A triumph is decreed to CÆsar. Immediately CÆsar’s critics become bland, his enemies fangless, his friends are pacified—they are always the most difficult personages to assuage; his detractors go and detract from others; his creditors burn incense before him; his feminine acquaintances dress at him, talk at him, sing at him, and look at him—oh! so differently.

CÆsar needs all of his unusually powerful mental attributes if he does not become abominably conceited, and straightway refer the kindness of circumstance to his own inherent talent for calculation and brilliant combination. Let him haste to place yet higher stakes upon the tables, and after the usual fluctuation and flattery of the Fiend, he arises one day ruined, undone, and despised by himself, neglected by others.

The fate of Ernest Neuchamp could never thus be told. Naturally too prudent in pecuniary matters to go much further than he had good warrant for, he was even alarmed at his present comparatively risky position. But he had adopted the advice of his best friend, whose former counsels had been accurately borne out in successful practice. He had taken time to consider. Wiser heads than his own were committed to the same results; and he was according to his custom, prepared to dismiss anxiety, and to await the issue.

Nor was he minded on this account to cut short his stay in Sydney. He determined, in accordance with his own feelings and Mr. Levison’s suggestion, to give the management of the new station to his faithful henchman Jack Windsor, who, now that he was married and settled, would be all the better fitted to undertake a position of responsibility. As for Charley Banks, he should retain him as general manager of Rainbar. He ought not even to live there always himself. If it kept on raining and elevating the fat cattle market ad infinitum, the place could be managed with a ‘long arm.’ No reason to bury himself there for ever. He might even run home to England for a year or so.

Meanwhile it was not unpleasant to be congratulated at the club upon his improved prospects, and his spirited purchase of so extensive and well-known a property as Mildool. He commenced to divide the honour of rapid operation with Mr. Parklands, and found from day to day offers awaiting him of desirable properties situated north, south, east, and west, with any quantity and variety of stock, and of every sort and description of climate and ‘country.’ Mr. Parklands, to the ineffable disgust of Jermyn Croker, had already sold Booroo-booroo and Chatsworth at a profit of six thousand pounds, which Mr. Croker said he regarded as being taken out of his pocket, so to speak. Parklands had, moreover, the coolness to say that, if it had been worth his while to keep two such small stations on hand for a longer time, he could have made ten thousand as easily as the six. Mr. Croker objected to the claret and cookery more pointedly than usual that day, and the committee and the house steward had an evil time of it; that is, as far as contemptuous reference may have affected them.

Mr. Parklands, now truly in his element, indulged his fancy for unlimited speculation and locomotion to the fullest extent. He filled the Melbourne markets with store stock and fat stock, horses and sheep, working bullocks and milch cows, every possible variety of animal, except goats and swine. It was asserted that he did consider the nanny question, and calculated roughly whether a steamer-load of those miniature milchers would not pay decently. He ransacked Tasmania for oats, palings, and jam, and, no doubt, would have largely imported that other interesting product, of which the sister island has always yielded so bounteous a supply, could he have seen his way to a clearing-off sale when he landed the cargo. Finally, he dashed off to Adelaide for a slap at copper, and having taken a contract for ‘ship cattle’ for New Zealand, paused, like another Alexander, awaiting the discovery of fresh colonies in which he might revel in still more colossal operations.