AT the end of six months George Fielding's stock had varied thus. Four hundred lambs, ten calves, fifteen cows, four hundred sheep. He had lost some sheep in lambing, and one cow in calving, but these casualties every feeder counts on; he had been lucky on the whole. He had sold about eighty sheep, and eaten a few but not many, and of his hundred pounds only five pounds were gone; against which and the decline in cows were to be placed the calves and lambs.

George considered himself eighty pounds richer in substance than six months ago. It so happened that on every side of George but one were nomads, shepherd-kings--fellows with a thousand head of horned cattle, and sheep like white pebbles by the sea; but on his right hand was another small bucolical, a Scotchman, who had started with less means than himself, and was slowly working his way, making a halfpenny and saving a penny after the manner of his nation. These two were mighty dissimilar, but they were on a level as to means and near neighbors, and that drew them together. In particular, they used to pay each other friendly visits on Sunday evenings, and McLaughlan would read a good book to George, for he was strict in his observances; but after that the pair would argue points of husbandry.

But one Sunday that George, admiring his stock, inadvertently proposed to him an exchange of certain animals, he rebuked the young man with awful gravity.

"Is this a day for warldly dealings?" said he. "Hoo div ye think to thrive gien y'offer your mairchandeeze o' the Sabba day!" George colored up to the eyes. "Ye'll may be no hae read the paurable o' the money changers i' the temple, no forgettin' a wheen warldly-minded chields that sell't doos, when they had mair need to be on their knees--or hearkening a religious discourse---or a bit psaum--or the like. Aweel, ye need na hong your heed yon gate neether. Ye had na the privileege of being born in Scoetland, ye ken--or nae doot ye'd hae kenned better, for ye are a decent lad--deed are ye. Aweel, stap ben led, and I'se let ye see a drap whisky. The like does na aften gang doon an Englishman's thrapple."

"Whisky? Well, but it seems to me if we didn't ought to deal we didn't ought to drink."

"Hout! tout! it is no forbedden to taste--thaat's nae sen that ever I heerd't-- C-way."

GEORGE heard of a farmer who was selling off his sheep about fifty miles off near the coast. George put money in his purse, rose at three, and walked the fifty miles with Carlo that day. The next he chaffered with the farmer, but they did not quite agree. George was vexed, but he knew it would not do to show it, so he strolled away carelessly toward the water. In this place the sea comes several miles inland, not in one sheet, but in a series of salt-water lakes very pretty.

George stood and admired the water and the native blacks paddling along in boats of bark no bigger than a cocked hat. These strips of bark are good for carriage and bad for carriage; I mean they are very easily carried on a man's back ashore, but they won't carry a man on the water so well, and sitting in them is like balancing on a straw. These absurd vehicles have come down to these blockheads from their fathers, so they won't burn them and build according to reason. They commonly paddle in companies of three; so then whenever one is purled the other two come on each side of him, each takes a hand and with amazing skill and delicacy they reseat him in his cocked hat, which never sinks--only purls. Several of these triads passed in the middle of the lake, looking to George like inverted capital "T's." They went a tremendous pace--with occasional stoppages when a purl occurred.

Presently a single savage appeared nearer the land and George could see his lithe, sinewy form and the grace and rapidity with which he urged his gossamer bark along. It was like a hawk--half a dozen rapid strokes of his wings and then a smooth glide for ever so far.

"Our savages would sit on the blade of a knife, I do think," was George's observation.

Now as George looked and admired blackee, it unfortunately happened that a mosquito flew into blackee's nostrils, which were much larger and more inviting--to a gnat--than ours. The aboriginal sneezed, and over went the ancestral boat.

The next moment he was seen swimming and pushing his boat before him. He was scarce a hundred yards from the shore when all of a sudden down he went. George was frightened and took off his coat, and was unlacing his boots--when the black came up again. "Oh, he was only larking," thought George. "But he has left his boat--and why, there he goes down again!" The savage made a dive and came up ten yards nearer the shore, but he kept his face parallel to it, and he was scarce a moment in sight before he dived again. Then a horrible suspicion flashed across George--"There is something after him!"

This soon became a fearful certainty. Just before he dived next time, a dark object was plainly visible on the water close behind him. George was wild with fear for poor blackee. He shouted at the monster, he shouted and beckoned to the swimmer; and last, snatching up a stone, he darted up a little bed of rock elevated about a yard above the shore. The next dive the black came up within thirty yards of this very place, but the shark came at him the next moment. He dived again, but before the fish followed him George threw a stone with great precision and force at him. It struck the water close by him as he turned to follow his prey; George jumped down and got several more stones, and held one foot advanced and his arm high in air. Up came the savage panting for breath. The fish made a dart, George threw a stone; it struck him with such fury on the shoulders that it span off into the air and fell into the sea forty yards off. Down went the man, and the fish after him. The next time they came up, to George's dismay, the sea-tiger showed no signs of being hurt and the man was greatly distressed. The moment he was above water George heard him sob, and saw the whites of his eyes, as he rolled them despairingly; and he could not dive again for want of breath. Seeing this, the shark turned on his back, and came at him with his white belly visible and his treble row of teeth glistening in a mouth like a red grave.

Rage as well as fear seized George Fielding, the muscles started on his brawny arm as he held it aloft with a heavy stone in it. The black was so hard pressed the last time, and so dead beat, that he could make but a short duck under the fish's back and come out at his tail. The shark did not follow him this time, but cunning as well as ferocious slipped a yard or two inshore, and waited to grab him; not seeing him, he gave a slap with his tail-fin, and reared his huge head out of water a moment to look forth. Then George Fielding, grinding his teeth with fury, flung his heavy stone with tremendous force at the creature's cruel eye. The heavy stone missed the eye by an inch or two, but it struck the fish on the nose and teeth with a force that would have felled a bullock.

"Creesh!" went the sea-tiger's flesh and teeth, and the blood squirted in a circle. Down went the shark like a lump of lead, literally felled by the crashing stroke.

"I've hit him! I've hit him!" roared George, seizing another stone. "Come here, quick! quick! before he gets the better of it."

The black swam like a mad thing to George. George splashed into the water up to his knee, and taking blackee under the arm-pits, tore him out of the water and set him down high and dry.

"Give us your hand over it, old fellow," cried George, panting and trembling. "Oh dear, my heart is in my mouth, it is!"

The black's eye seemed to kindle a little at George's fire, but all the rest of him was as cool as a cucumber. He let George shake his hand and said quietly, "Thank you, sar! Jacky thank you a good deal!" he added in the same breath; "suppose you lend me a knife, then we eat a good deal."

George lent him his knife, and to his surprise the savage slipped into the water again. His object was soon revealed; the shark had come up to the surface and was floating motionless. It was with no small trepidation George saw this cool hand swim gently behind him and suddenly disappear; in a moment, however, the water was red all round, and the shark turned round on his belly. Jacky swam behind, and pushed him ashore. It proved to be a young fish about six feet long; but it was as much as the men could do to lift it. The creature's nose was battered, and Jacky showed this to George, and let him know that a blow on that part was deadly to them. "You make him dead for a little while," said he, "so then I make him dead enough to eat;" and he showed where he had driven the knife into him in three places.

Jacky's next proceeding was to get some dry sticks and wood, and prepare a fire, which to George's astonishment he lighted thus. He got a block of wood, in the middle of which he made a little hole; then he cut and pointed a long stick, and inserting the point into the block, worked it round between his palms for some time and with increasing rapidity. Presently there came a smell of burning wood, and soon after it burst into a flame at the point of contact. Jacky cut slices of shark and toasted them. "Black fellow stupid fellow--eat 'em raw; but I eat 'em burn't, like white man."

He then told George he had often been at Sydney, and could "speak the white man's language a good deal," and must on no account be confounded with common black fellows. He illustrated his civilization by eating the shark as it cooked; that is to say, as soon as the surface was brown he gnawed it off, and put the rest down to brown again, and so ate a series of laminæ instead of a steak; that it would be cooked to the center if he let it alone was a fact this gentleman had never discovered; probably had never had the patience to discover.

George, finding the shark's flesh detestable, declined it, and watched the other. Presently he vented his reflections. "Well you are a cool one! half an hour ago I didn't expect to see you eating him--quite the contrary." Jacky grinned good-humoredly in reply.

When George returned to the farmer, the latter, who had begun to fear the loss of a customer, came at once to terms with him. The next day he started for home with three hundred sheep. Jacky announced that he should accompany him, and help him a good deal. George's consent was not given, simply because it was not asked. However, having saved the man's life, he was not sorry to see a little more of him.

It is usual in works of this kind to give minute descriptions of people's dress. I fear I have often violated this rule. However I will not in this case.

Jacky's dress consisted of, in front, a sort of purse made of rat-skin; behind, a bran new tomahawk and two spears.

George fancied this costume might be improved upon; he therefore bought from the farmer a second-hand coat and trousers and his new friend donned them with grinning satisfaction. The farmer's wife pitied George living by himself out there, and she gave him several little luxuries; a bacon-ham, some tea, and some orange-marmalade, and a little lump-sugar and some potatoes.

He gave the potatoes to Jacky to carry. They weighed but a few pounds. George himself carried about a quarter of a hundredweight. For all that the potatoes worried Jacky more than George's burden him. At last he loitered behind so long that George sat down and lighted his pipe. Presently up comes Niger with the sleeves of his coat hanging on each side of his neck and the potatoes in them. My lord had taken his tomahawk and chopped off the sleeves at the arm-pit; then he had sewed up their bottoms and made bags of them, uniting them at the other end by a string which rested on the back of his neck like a milkmaid's balance. Being asked what he had done with the rest of the coat, he told George he had thrown it away because it was a good deal hot.

"But it won't be hot at night, and then you will wish you hadn't been such a fool," said George, irate.

No, he couldn't make Jacky see this; being hot at the time Jacky could not feel the cold to come. Jacky became a hanger-on of George, and if he did little he cost little; and if a beast strayed he was invaluable, he could follow the creature for miles by a chain of physical evidence no single link of which a civilized man would have seen.

A quantity of rain having fallen and filled all the pools, George thought he would close with an offer that had been made him and swap one hundred and fifty sheep for cows and bullocks. He mentioned this intention to McLaughlan one Sunday evening. McLaughlan warmly approved his intention. George then went on to name the customer who was disposed to make the exchange in question. At this the worthy McLaughlan showed some little uneasiness and told George he might do better than deal with that person.

George said he should be glad to do better, but did not see how.

"Humph!" said McLaughlan, and fidgeted.

McLaughlan then invited George to a glass of grog, and while they were sipping he gave an order to his man.

McLaughlan inquired when the proposed negotiation was likely to take place. "To-morrow morning," said George. "He asked me to go over about it this afternoon, but I remembered the lesson you gave me about making bargains on this day, and I said 'To-morrow, farmer.'"

"Y're a guid lad," said the Scot demurely; "y're just as decent a body as ever I forgathered wi'--and I'm thinking it's a sin to let ye gang twa miles for mairchandeeze whan ye can hae it a hantle cheaper at your ain door."

"Can I? I don't know what you mean."

"Ye dinna ken what I mean? Maybe no."

Mr. McLaughlan fell into thought a while, and the grog being finished he proposed a stroll. He took George out into the yard, and there the first thing they saw was a score and a half of bullocks that had just been driven into a circle and were maintained there by two men and two dogs.

George's eye brightened at the sight and his host watched it. "Aweel," said he, "has Tamson a bonnier lot than yon to gie ye?"

"I don't know," said George dryly. "I have not seen his."

"But I hae--and he hasna a lot to even wi' them."

"I shall know to-morrow," said George. But he eyed McLaughlan's cattle with an expression there was no mistaking.

"Aweel," said the worthy Scot, "ye're a neebor and a decent lad ye are, sae I'll just speer ye ane question. Noo, mon," continued he in a most mellifluous tone and pausing at every word, "gien it were Monday--as it is the Sabba day--hoo mony sheep wud ye gie for yon bonnie beasties?"

George, finding his friend in this mind, pretended to hang back and to consider himself bound to treat with Thomson first. The result of all which was that McLaughlan came over to him at daybreak and George made a very profitable exchange with him.

At the end of six months more George found himself twice as rich in substance as at first starting; but instead of one hundred pounds cash he had but eighty. Still if sold up he would have fetched five hundred pounds. But more than a year was gone since he began on his own account. "Well," said George, "I must be patient and still keep doubling on, and if I do as well next year as last I shall be worth eight hundred pounds."

A month's dry hot weather came and George had arduous work to take water to his bullocks and to drive them in from long distances to his homestead, where, by digging enormous tanks, he had secured a constant supply. No man ever worked for a master as this rustic Hercules worked for Susan Merton. Prudent George sold twenty bullocks and cows to the first bidder. "I can buy again at a better time," argued he.

He had now one hundred and twenty-five pounds in hand. The drought continued and he wished he had sold more.

One morning Abner came hastily in and told him that nearly all the beasts and cows were missing. George flung himself on his horse and galloped to the end of his run. No signs of them--returning disconsolate he took Jacky on his crupper and went over the ground with him. Jacky's eyes were playing and sparkling all the time in search of signs. Nothing clear was discovered. Then at Jacky's request they rode off George's feeding-ground altogether and made for a little wood about two miles distant. "Suppose you stop here, I go in the bush," said Jacky.

George sat down and waited. In about two hours Jacky came back. "I've found 'em," said Jacky coolly.

George rose in great excitement and followed Jacky through the stiff bush, often scratching his hands and face. At last Jacky stopped and pointed to the ground, "There!"

"There? ye foolish creature," cried George; "that's ashes where somebody has lighted a fire; that and a bone or two is all I see."

"Beef bone," replied Jacky coolly. George started with horror. "Black fellow burn beef here and eat him. Black fellow a great thief. Black fellow take all your beef. Now we catch black fellow and shoot him suppose he not tell us where the other beef gone."

"But how am I to catch him? How am I even to find him?"

"You wait till the sun so; then black fellow burn more beef. Then I see the smoke; then I catch him. You go fetch the make-thunder with two mouths. When he see him that make him honest a good deal."

Off galloped George and returned with his double-barreled gun in about an hour and a half. He found Jacky where he had left him at the foot of a gumtree tall and smooth as an admiral's main-mast.

Jacky, who was coiled up in happy repose like a dog in warm weather, rose and with a slight yawn said, "Now I go up and look."

He made two sharp cuts on the tree with his tomahawk, and putting his great toe in the nick, rose on it, made another nick higher up, and holding the smooth stem put his other great toe in it, and so on till in an incredibly short time he had reached the top and left a staircase of his own making behind him. He had hardly reached the top when he slid down to the bottom again and announced that he had discovered what they were in search of.

George haltered the pony to the tree and followed Jacky, who struck farther into the wood. After a most disagreeable scramble at the other side of the wood Jacky stopped and put his finger to his lips. They both went cautiously out of the wood, and mounting a bank that lay under its shelter they came plump upon a little party of blacks, four male and three female. The women were seated round a fire burning beef and gnawing the outside laminæ, then putting it down to the fire again. The men, who always serve themselves first, were lying gorged--but at sight of George and Jacky they were on their feet in a moment and their spears poised in their hands.

Jacky walked down the bank and poured a volley of abuse into them. Between two of his native sentences he uttered a quiet aside to George, "Suppose black fellow lift spear you shoot him dead," and then abused them like pickpockets again and pointed to the make-thunder with two mouths in George's hand.

After a severe cackle on both sides the voices began to calm down like water going off the boil, and presently soft low gutturals passed in pleasant modulation. Then the eldest male savage made a courteous signal to Jacky that he should sit down and gnaw. Jacky on this administered three kicks among the gins and sent them flying, then down he sat and had a gnaw at their beef--George's beef, I mean. The rage of hunger appeased, he rose, and with the male savages took the open country. On the way he let George know that these black fellows were of his tribe, that they had driven off the cattle and that he had insisted on restitution--which was about to be made; and sure enough, before they had gone a mile they saw some beasts grazing in a narrow valley. George gave a shout of joy, but counting them he found fifteen short. When Jacky inquired after the others the blacks shrugged their shoulders. They knew nothing more than this, that wanting a dinner they had driven off forty bullocks; but finding they could only eat one that day they had killed one and left the others, of whom some were in the place they had left them; the rest were somewhere, they didn't know where--far less care. They had dined, that was enough for them.

When this characteristic answer reached George he clinched his teeth and for a moment felt an impulse to make a little thunder on their slippery black carcasses, but he groaned instead and said, "They were never taught any better."

Then Jacky and he set to work to drive the cattle together. With infinite difficulty they got them all home by about eleven o'clock at night. The next day up with the sun to find the rest. Two o'clock--and only one had they fallen in with, and the sun broiled so that lazy Jacky gave in and crept in under the beast for shade, and George was fain to sit on his shady side with moody brow and sorrowful heart.

Presently Jacky got up. "I find one," said he.

"Where? where?" cried George, looking all round. Jacky pointed to a rising ground at least six miles off.

George groaned, "Are you making a fool of me? I can see nothing but a barren hill with a few great bushes here and there. You are never taking those bushes for beasts?"

Jacky smiled with utter scorn. "White fellow stupid fellow; he see nothing."

"Well and what does black fellow see?" snapped George.

"Black fellow see a crow coming from the sun, and when he came over there he turned and went down and not get up again a good while. Then black fellow say, 'I tink.' Presently come flying one more crow from that other side where the sun is not. Black fellow watch him, and when he come over there he turn round and go down, too, and not get up a good while. Then black fellow say, 'I know.'"

"Oh, come along!" cried George.

They hurried on; but when they came to the rising ground and bushes Jacky put his finger to his lips. "Suppose we catch the black fellows that have got wings; you make thunder for them?"

He read the answer in George's eye. Then he took George round the back of the hill and they mounted the crest from the reverse side. They came over it and there at their very feet lay one of George's best bullocks, with tongue protruded, breathing his last gasp. A crow of the country was perched on his ribs, digging his thick beak into a hole he had made in his ribs, and another was picking out one of his eyes. The birds rose heavily, clogged and swelling with gore. George's eyes flashed, his gun went up to his shoulder, and Jacky saw the brown barrel rise slowly for a moment as it followed the nearest bird wobbling off with broad back invitingly displayed to the marksman. Bang! the whole charge shivered the ill-omened glutton, who instantly dropped riddled with shot like a sieve, while a cloud of dusky feathers rose from him into the air. The other, hearing the earthly thunder and Jacky's exulting whoop, gave a sudden whirl with his long wing and shot up into the air at an angle and made off with great velocity; but the second barrel followed him as he turned and followed him as he flew down the wind. Bang! out flew two handfuls of dusky feathers, and glutton No. 2 died in the air, and its carcass and expanded wings went whirling like a sheet of paper and fell on the top of a bush at the foot of the hill.

All this delighted the devil-may-care Jacky, but it may be supposed it was small consolation to George. He went up to the poor beast, who died even as he looked down on him.

"Drought, Jacky! drought!" said he--"it is Moses, the best of the herd. Oh, Moses, why couldn't you stay beside me? I'm sure I never let you want for water, and never would--you left me to find worse friends!" and so the poor simple fellow moaned over the unfortunate creature, and gently reproached him for his want of confidence in him that it was pitiful. Then suddenly turning on Jacky he said gravely, "Moses won't be the only one, I doubt."

The words were hardly out of his mouth before a loud moo proclaimed the vicinity of cattle. They ran toward the sound, and in a rocky hollow they found nine bullocks; and alas! at some little distance another lay dead. Those that were alive were panting with lolling tongues in the broiling sun. How to save them; how to get them home a distance of eight miles. "Oh! for a drop of water." The poor fools had strayed into the most arid region for miles round.

Instinct makes blunders as well as reason.--Bestiale est errare.

"We must drive them from this, Jacky, though half of them die by the way."

The languid brutes made no active resistance. Being goaded and beaten they got on their legs and moved feebly away.

Three miles the men drove them, and then one who had been already staggering more than the rest gave in and lay down, and no power could get him up again. Jacky advised to leave him. George made a few steps onward with the other cattle, but then he stopped and came back to the sufferer and sat down beside him disconsolate.

"I can't bear to desert a poor dumb creature. He can't speak, Jacky, but look at his poor frightened eye; it seems to say have you got the heart to go on and leave me to die for the want of a drop of water. Oh! Jacky, you that is so clever in reading the signs of Nature, have pity on the poor thing and do pray try and find us a drop of water. I'd run five miles and fetch it in my hat if you would but find it. Do help us, Jacky." And the white man looked helplessly up to the black savage, who had learned to read the small type of Nature's book and he had not.

Jacky hung his head. "White fellow's eyes always shut; black fellow's always open. We pass here before and Jacky look for water--look for everything. No water here. But," said he languidly, "Jacky will go up high tree and look a good deal." Selecting the highest tree near he chopped a staircase and went up it almost as quickly as a bricklayer mounts a ladder with a hod. At the top he crossed his thighs over the stem, and there he sat full half an hour; his glittering eye reading the confused page, and his subtle mind picking out the minutest syllables of meaning. Several times he shook his head. At last all of a sudden he gave a little start, and then a chuckle, and the next moment he was on the ground.

"What is it?"

"Black fellow stupid fellow--look too far off," and be laughed again for all the world like a jackdaw.

"What is it?"

"A little water; not much."

"Where is it? Where is it? Why don't you tell me where it is?"

"Come," was the answer.

Not forty yards from where they stood Jacky stopped and thrusting his hand into a tuft of long grass pulled out a short blue flower with a very thick stem. "Saw him spark from the top of the tree," said Jacky with a grin. "This fellow stand with him head in the air but him foot in the water. Suppose no water he die a good deal quick." Then taking George's hand he made him press the grass hard, and George felt moisture ooze through the herb.

"Yes, my hand is wet, but, Jacky, this drop won't save a beast's life without it is a frog's."

Jacky smiled and rose. "Where that wet came from more stay behind."

He pointed to other patches of grass close by, and following them showed George that they got larger and larger in a certain direction. At last he came to a hidden nook, where was a great patch of grass quite a different color, green as an emerald. "Water," cried Jacky, "a good deal of water." He took a jump and came down flat on his back on the grass, and sure enough, though not a drop of surface water was visible, the cool liquid squirted up in a shower round Jacky.

Nature is extremely fond of producing the same things in very different sizes. Here was a miniature copy of those large Australian lakes which show nothing to the eye but rank grass. You ride upon them a little way, merely wetting your horse's feet, but after a while the sponge gets fuller and fuller, and the grass shows symptoms of giving way, and letting you down to "bottomless perdition."

They squeezed out of this grass sponge a calabash full of water, and George ran with it to the panting beast. Oh! how he sucked it up, and his wild eye calmed, and the liquid life ran through all his frame!

It was hardly in his stomach before he got up of his own accord, and gave a most sonorous moo, intended no doubt to express the sentiment of "never say die."

George drove them all to the grassy sponge, and kept them there till sunset. He was three hours squeezing out water and giving it them before they were satisfied. Then in the cool of the evening he drove them safe home.

The next day one more of his strayed cattle found his way home. The rest he never saw again. This was his first dead loss of any importance; unfortunately, it was not the last.

The brutes were demoralized by their excursion, and being active as deer they would jump over anything and stray.

Sometimes the vagrant was recovered--often he was found dead; and sometimes he went twenty miles and mingled with the huge herds of some Croesus, and was absorbed like a drop of water and lost to George Fielding. This was a bitter blow. This was not the way to make the thousand pounds.

"Better sell them all to the first comer, and then I shall see the end of my loss. I am not one of your lucky ones. I must not venture."

A settler passed George's way driving a large herd of sheep and ten cows. George gave him a dinner and looked over his stock. "You have but few beasts for so many sheep," said he.

The other assented.

"I could part with a few of mine to you if you were so minded."

The other said he should be very glad, but he had no money to spare. Would George take sheep in exchange?

"Well," drawled George, "I would rather it had been cash, but such as you and I must not make the road hard to one another. Sheep I'll take, but full value."

The other was delighted, and nearly all George's bullocks became his for one hundred and fifty sheep.

George was proud of his bargain, and said, "That is a good thing for you and me, Susan, please God."

Now the next morning Abner came in and said to George, "I don't like some of your new lot--the last that are marked with a red V."

"Why, what is wrong about them?"

"Come and see."

He found more than one of the new sheep rubbing themselves angrily against the pen, and sometimes among one another.

"Oh dear!" said George, "I have prayed against this on my knees every night of my life, and it is come upon me at last. Sharpen your knife, Abner."

"What! must they all--"

"All the new lot. Call Jacky, he will help you; he likes to see blood. I can't abide it. One hundred and fifty sheep; eighteen-pennorth of wool, and eighteen-pennorth of fat when we fling 'em into the pot--that is all that is left to me of yesterday's deal."

Jacky was called.

"Now, Jacky," said George, "these sheep have got the scab of the country; if they get to my flock and taint it I am a beggar from that moment. These sheep are sure to die, so Abner and you are to kill them. He will show you how. I can't look on and see their blood and my means spilled like water. Susan, this is a black day for us!"

He went away and sat down upon a stone a good way off, and turned his back upon his house and his little homestead. This was not the way to make the thousand pounds.

The next day the dead sheep were skinned and their bodies chopped up and flung into the copper. The grease was skimmed as it rose, and set aside, and when cool was put into rough barrels with some salt and kept up until such time as a merchant should pass that way and buy it.

"Well!" said George, with a sigh, "I know my loss. But if the red scab had got into the large herd, there would have been no end to the mischief."

Soon after this a small feeder at some distance offered to change with McLaughlan. That worthy liked his own ground best, but willing to do his friend George a good turn he turned the man over to him. George examined the new place, found that it was smaller but richer and better watered, and very wisely closed with the proposal.

When he told Jacky that worthy's eyes sparkled.

"Black fellow likes another place. Not every day the same."

And in fact he let out that if this change had not occurred his intention had been to go a-hunting for a month or two, so weary had he become of always the same place.

The new ground was excellent, and George's hopes, lately clouded, brightened again. He set to work and made huge tanks to catch the next rain, and as heretofore did the work of two.

It was a sad thing to have to write to Susan and tell her that after twenty months' hard work he was just where he had been at first starting. One day, as George was eating his homely dinner on his knee by the side of his principal flock, he suddenly heard a tremendous scrimmage mixed with loud, abusive epithets from Abner. He started up, and there was Carlo pitching into a sheep who was trying to jam herself into the crowd to escape him. Up runs one of the sheep-dogs growling, but instead of seizing Carlo, as George thought he would, what does he do but fall upon another sheep, and spite of all their evasions the two dogs drove the two sheep out of the flock and sent them pelting down the hill. In one moment George was alongside Abner.

"Abner," said he, "how came you to let strange sheep in among mine?"

"Never saw them till the dog pinned them."

"You never saw them," said George reproachfully. "No, nor your dog either till my Carlo opened your eyes. A pretty thing for a shepherd and his dog to be taught by a pointer. Well," said George, "you had eyes enough to see whose sheep they were. Tell me that, if you please?"

Abner looked down.

"Why, Abner?"

"I'd as lieve bite off my tongue as tell you."

George looked uneasy and his face fell.

"A 'V.' Don't ye take on," said Abner. "They couldn't have been ten minutes among ours, and there were but two. And don't you blow me up, for such a thing might happen to the carefulest shepherd that ever was."

"I won't blow ye up, Will Abner," said George. "It is my luck not yours that has done this. It was always so. From a game of cricket upward I never had my neighbor's luck. If the flock are not tainted I'll give you five pounds, and my purse is not so deep as some. If they are, take your knife and drive it into my heart. I'll forgive you that as I do this. Carlo! let me look at you. See here, he is all over some stinking ointment. It is off those sheep. I knew it. 'Twasn't likely a pointer dog would be down on strange sheep like a shepherd's dog by the sight. 'Twas this stuff offended him. Heaven's will be done."

"Let us hope the best, and not meet trouble half way."

"Yes" said George feebly. "Let us hope the best."

"Don't I hear that Thompson has an ointment that cures the red scab?"

"So they say."

George whistled to his pony. The pony came to him. George did not treat him as we are apt to treat a horse--like a riding machine. He used to speak to him and caress him when he fed him and when he made his bed, and the horse followed him about like a dog.

In half an hour's sharp riding they were at Thompson's, an invaluable man that sold and bought animals, doctored animals, and kept a huge boiler in which bullocks were reduced to a few pounds of grease in a very few hours.

"You have an ointment that is good for the scab, sir?"

"That I have, farmer. Sold some to a neighbor of yours day before yesterday."

"Who was that?"

"A newcomer. Vesey is his name."

George groaned. "How do you use it, if you please?"

"Shear 'em close, rub the ointment well in, wash 'em every two days, and rub in again."

"Give me a stone of it."

"A stone of my ointment! Well! you are the wisest man I have come across this year or two. You shall have it, sir."

George rode home with his purchase.

Abner turned up his nose at it, and was inclined to laugh at George's fears. But George said to himself, "I have Susan to think of as well as myself. Besides," said he a little bitterly, "I haven't a grain of luck. If I am to do any good I must be twice as prudent and thrice as industrious as my neighbors or I shall fall behind them. Now, Abner, we'll shear them close."

"Shear them! Why it is not two months since they were all sheared."

"And then we will rub a little of this ointment into them."

"What! before we see any sign of the scab among them? I wouldn't do that if they were mine."

"No more would I if they were yours," replied George almost fiercely. "But they are not yours, Will Abner. They are unlucky George's."

During the next three days four hundred sheep were clipped and anointed. Jacky helped clip, but he would not wear gloves, and George would not let him handle the ointment without them, suspecting mercury.

At last George yielded to Abner's remonstrances, and left off shearing and anointing.

Abner altered his opinion when one day he found a sheep rubbing like mad against a tree, and before noon half a dozen at the same game. Those two wretched sheep had tainted the flock.

Abner hung his head when he came to George with this ill-omened news. He expected a storm of reproaches. But George was too deeply distressed for any petulances of anger. "It is my fault," said he, "I was the master, and I let my servant direct me. My own heart told me what to do, yet I must listen to a fool and a hireling that cared not for the sheep. How should he? they weren't his, they were mine to lose and mine to save. I had my choice, I took it, I lost them. Call Jacky and let's to work and save here and there one, if so be God shall be kinder to them than I have been."

From that hour there was but little rest morning, noon or night. It was nothing but an endless routine of anointing and washing, washing and anointing sheep. To the credit of Mr. Thompson it must be told that of the four hundred who had been taken in time no single sheep died; but of the others a good many. There are incompetent shepherds as well as incompetent statesmen and doctors, though not so many. Abner was one of these. An acute Australian shepherd would have seen the more subtle signs of this terrible disease a day or two before the patient sheep began to rub themselves with fury against the trees and against each other; but Abner did not; and George did not profess to have a minute knowledge of the animal, or why pay a shepherd? When this Herculean labor and battle had gone on for about a week, Abner came to George, and with a hang-dog look begged him to look out for another shepherd.

"Why, Will! surely you won't think to leave me in this strait? Why three of us are hardly able for the work, and how can I make head against this plague with only the poor sav--with only Jacky, that is first-rate at light work till he gets to find it dull--but can't lift a sheep and fling her into the water, as the like of us can?"

"Well, ye see," said Abner, doggedly, "I have got the offer of a place with Mr. Meredith, and he won't wait for me more than a week."

"He is a rich man, Will, and I am a poor one," said George in a faint, expostulating tone. Abner said nothing, but his face showed he had already considered this fact from his own point of view.

"He could spare you better than I can; but you are right to leave a falling house that you have helped to pull down."

"I don't want to go all in a moment. I can stay a week till you get another."

"A week! how can I get a shepherd in this wilderness at a week's notice? You talk like a fool."

"Well, I can't stay any longer. You know there is no agreement at all between us, but I'll stay a week to oblige you."

"You'll oblige me, will you?" said George, with a burst of indignation; "then oblige me by packing up your traps and taking your ugly face out of my sight before dinner-time this day. Stay, my man, here are your wages up to twelve o'clock to-day, take 'em and out of my sight, you dirty rascal. Let me meet misfortune with none but friends by my side. Away with you, or I shall forget myself and dirty my hands with your mean carcass."

The hireling slunk off, and as he slunk George stormed and thundered after him, "And wherever you may go, may sorrow and sickness--no!"

George turned to Jacky, who sat coolly by, his eyes sparkling at the prospect of a row. "Jacky!" said he, and then he seemed to choke, and could not say another word.

"Suppose I get the make-thunder, then you shoot him."

"Shoot him! what for?"

"Too much bungality,* shoot him dead. He let the sheep come that have my two fingers so on their backs;" here Jacky made a V with his middle and forefinger, "so he kill the other sheep--yet still you not shoot him--that so stupid I call."

* Stupidity.

"Oh Jacky, hush! don't you know me better than to think I would kill a man for killing my sheep. Oh fie! oh fie! No, Jacky, Heaven forbid I should do the man any harm; but when I think of what he has brought on my head, and then to skulk and leave me in my sore strait and trouble, me that never gave him ill language as most masters would; and then, Jacky, do you remember when he was sick how kind you and I were to him--and now to leave us. There, I must go into the house, and you come and call me out when that man is off the premises--not before."

At twelve o'clock selfish Abner started to walk thirty miles to Mr. Meredith's. Smarting under the sense of his contemptibleness and of the injury he was doing his kind, poor master, he shook his fist at the house and told Jacky he hoped the scab would rot the flock, and that done fall upon the bipeds, on his own black hide in particular. Jacky only answered with his eye. When the man was gone he called George.

George's anger had soon died. Jacky found him reading a little book in search of comfort, and when they were out in the air Jacky saw that his eyes were rather red.

"Why you cry?" said Jacky. "I very angry because you cry."

"It is very foolish of me," said George, apologetically, "but three is a small company, and we in such trouble; I thought I had made a friend of him. Often I saw he was not worth his wages, but out of pity I wouldn't part with him when I could better have spared him than he me, and now--there--no more about it. Work is best for a sore heart, and mine is sore and heavy, too, this day."

Jacky put his finger to his head, and looked wise. "First you listen me--this one time I speak a good many words. Dat stupid fellow know nothing, and so because you not shoot him a good way* behind--you very stupid. One," counted Jacky, touching his thumb, "he know nothing with these (pointing to his eyes). Jacky know possum,** Jacky know kangaroo, know turkey, know snake, know a good many, some with legs like dis (four fingers), some with legs like dis (two flngers)--dat stupid fellow know nothing but sheep, and not know sheep, let him die too much. Know nothing with 'um eyes. One more (touching his forefinger). Know nothing with dis (touching his tongue). Jacky speak him good words, he speak Jacky bad words. Dat so stupid--he know nothing with dis.

* Long ago.

** Opossum.

"One more. You do him good things--he do you bad things; he know nothing with these (indicating his arms and legs as the seat of moral action), so den because you not shoot him long ago now you cry; den because you cry Jacky angry. Yes, Jacky very good. Jacky a little good before he live with you. Since den very good--but when dat fellow know nothing, and now you cry at the bottom* part Jacky a little angry, and Jacky go hunting a little not much direckly."

*At last.

With these words the savage caught up his tomahawk and two spears, and was going across country without another word, but George cried out in dismay, "Oh, stop a moment! What! to-day, Jacky? Jacky, Jacky, now don't ye go to-day. I know it is very dull for the likes of you, and you will soon leave me, but don't ye go to-day; don't set me against flesh and blood altogether."

"I come back when the sun there," pointing to the east, "but must hunt a little, not much. Jacky uncomfortable," continued he, jumping at a word which from its size he thought must be of weight in any argument, "a good deal uncomfortable suppose I not hunt a little dis day."

"I say no more, I have no right--goodby, take my hand, I shall never see you any more.

"I shall come back when the sun there."

"Ah! well I daresay you think you will. Good-by, Jacky; don't you stay to please me."

Jacky glided away across country. He looked back once and saw George watching him. George was sitting sorrowful upon a stone, and as this last bit of humanity fell away from him and melted away in the distance his heart died within him. "He thinks he will come back to me, but when he gets in the open and finds the track of animals to hunt he will follow them wherever they go, and his poor shallow head won't remember this place nor me; I shall never see poor Jacky any more!"

The black continued his course for about four miles until a deep hollow hid him from George. Arrived here he instantly took a line nearly opposite to his first, and when he had gone about three miles on this tack he began to examine the ground attentively and to run about like a hound. After near half an hour of this he fell upon some tracks and followed them at an easy trot across the country for miles and miles, his eye keenly bent upon the ground.

OUR story has to follow a little way an infinitesimal personage.

Abner, the ungratefulish one, with a bundle tied up in a handkerchief, strode stoutly away toward Mr. Meredith's grazing ground. "I am well out of that place," was his reflection. As he had been only once over the ground before, he did not venture to relax his pace lest night should overtake him in a strange part. He stepped out so well that just before the sun set he reached the head of a broad valley that was all Meredith's. About three miles off glittered a white mansion set in a sea of pasture, studded with cattle instead of sails. "Ay! ay!" thought the ungratefulish one, no fear of the scab breaking up this master--"I'm all right now." As he chuckled over his prospects a dusky figure stole noiselessly from a little thicket--an arm was raised behind him--crosssh! a hard weapon came down on his skull, and he lay on his face with the blood trickling from his mouth and ears.

HE who a few months ago was so lighthearted and bright with hope now rose at daybreak for a work of Herculean toil as usual, but no longer with the spirit that makes labor light. The same strength, the same dogged perseverance were there, but the sense of lost money, lost time, and invincible ill-luck oppressed him; then, too, he was alone--everything had deserted him but misfortune.

"I have left my Susan and I have lost her--left the only friend I had or ever shall have in this hard world." This was his constant thought, as doggedly but hopelessly he struggled against the pestilence. Single-handed and leaden-hearted he had to catch a sheep, to fling her down, to hold her down, to rub the ointment into her, and to catch another that had been rubbed yesterday and take her to the pool and fling her in and keep her in till every part of her skin was soaked.

Four hours of this drudgery had George gone through single-handed and leaden-hearted, when as he knelt over a kicking, struggling sheep, he became conscious of something gliding between him and the sun; he looked up and there was Jacky grinning.

George uttered an exclamation: "What, come back! Well, now that is very good of you I call. How do you do?" and he gave him a great shake of the hand.

"Jacky very well, Jacky not at all uncomfortable after him hunt a little."

"Then I am very glad you have had a day's sport, leastways a night's, I call it, since it has made you comfortable, Jacky."

"Oh! yes, very comfortable now," and his white teeth and bright eye proclaimed the relief and satisfaction his little trip had afforded his nature.

"There, Jacky, if the ointment is worth the trouble it gives me rubbing of it in, that sheep won't ever catch the scab, I do think. Well, Jacky, seems to me I ought to ask your pardon--I did you wrong. I never expected you would leave the kangaroos and opossums for me once you were off. But I suppose fact is you haven't quite forgotten Twofold Bay."

"Two fool bay!" inquired Jacky, puzzled.

"Where I first fell in with you. You made one in a hunt that day, only instead of hunting you was hunted and pretty close, too, and if I hadn't been a good cricketer and learned to fling true-- Why, I do declare I think he has forgotten the whole thing, shark and all!"

At the word shark a gleam of intelligence came to the black's eye; it was succeeded by a look of wonder. "Shark come to eat me--you throw stone--so we eat him. I see him now a little--a very little--dat a long way off--a very long way off. Jacky can hardly see him when he try a good deal. White fellow see a long way off behind him back--dat is very curious."

George colored. "You are right, lad--it was a long while ago, and I am vexed for mentioning it. Well, any way you are come back and you are welcome. Now you shall do a little of the light work, but I'll do all the heavy work because I'm used to it;" and indeed poor George did work and slave like Hercules; forty times that day he carried a full-sized sheep in his hands a distance of twenty yards and flung her into the water and splashed in and rubbed her back in the water.

The fourth day after Jacky's return George asked him to go all over the ground and tell him how many sheep he saw give signs of the fatal disorder.

About four o'clock in the afternoon Jacky returned driving before him with his spear a single sheep. The agility of both the biped and quadruped were droll; the latter every now and then making a rapid bolt to get back to the pasture and Jacky bounding like a buck and pricking her with a spear.

For the first time he found George doing nothing. "Dis one scratch um back--only dis one."

"Then we have driven out the murrain and the rest will live. A hard fight! Jacky, a hard fight! but we have won it at last. We will rub this one well; help me put her down, for my head aches."

After rubbing her a little George said, "Jacky, I wish you would do it for me, for my head do ache so I can't abide to hold it down and work, too."

After dinner they sat and looked at the sheep feeding. "No more dis," said Jacky gayly, imitating a sheep rubbing against a tree.

"No! I have won the day; but I haven't won it cheap. Jacky, that fellow, Abner, was a bad man--an ungrateful man."

These words George spoke with a very singular tone of gravity.

"Never you mind you about him."

"No! I must try to forgive him; we are all great sinners; is it cold to-day?"

"No! it is a good deal hot

"I thought it must, for the wind is in a kindly quarter. Well, Jacky, I am as cool as ice."

"Dat very curious."

"And my head do ache so I can hardly bear myself."

"You ill a little--soon be well."

"I doubt I shall be worse before I am better."

"Never you mind you. I go and bring something I know. We make it hot with water, den you drink it; and after dat you a good deal better."

"Do, Jacky. I won't take doctor's stuff; it is dug out of the ground and never was intended for man's inside. But you get me something that grows in sight and I'll take that; and don't be long, Jacky--for I am not well."

Jacky returned toward evening with a bundle of simples. He found George shivering over a fire. He got the pot and began to prepare an infusion. "Now you soon better," said he.

"I hope so, Jacky," said George very gravely, "thank you, all the same. Jacky, I haven't been not to say dry for the last ten days with me washing the sheep, and I have caught a terrible chill--a chill like death; and, Jacky, I have tried too much--I have abused my strength. I am a very strong man as men go, and so was my father; but he abused his strength--and he was took just as I am took now, and in a week he was dead. I have worked hard ever since I came here, but since Abner left me at the pinch it hasn't been man's work, Jacky; it has been a wrestling-match from dawn to dark. No man could go on so and not break down; but I wanted so to save the poor sheep. Well, the sheep are saved; but--"

When Jacky's infusion was ready he made George take it and then lie down. Unfortunately the attack was too violent to yield to this simple remedy. Fever was upon George Fielding--fever in his giant shape; not as he creeps over the weak, but as he rushes on the strong. George had never a headache in his life before. Fever found him full of blood and turned it all to fire. He tossed--he raged--and forty-eight hours after his first seizure the strong man lay weak as a child, except during those paroxysms of delirium which robbed him of his reason while they lasted, and of his strength when they retired.

On the fourth day---after a raging paroxysm--he became suddenly calm, and looking up saw Jacky seated at some little distance, his bright eye fixed upon him.

"You better now?" inquired he, with even more than his usual gentleness of tone. "You not talk stupid things any more?"

"What, Jacky, are you watching me?" said the sick man. "Now I call that very kind of you. Jacky, I am not the man I was--we are cut down in a day like the ripe grass. How long is it since I was took ill?"

"One, one, one, and one more day."

"Ay! Ay! My father lasted till the fifth day, and then--Jacky!"

"Here Jacky! what you want?"

"Go out on the hill and see whether any of the sheep are rubbing themselves."

Jacky went out and soon returned.

"Not see one rub himself."

A faint gleam lighted George's sunken eye. "That is a comfort. I hope I shall be accepted not to have been a bad shepherd, for I may say 'I have given my life for my sheep.' Poor things."

George dozed. Toward evening he awoke, and there was Jacky just where he had seen him last. "I didn't think you had cared so much for me, Jacky, my boy."

"Yes, care very much for you. See, um make beef-water for you a good deal."

And sure enough he had boiled down about forty pounds of beef and filled a huge calabash with the extract, which he set by George's side.

"And why are you so fond of me, Jacky? It isn't on account of my saving your life, for you had forgotten that. What makes you such a friend to me?"

"I tell you. Often I go to tell you before, but many words dat a good deal trouble. One--when you make thunder the bird always die. One--you take a sheep so and hold him up high. Um never see one more white fellow able do dat. One--you make a stone go and hit thing; other white fellow never hit. One--little horse come to you; other white fellow go to horse--horse run away. Little horse run to you, dat because you so good. One--Carlo fond of you. All day now he come in and go out, and say so (imitating a dog's whimper). He so uncomfortable because you lie down so. One--when you speak to Jacky you not speak big like white fellow, you speak small and like a fiddle--dat please Jacky's ear.

"One--when you look at Jacky always your face make like a hot day when dere no rain--dat please Jacky's eye; and so when Jacky see you stand up one day a good deal high and now lie down--dat makes him uncomfortable; and when he see you red one day and white dis day--dat make him uncomfortable a good deal; and when he see you so beautiful one day and dis day so ugly--dat make him so uncomfortable, he afraid you go away and speak no more good words to Jacky--and dat make Jacky feel a thing inside here (touching his breast), no more can breathe--and want to do like the gin, but don't know how. Oh, dear! don't know how!"

"Poor Jacky! I do wish I had been kinder to you than I have. Oh, I am very short of wind, and my back is very bad!"

"When black fellow bad in um back he always die," said Jacky very gravely.

"Ay," said George quietly. "Jacky, will you do one or two little things for me now?"

"Yes, do um all."

"Give me that little book that I may read it. Thank you. Jacky, this is the book of my religion; and it was given to me by one I love better than all the world. I have disobeyed her--I have thought too little of what is in this book and too much of this world's gain. God forgive me! and I think He will, because it was for Susan's sake I was so greedy of gain."

Jacky looked on awestruck as George read the book of his religion. "Open the door, Jacky."

Jacky opened the door; then coming to George's side, he said with an anxious, inquiring look and trembling voice, "Are you going to leave me, George?"

"Yes, Jacky, my boy," said George, "I doubt I am going to leave you. So now thank you and bless you for all kindness. Put your face close down to mine-there--I don't care for your black skin--He who made mine made yours; and I feel we are brothers, and you have been one to me. Good-by, dear, and don't stay here. You can do nothing more for your poor friend George."

Jacky gave a little moan. "Yes, um can do a little more before he go and hide him face where there are a good deal of trees."

Then Jacky went almost on tiptoe, and fetched another calabash full of water and placed it by George's head. Then he went very softly and fetched the heavy iron which he had seen George use in penning sheep, and laid it by George's side; next he went softly and brought George's gun, and laid it gently by George's side down on the ground.

This done he turned to take his last look of the sick man now feebly dozing, the little book in his drooping hand. But as he gazed nature rushed over the poor savage's heart and took it quite by surprise. Even while bending over his white brother to look his last farewell, with a sudden start he turned his back on him, and sinking on his hams he burst out crying and sobbing with a wild and terrible violence.

FOR near an hour Jacky sat upon the ground, his face averted from his sick friend, and cried; then suddenly he rose, and without looking at him went out at the door, and turning his face toward the great forests that lay forty miles distant eastward, he ran all the night, and long before dawn was hid in the pathless woods.

A white man feels that grief, when not selfish, is honorable, and unconsciously he nurses such grief more or less; but to simple-minded Jacky grief was merely a subtle pain, and to be got rid of as quickly as possible, like any other pain.

He ran to the vast and distant woods, hoping to leave George's death a long way behind him, and so not see what caused his pain so plain as he saw it just now. It is to be observed that he looked upon George as dead. The taking into his hand of the book of his religion, the kind embrace, the request that the door might be opened, doubtless for the disembodied spirit to pass out, all these rites were understood by Jacky to imply that the last scene was at hand. Why witness it? it would make him still more uncomfortable. Therefore he ran, and never once looked back, and plunged into the impenetrable gloom of the eastern forests.

The white man had left Fielding to get a richer master. The half-reasoning savage left him to cure his own grief at losing him. There he lay abandoned in trouble and sickness by all his kind. But one friend never stirred; a single-hearted, single-minded, non-reasoning friend.

Who was this pure-minded friend? A dog.

Carlo loved George. They had lived together, they had sported together, they had slept together side by side on the cold, hard deck of the Phoenix, and often they had kept each other warm, sitting crouched together behind a little bank or a fallen tree, with the wind whistling and the rain shooting by their ears.

When day after day George came not out of the house, Carlo was very uneasy. He used to patter in and out all day, and whimper pitifully, and often he sat in the room where George lay and looked toward him and whined. But now when his master was left quite alone his distress and anxiety redoubled; he never went ten yards away from George. He ran in and out moaning and whining, and at last he sat outside the door and lifted up his voice and howled day and night continually. His meaner instincts lay neglected; he ate nothing; his heart was bigger than his belly; he would not leave his friend even to feed himself. And still day and night without cease his passionate cry went up to heaven.

What passed in that single heart none can tell for certain but his Creator; nor what was uttered in that deplorable cry; love, sorrow, perplexity, dismay--all these perhaps, and something of prayer--for still he lifted his sorrowful face toward heaven as he cried out in sore perplexity, distress, and fear for his poor master--oh! o-o-o-h! o-o-o-o-h! o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-h!

So we must leave awhile poor, honest, unlucky George, sick of a fever, ten miles from the nearest hut.

Leather-heart has gone from him to be a rich man's hireling.

Shallow-heart has fled to the forest, and is hunting kangaroos with all the inches of his soul.

Single-heart sits fasting from all but grief before the door, and utters heartrending, lamentable cries to earth and heaven.

---- JAIL is still a grim and castellated mountain of masonry, but a human heart beats and a human brain throbs inside it now.

Enter without fear of seeing children kill themselves, and bearded men faint like women, or weep like children--horrible sights.

The prisoners no longer crouch and cower past the officers, nor the officers look at them and speak to them as if they were dogs, as they do in most of these places, and used to here.

Open this cell. A woman rises with a smile! why a smile? Because for months an open door has generally let in what is always a great boon to a separate prisoner--a human creature with a civil word. We remember when an open door meant "way for a ruffian and a fool to trample upon the solitary and sorrowful!"

What is this smiling personage doing? as I live she is watchmaking! A woman watchmaking, with neat and taper fingers, and a glass at her eye sometimes, but not always, for in vision as well as in sense of touch and patience nature has been bounteous to her. She is one of four. Eight, besides these four, were tried and found incapable of excellence in this difficult craft. They were put to other things; for permanent failures are not permitted in ---- Jail. The theory is that every home can turn some sort of labor to profit.

Difficulties occur often. Impossibilities will bar the way now and then; but there are so few real impossibilities. When a difficulty arises, the three hundred industrious arts and crafts are freely ransacked for a prisoner; ay!--ransacked as few rich men would be bothered to sift the seven or eight liberal professions in order to fit a beloved son.

Here, as in the world, the average of talent is low. The majority can only learn easy things, and vulgar things, and some can do higher things and a few can do beautiful things, and one or two have developed first-rate gifts and powers.

There are 25 shoemakers (male); 12 tailors, of whom 6 female; 24 weavers, of whom 10 female; 4 watchmakers, all female; 6 printers and composers, 5 female; 4 engrainers of wood, 2 female. (In this art we have the first artist in Britain, our old acquaintance, Thomas Robinson. He has passed all his competitors by a simple process. Beautiful specimens of all the woods have been placed and kept before him, and for a month he has been forced to imitate nature with his eye never off her. His competitors in the world imitate nature from memory, from convention, or from tradition. By such processes truth and beauty are lost at each step down the ladder of routine. Mr. Eden gave clever Tom at first starting the right end of the stick, instead of letting him take the wrong.) Nine joiners and carpenters, 3 female; 3 who color prints downright well, 1 female; 2 painters, 1 female; 3 pupils shorthand writing, 1 female.

[Fancy these attending the Old Bailey and taking it all down solemn as judges.]

Workers in gutta-percha, modelers in clay, washers and getters-up of linen, hoe-makers, spade-makers, rake-makers, woodcarvers, stonecutters, bakers, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. Come to the hard-labor yard. Do you see those fifteen stables? there lurk in vain the rusty cranks; condemned first as liars they fell soon after into disrepute as weapons of half-science to degrade minds and bodies. They lurk there grim as the used-up giants in "Pilgrim's Progress," and like them can't catch a soul.

Hark to the music of the shuttle and the useful loom. We weave linen, cotton, woolen, linsey-woolsey, and, not to be behind the rogues outside, cottonsey-woolsey and cottonsey-silksey; damask we weave, and a little silk and poplin, and Mary Baker velvet itself for a treat now and then. We of the loom relieve the county of all expense in keeping us, and enrich a fund for taking care of discharged industrious prisoners until such time as they can soften prejudices and obtain lucrative employment. The old plan was to kick a prisoner out and say:

"There, dog! go without a rap among those who will look on you as a dog and make you starve or steal. We have taught you no labor but crank, and as there are no cranks in the outside world, the world not being such an idiot as we are, you must fill your belly by means of the only other thing you have ever been taught--theft."

Now the officers take leave of a discharged prisoner in English. Farewell; good-by!--a contraction for God be wi' ye--etc. It used to be in French, Sans adieu! au revoir! and the like.

Having passed the merry, useful looms open this cell. A she-thief looks up with an eye six times as mellow as when we were here last. She is busy gilding. See with what an adroit and delicate touch the jade slips the long square knife under the gossamer gold-leaf which she has blown gently out of the book--and turns it over; and now she breathes gently and vertically on the exact center of it, and the fragile yet rebellious leaf that has rolled itself up like a hedgehog is flattened by that human zephyr on the little leathern easel. Now she cuts it in three with vertical blade; now she takes her long flat brush and applies it to her own hair once or twice; strange to say the camel-hair takes from this contact a soupçon of some very slight and delicate animal oil, which enables the brush to take up the gold-leaf, and the artist lays a square of gold in its place on the plaster bull she is gilding. Said bull was cast in the prison by another female prisoner who at this moment is preparing a green artificial meadow for the animal to stand in. These two girls had failed at the watchmaking. They had sight and the fine sensation of touch required, but they lacked the caution, patience and judgment so severe an art demanded; so their talents were directed elsewhere. This one is a first-rate gilder, she mistressed it entirely in three days.

The last thing they did in this way was an elephant. Cost of casting him, reckoning labor and the percentage he ought to pay to the mold, was 1s. 4d. Plaster, chrome, water-size and oil-size, 3d.; goldleaf, 3s.; 1 foot of German velvet, 4d.; thread, needles and wear of tools, 1d.; total, 5s.

Said gold elephant standing on a purple cushion was subjected to a severe test of his value. He was sent to a low auction room in London. There he fell to the trade at 18s. This was a "knock-out" transaction; twelve buyers had agreed not to bid against one another in the auction room, a conspiracy illegal but customary. The same afternoon these twelve held one of their little private unlawful auctions over him; here the bidding was like drops of blood oozing from flints, but at least it was bona-fide, and he rose to 25s. The seven shillings premium was divided among the eleven sharpers. Sharper No. 12 carried him home and sold him the very next day for 37s. to a lady who lived in Belgravia, but shopped in filthy alleys, misled perhaps by the phrase "dirt cheap."

Mr. Eden conceived him, two detected ones made him at a cost of 5s., twelve undetected ones caught him first for 18s., and now he stands in Belgravia, and the fair ejaculate over him, "What a duck!"

The aggregate of labor to make and gild this elephant was not quite one woman's work (12 hours). Taking 18s. as the true value of the work, for in this world the workman has commonly to sell his production under the above disadvantages, forced sale and the conspiracies of the unimprisoned--we have still 13s. for a day's work by a woman.

From the bull greater things are expected. The cast is from the bull of the Vatican, a bull true to Nature, and Nature adorned the very meadows when she produced the bull. What a magnificent animal is a bull! what a dewlap! what a front! what clean pasterns! what fearless eyes! what a deep diapason is his voice! of which beholding this his true and massive effigy in ---- Jail we are reminded. When he stands muscular, majestic, sonorous, gold, in his meadow pied with daisies, it shall not be "sweet" and "love" and "duck"--words of beauty but no earthly signification; it shall be, "There, I forgive Europa."

And need I say there were more aimed at in all this than pecuniary profit. Mr. Eden held that the love of production is the natural specific antidote to the love of stealing. He kindled in his prisoners the love of producing, of what some by an abuse of language call "creating." And the producers rose in the scale of human beings. Their faces showed it--the untamed look melted away--the white of the eye showed less, and the pupil and iris more, and better quality.

Gold-leaf when first laid on adheres in visible squares with uncouth edges, a ragged affair; then the gilder takes a camelhair brush and under its light and rapid touch the work changes as under a diviner's rod, so rapidly and majestically come beauty and finish over it. Perhaps no other art has so delicious a one minute as this is to the gilder. The first work our prisoner gilded she screamed with delight several times at this crisis. She begged to have the work left in her cell one day at least. "It lights up the cell and lights up my heart."

"Of course it does," said Mr. Eden. "Aha! what, there are greater pleasures in the world than sinning, are there?"

"That there are. I never was so pleased in my life. May I have it a few minutes?"

"My child, you shall have it till its place is taken by others like it. Keep it before your eyes, feed on it, and ask yourself which is the best, to work and add something useful or beautiful to the world's material wealth, or to steal; to be a little benefactor to your kind and yourself, or a little vermin preying on the industrious. Which is best?"

"I'll never take while I can make."

This is, of course, but a single specimen out of scores. To follow Mr. Eden from cell to cell, from mind to mind, from sex to sex, would take volumes and volumes. I only profess to reveal fragments of such a man. He never hoped from the mere separate cell the wonders that dreamers hope. It was essential to the reform of prisoners that moral contagion should be checkmated, and the cell was the mode adopted, because it is the laziest, cheapest, selfishest and cruelest way of doing this. That no discretion was allowed him to let the converted or the well-disposed mix and sympathize, and compare notes, and confirm each other in good under a watchful officer's eye; this he thought a frightful blunder of the system.

Generally he held the good effect of separate confinement to be merely negative; he laughed to scorn the chimera that solitude is an active agent, capable of converting a rogue. Shut a rogue from rogues and let honest men in upon him--the honest men get a good chance to convert him, but if they do succeed it was not solitude that converted him but healing contact. The moments that most good comes to him are the moments his solitude is broken.

He used to say solitude will cow a rogue and suspend his overt acts of theft by force, and so make him to a non-reflector seem no longer a thief; but the notion of the cell effecting permanent cures might honestly be worded thus: "I am a lazy self-deceiver, and want to do by machinery and without personal fatigue what St. Paul could only do by working with all his heart, with all his time, with all his wit, with all his soul, with all his strength and with all himself." Or thus: "Confine the leopards in separate cages, Jock; the cages will take their spots out while ye're sleeping."

Generally this was Mr. Eden's theory of the cell--a check to further contamination, but no more. He even saw in the cell much positive ill which he set himself to qualify.

"Separate confinement breeds monstrous egotism," said he, "and egotism hardens the heart. You can't make any man good if you never let him say a kind word or do an unselfish action to a fellow-creature. Man is an acting animal. His real moral character all lies in his actions, and none of it in his dreams or cogitations. Moral stagnation or cessation of all bad acts and of all good acts is a state on the borders of every vice and a million miles from virtue."

His reverence attacked the petrifaction and egotism of the separate cell as far as the shallow system of this prison let him. First, he encouraged prisoners to write their lives for the use of the prison; these were weeded, if necessary (the editor was strong-minded and did not weed out the re-poppies); printed and circulated in the jail. The writer's number was printed at the foot if he pleased, but never his name. Biography begot a world of sympathy in the prison. Second, he talked to one prisoner acquainted with another prisoner's character, talked about No. 80 to No. 60, and would sometimes say: "Now could you give No. 60 any good advice on this point?"

Then if 80's advice was good he would carry it to 60, and 60 would think all the more of it that it came from one of his fellows.

Then in matters of art he would carry the difficulties of a beginner or a bungler to a proficient, and the latter would help the former. The pleasure of being kind on one side, a touch of gratitude on the other, seeds of interest and sympathy in both. Then such as had produced pretty things were encouraged to lend them to other cells to adorn them and stimulate the occupants.

For instance, No. 140, who gilded the bull, was reminded that No. 120, who had cast him, had never had the pleasure of setting him on her table in her gloomy cell and so raising its look from dungeon to workshop. Then No. 140 said, "Poor No. 120! that is not fair; she shall have him half the day or more if you like, sir."

Thus a grain of self-denial, justice and charity was often drawn into the heart of a cell through the very keyhole.

No. 19, Robinson, did many a little friendly office for other figures, received their thanks, and, above all, obliging these figures warmed and softened his own heart.

You might hear such dialogues as this:

No. 24. "And how is poor old No. 50 to-day (Strutt)?"

Mr. Eden. "Much the same."

No. 24. "Do you think you will bring him round, sir?"

Mr. Eden. "I have great hopes; he is much improved since he had the garden and the violin."

No. 24. "Will you give him my compliments, sir? No. 24's compliments and tell him I bid him 'never say die'?"

Mr. Eden. "Well, ----, how are you this morning?"

"I am a little better, sir. This room (the infirmary) is so sweet and airy, and they give me precious nice things to eat and drink."

"Are the nurses kind to you?"

"That, they are, sir, kinder than I deserve."

"I have a message for you from No. -- on your corridor."

"No! have you, sir?"

"He sends his best wishes for your recovery."

"Now that is very good of him."

"And he would be very glad to hear from yourself how you feel."

"Well, sir, you tell him I am a trifle better, and God bless him for troubling his head about me."

In short, his reverence reversed the Hawes system. Under that a prisoner was divested of humanity and became a number and when he fell sick the sentiment created was, "The figure written on the floor of that cell looks faint." When he died or was murdered, "There is such and such a figure rubbed off our slate."

Mr. Eden made these figures signify flesh and blood, even to those who never saw their human faces. When he had softened a prisoner's heart then he laid the deeper truths of Christianity to that heart. They would not adhere to ice or stone or brass. He knew that till he had taught a man to love his brother whom he had seen he could never make him love God whom he has not seen. To vary the metaphor, his plan was, first warm and soften your wax then begin to shape it after Heaven's pattern. The old-fashioned way is freeze, petrify and mold your wax by a single process. Not that he was mawkish. No man rebuked sin more terribly than he often rebuked it in many of these cells; and when he did so see what he gained by the personal kindness that preceded these terrible rebukes! The rogue said: "What! is it so bad that his reverence, who I know has a regard for me, rebukes me for it like this?--why, it must be bad indeed!"

A loving friend's rebuke is a rebuke--sinks into the heart and convinces the judgment; an enemy's or stranger's rebuke is invective and irritates--not converts. The great vice of the new prisons is general self-deception varied by downright calculating hypocrisy. A shallow zealot like Mr. Lepel is sure to drive the prisoners into one or other of these. It was Mr. Eden's struggle to keep them out of it. He froze cant in the bud. Puritanical burglars tried Scriptural phrases on him as a matter of course, but they soon found it was the very worse lay they could get upon in ---- Jail. The notion that a man can jump from the depths of vice up to the climax of righteous habits, spiritual-mindedness, at one leap, shocked his sense and terrified him for the daring dogs that profess these saltatory powers and the geese that believe it. He said to such: "Let me see you crawl heavenward first, then walk heavenward; it will be time enough to soar when you have lived soberly, honestly, piously a year or two--not here, where you are tied hands, feet and tongue, but free among the world's temptations." He had no blind confidence in learned-by-heart texts. "Many a scoundrel has a good memory," said he.

Here he was quite opposed to his friend Lepel. This gentleman attributed a sort of physical virtue to Holy Writ poured anyhow into a human vessel. His plan of making a thief honest will appear incredible to a more enlightened age; yet it is widely accepted now and its advocates call Mr. Eden a dreamer. It was this: He came into a cell cold and stern and set the rogues a lot of texts. Those that learned a great many he called good prisoners, and those that learned few--black sheep; and the prisoners soon found out that their life, bitter as it was, would be bitterer if they did not look sharp and learn a good many texts. So they learned lots--and the slyest scoundrels learned the most. "Why not?" said they, "in these cursed holes we have nothing better to do; and it is the only way to get the parson's good word, and that is always worth having in jail."

One rogue on getting out explained his knowledge of five hundred texts thus: "What did it hurt me learning texts? I'd just as lieve be learning texts as turning a crank, and as soon be d--d as either."

This fellow had been one of Mr. Lepel's sucking saints--a show prisoner. The Bible and brute force--how odd they sound together! Yet such was the Lepel system, humbug apart. Put a thief in a press between an Old Testament and a New Testament. Turn the screw, crush the texts in, and the rogue's vices out! Conversion made easy! What a wonder he opposes cunning cloaked with religion to brutality cloaked under religion. Ay, brutality, and laziness, and selfishness, all these are the true foundation of that system. Selfishness--for such a man won't do anything he does not like. No! "Why should I make myself 'all things to all men' to save a soul? I will save them this one way or none--this is my way and they shall all come to it," says the reverend Procrustes, forgetting that if the heart is not won in vain is the will crushed; or perhaps not caring so that he gets his own way.

To work on Mr. Eden's plan is a herculean effort day by day repeated; but to set texts is easy, easier even than to learn them--and how easy that is appears from the multitude of incurable felons who have swapped texts for tickets-of-leave. Messieurs Lepel, who teach solitary depressed sinners the Bible with screw and lifted lash and no love nor pity, a word in your ear. Begin a step higher. Go first to some charitable priest and at his feet learn that Bible yourselves!

Forgive my heat, dear reader. I am not an Eden, and these fellows rile me when I think of the good they might do, and they do nothing but force hypocrisy upon men who were bad enough without that. I allow a certain latitude; don't want to swim in hot water by quarreling with every madman or every dunce, but I do doubt any man's right to combine contradictory vices. Now these worthies are stupid yet wild, thick-headed yet delirious--tortoises and March hares.

My sketch of Mr. Eden and his ways is feeble and unworthy. But I conclude it with one master-stroke of eulogy--He was the opposite of these men.

WE left Thomas Robinson writing his life. He has written it. It has been printed by prisoners and circulated among prisoners. One copy lay in Robinson's cell till he left the prison, and to this copy were appended Mr. Eden's remarks in MS.

This autobiography is a self-drawn portrait of a true Bohemian and his mind from boyhood up to the date when he fell into my hands.

Unfortunately we cannot afford so late in our story to make any retrograde step. The "Autobiography of a Thief" must therefore be thrust into my Appendix or printed elsewhere.

The reader has seen Robinson turned into a fiend by cruelty and turned back to a man by humanity.

On this followed many sacred, softening, improving lessons, and as he loved Mr. Eden his heart was open to them.

Most prisoners are very sensible of genuine kindness, and docile as wax in the hands of those who show it. They are the easiest class in the world to impress. The difficulty is to make the impression permanent. But the people who pretend to you that kindness does not greatly affect, persuade and help convince them HAVE NEVER TRIED ANYTHING BUT BRUTALITY, and never will; for nothing greater, wiser or better is in them.

I will now indicate the other phases through which his mind passed in ---- Jail.

Being shown that his crimes were virtually the cause of Mary's hapless life and untimely death, and hard pressed by his father confessor, he fell into religious despondency; believed his case desperate, and his sins too many for Heaven's mercy.

Of all states of mind this was the one Mr. Eden most dreaded. He had observed that the notion that they cannot be reconciled to God and man is the cause of prisoners' recklessness, and one great means by which jail officers and society, England A.D. 185--, confirm them in ill.

He soothed and cheered the poor fellow with many a hopeful message from the gospel of mercy and soon drew him out of the Slough of Despond; but he drew him out with so eager an arm that up went this impressionable personage from despond to the fifth heaven. He was penitent, forgiven, justified, sanctified, all in three weeks. Moreover, he now fell into a certain foul habit. Of course Scripture formed a portion of his daily reading and discourse with the chaplain. Robinson had a memory that seized and kept everything like a vise, so now a text occurred to him for every occasion, and he interwove them with all his talk. Your shallow observers would have said, "What a hypocrite!"

Not a hypocrite, oh Criticaster, but a chameleon! who had been months out of the atmosphere of vice and in an atmosphere of religion.

His reverence broke him of this nasty habit of chattering Bible, and generally cooled him down. Finally he became sober, penitent for his past life, and firmly resolved to lead a better. With this began to mingle ambition to rise very high in the world, and a violent impatience to begin.

Through all these phases ran one excellent and saving thing, a genuine attachment to his good friend the chaplain. The attachment was reciprocal, and there was something touching in the friendship of two men so different in mind and worldly station. But they had suffered together. And indeed a much more depraved prisoner than Robinson would have loved such a benefactor and brother as Eden; and many a scoundrel in this place did love him as well as he could love anything; and as to the other, the clew to him is simple. While the vulgar self-deceiving moralist loathes the detected criminal, and never (whatever he may think) really rises to abhorrence of crime, the saint makes two steps upward toward the mind of Heaven itself, abhors crime, and loves, pities, and will not despair of the criminal.

But besides this Robinson was an engaging fellow, full of thought and full of facts, and the Rev. Francis Tender-Conscience often spent an extra five minutes in his cell and then reproached himself for letting the more interesting personage rob other depressed and thirsty souls of those drops of dew.

One day Mr. Eden, who had just entered the cell, said to Robinson, "Give me your hand. It is as I feared, your nerves are going."

"Are they?" said Robinson ruefully.

"Do you not observe that you are becoming tremulous?"

"I notice that when my door is opened suddenly it makes me shake a little and twitches come in my thigh."

"I feared as much. It is not every man that can bear separate confinement for twelve months. You cannot."

"I shall have to, whether I can or not."

"Will you?"

Three days after this Mr. Eden came into his cell and said with a sad smile, "I have good news for you; you are going to leave me.

"Oh, your reverence! is that good news?"

"Those who have the disposal of you are beginning to see that all punishment (except hanging) is for the welfare of the culprit, and must never be allowed to injure him. Strutt left the prison for my house a fortnight ago, and you are to cross the water next week."

"Oh, your reverence! Heaven forgive me for feeling glad."

"For being human, eh, my poor fellow?"

In the course of this conversation Mr. Eden frankly regretted that Robinson was going so soon. "Four months more prison would have made you safer, and I would have kept you here till the last minute of your sentence for the good of your soul," said he grimly; "but your body and nerves might have suffered," added he tenderly; "we must do all for the best."

A light burst on Robinson. "Why, your reverence," cried he, "is it for fear? Why you don't ever think that I shall turn rogue again after I get out of prison?"

"You are going among a thousand temptations."

"What! do you really think all your kindness has been wasted on me? Why, sir, if a thousand pounds lay there I would not stretch out my hand to take one that did not belong to me. How ungrateful you must think me, and what a fool into the bargain after all my experience!"

"Ungrateful you are not, but you are naturally a fool--a weak, flexible fool. A man with a tenth of your gifts would lead you by the nose into temptation. But I warn you if you fall now conscience will prick you as it never yet has; you will be miserable, and yet though miserable perhaps will never rise again, for remorse is not penitence."

Robinson was so hurt at this want of confidence that he said nothing in reply, and then Mr. Eden felt sorry he had said so much, "for, after all," thought he, "these are mere misgivings; by uttering them I only pain him. I can't make him share them. Let me think what I can do."

That very day he wrote to Susan Merton. The letter contained the following: "Thomas Robinson goes to Australia next week. He will get a ticket-of-leave almost immediately on landing. I am in great anxiety; he is full of good resolves, but his nature is unstable, yet I should not fear to trust him anywhere if I could but choose his associates. In this difficulty I have thought of George Fielding. You know I can read characters, and though you never summed George up to me, his sayings and doings reveal him to me. He is a man in whom honesty is engrained. Poor Robinson with such a companion would be as honest as the day, and a useful friend, for he is full of resources. Then, dear friend, will you do a Christian act and come to our aid. I want you to write a note to Mr. Fielding and let this poor fellow take it to him. Armed with this my convert will not be shy of approaching the honest man, and the exile will not hate me for this trick--will he? I send you inclosed the poor clever fool's life written by himself and printed by my girls. Read it and tell me are we wrong in making every effort to save such a man?" etc.

By return of post came a reply from Susan Merton, full of pity for Robinson and affectionate zeal to co-operate in any way with her friend. Inclosed was a letter addressed to George Fielding, the envelope not closed. Mr. Eden slipped in a banknote and a very small envelope and closed it, placed it in a larger envelope, sealed that and copied the first address on its cover.

He now gave Robinson more of his time than ever and seemed to cling to him with almost a motherly apprehension. Robinson noticed it and felt it very, very much, and his joy at getting out of prison oozed away more and more as the day drew near.

That day came at last. Robinson was taken by Evans to the chaplain's room to bid him farewell. He found him walking about the room in deep thought. "Robinson, when you are thousands of miles from me bear this in mind, that if you fall again you will break my heart."

"I know it, sir; I know it; for you would say, 'If I could not save him who can I hope to?'"

"You would not like to break my heart--to discourage your friend and brother in the good work, the difficult work?"

"I would rather die; if it is to be so I pray Heaven to strike me dead in this room while I am fit to die!"

"Don't say that; live to repair your crimes and to make me prouder of you than a mother of her first-born." He paused and walked the room in silence. Presently he stopped in front of Robinson. "You have often said you owed me something."

"My life and my soul's salvation," was the instant reply.

"I ask a return; square the account with me."

"That I can never do."

"You can! I will take two favors in return for all you say I have done for you. No idle words--but yes or no upon your honor. Will you grant them or won't you?"

"I will, upon my honor."

"One is that you will pray very often, not only morning and evening, but at sunset, at that dangerous hour to you when evil association begins; at that hour honest men retire out of sight and rogues come abroad like vermin and wild beasts; but most of all at any hour of the day or night a temptation comes near you, at that moment pray! Don't wait to see how strong the temptation is, and whether you can't conquer it without help from above. At the sight of an enemy put on heavenly armor--pray! No need to kneel or to go apart. Two words secretly cast heavenward, 'Lord, help me,' are prayer. Will you so pray?"

"Yes!"

"Then give me your hand; here is a plain gold ring to recall this sacred promise; put it on, wear it, and look at it, and never lose it or forget your promise."

"Them that take it must cut my hand off with it."

"Enough, it is a promise. My second request is that the moment you are free you will go and stay with an honest man."

"I ask no better, sir, if he will have me."

"George Fielding; he has a farm near Bathurst."

"George Fielding, sir? He affronted me when I was in trouble. It was no more than I deserved. I forgive him; but you don't know the lad, sir. He would not speak to me; he would not look at me. He would turn his back on me if we ran against one another in a wilderness."

"Here is a talisman that will insure you a welcome from him--a letter from the woman he loves. Come, yes or no?"

"I will, sir, for your sake, not for theirs. Sir, do pray give me something harder to do for you than these two things!"

"No, I won't overweight you--nor encumber your memory with pledges-- these two and no more. And here we part. See what it is to sin against society. I, whom your conversation has so interested, to whom your company is so agreeable--in one word, I, who love you, can find no kinder word to say to you to-day than this--let me never see your face again--let me never hear your name in this world!"

His voice trembled as he said these words--and he wrung Robinson's hand, and Robinson groaned and turned away.

"So now I can do no more for you--I must leave the rest to God." And with these words, for the second time in their acquaintance, the good soul kneeled down and prayed aloud for this man. And this time he prayed at length with ardor and tenderness unspeakable. He prayed as for a brother on the brink of a precipice. He wrestled with Heaven; and ere he concluded he heard a subdued sound near him, and it was poor Robinson, who, touched and penetrated by such angelic love, and awestruck to hear a good man pour out his very soul at the mercy-seat of Heaven, had crept timidly to his side and knelt there, bearing his mute part in this fervent supplication.

As Mr. Eden rose from his knees Evans knocked gently at the door. He had been waiting some minutes, but had heard the voice of prayer and reverently forbore to interrupt it. At his knock the priest and the thief started. The priest suddenly held out both his hands; the thief bowed his head and kissed them many times, and on this they parted hastily with swelling hearts and not another word--except the thousands that their moist eyes exchanged in one single look--the last.

THE ship was to sail in a week, and meantime Robinson was in the hulks at Portsmouth. Now the hulks are a disgrace to Europe, and a most incongruous appendage to a system that professes to cure by separate confinement. One or two of the worst convicts made the usual overtures of evil companionship to Robinson. These were coldly declined; and it was a good sign that Robinson, being permitted by the regulations to write one letter, did not write to any of his old pals in London or elsewhere, but to Mr. Eden. He told him that he regretted his quiet cell where his ears were never invaded with blasphemy and indecency, things he never took pleasure in even at his worst--and missed his reverence's talk sadly. He concluded by asking for some good books by way of antidote.

He received no answer while at Portsmouth, but the vessel having sailed and lying two days off Plymouth, his name was called just before she weighed again and a thick letter handed to him. He opened it eagerly and two things fell on deck--a sovereign and a tract. The sovereign rolled off and made for the sea. Robinson darted after it and saved it from the deep and the surrounding rogues. Then he read a letter which was also in the inclosure. It was short. In it Mr. Eden told him he had sent him the last tract printed in the prison. "It is called 'The Wages of Sin are Death.' It is not the same one you made into cards; that being out of print and the author dead I have been tempted by that good, true title to write another. I think you will value it none the less for being written by me and printed by our brothers and sisters in this place. I inclose one pound that you may not be tempted for want of a shilling."

Robinson looked round for the tract; it was not to be seen; nobody had seen it. N. B. It had been through a dozen light-fingered hands already and was now being laughed at and blasphemed over by two filthy ruffians behind a barrel on the lower deck. Robinson was first in a fury and then, when he found it was really stolen from him, he was very much cut up. "I wish I had lifted it and let the money roll. However," thought he, "if I keep quiet I shall hear of it."

He did hear of it, but he never saw it; for one of these hardened creatures that had got hold of it had a spite against Robinson for refusing his proffered amity, and the malicious dog, after keeping it several hours, hearing Robinson threaten to inform against whoever had taken it, made himself safe and gratified his spite by flinging it into the Channel.

This, too, came in due course to Robinson's ears. He moralized on it. "I made the first into the devil's books," said he, "and now a child of the devil has robbed me of the second. I shan't get a third chance. I would give my sovereign and more to see what his reverence says about 'The wages of sin are death.' The very title is a sermon. I pray Heaven the dirty hand that robbed me of it may rot off at the--no! I forgot. Bless and curse not!"

And now Robinson was confined for five months in a wooden prison with the scum of our jails. No cell to take refuge in from evil society. And in that wretched five months this perpetual contact with criminals, many of them all but incurable, took the gloss off him. His good resolutions were unshaken, but his repugnance to evil associates became gradually worn away.

At last they landed at Sydney. They were employed for about a fortnight in some government works, a mile from the town; and at the end of that time he was picked out by a gentleman who wanted a servant.

Robinson's work was to call him not too early, to clean his boots, go on errands into the town, and be always in the way till five o'clock. From that hour until about two in the morning Mr. Miles devoted to amusement, returning with his latch key, and often rousing the night owl and his servant with a bacchanalian or Anacreontic melody. In short, Mr. Miles was a loose fish; a bachelor who had recently inherited the fortune of an old screw his uncle, and was spending thrift in all the traditional modes. Horses, dogs, women, cards, etc.

He was a good-natured creature, and one morning as he brought him up his hot water and his soda-water Robinson ventured on a friendly remonstrance.

Mr. Miles flung canting rogue and half a dozen oaths and one boot at his head, and was preparing to add a tumbler, when his mentor whipped into the lobby. Robinson could not have fallen to a worse master than this, whose irregularities were so regular that his servant had always seven hours to spend in the town as he pleased. There he was often solicited to join in depredations on property. For he found half his old acquaintances were collected by the magic of the law on this spot of earth.

Robinson took a particular pride in telling these gentlemen that he had no objection to taking a friendly glass with them and talking over old times, but that as for taking what did not belong to him all that was over forever. In short, he improved on Mr. Eden's instructions. Instead of flying from temptation, like a coward conscious of weakness, he nobly faced it and walked cool, collected and safe on the edge of danger.

One good result of this was that he spent his wages every month faster than he got them, and spent the clothes his master gave him, and these were worth more than his wages, for Mr. Miles was going the pace--wore nothing after the gloss was off it. But Robinson had never lived out of prison at less than five hundred per annum, and the evening is a good time in the day for spending money in a town, and his evenings were all his own.

One evening a young tradeswoman with whom he was flirting in the character of a merchant's clerk, tremendously busy, who could only get out in the evening; this young woman, whom he had often solicited to go to the theater, consented.

"I could go with you to-morrow, my sister and I," said she.

Robinson expressed his delight, but consulting his pockets found he had not the means of paying for their seats, and he could not pawn any clothes, for he had but two sets. One (yellowish) that government compelled him to wear by daylight, and one a present from his master (black). That, together with a mustache, admitted him into the bosom of society at night. What was to be done? Propose to the ladies to pay, that was quite without precedent. Ask his master for an advance, impossible. His master was gone kangaroo hunting for three days. Borrow some of his master's clothes and pawn them, that was too like theft. He would pawn his ring, it would only be for a day or two, and he would not spend a farthing more till he had got it back.

He pawned Mr. Eden's ring; it just paid for their places at the theater, where they saw the living puppets of the colony mop and mow and rant under the title of acting. This was so interesting that Robinson was thinking of his ring the whole time, and how to get it back. The girls agreed between themselves they had never enjoyed so dull a cavalier.

The next day a line from Mr. Miles to say that he should not be back for a week. No hope of funds from him. So Robinson pawned his black coat and got back his ring; and as the trousers and waistcoat were no use now, he pawned them for pocket-money, which soon dissolved.

Mr. Robinson now was out of spirits.

"Service is not the thing for me. I am of an active turn--I want to go into business that will occupy me all day long--business that requires some head. Even his reverence, the first man in the country, acknowledged my talents--and what is the vent for them here? The blacking-bottle."

IN a low public outside the town--in a back room--with their arms on the table and their low foreheads nearly touching, sat whispering two men--types. One had the deep-sunk, colorless eyes, the protruding cheek-bones, the shapeless mouth, and the broad chin good in itself but bad in the above connection; the other had the vulpine chin, and the fiendish eyebrows descending on the very nose in two sharp arches. Both had the restless eye, both the short-cropped hair, society's comment, congruous and auxiliary, though in itself faint by the side of habit's seal and Nature's.

A small north window dimly lighted the gloomy, uncouth cabin, and revealed the sole furniture--four chairs, too heavy to lift, too thick to break, and a table discolored with the stains of a thousand filthy debauches and dotted here and there with the fresh ashes of pipes and cigars.

In this appropriate frame behold two felons putting their heads together. By each felon's side smoked in a glass hot with heat and hotter with alcohol, the enemy of man. It would be difficult to give their dialogue, for they spoke in thieves' Latin. The substance was this: They had scent of a booty in a house that stood by itself three miles out of the town. But the servants were incorruptible, and they could not get access to inspect the premises, which were intricate. Now your professional burglar will no more venture upon unexplored premises than a good seaman will run into an unknown channel without pilot, soundings or chart. It appeared from the dialogue that the two men were acquainted with a party who knew these premises, having been more than once inside them with his master.

The more rugged one objected to this party. "He is no use, he has turned soft. I have heard him refuse a dozen good plants the last month. Besides, I don't want a canting son of a gun for my pal--ten to one if he don't turn tail and perhaps split."

N. B.--All this not in English, but in thieve's cant, with an oath or a nasty expression at every third word. The sentences measled with them.

"You don't know how to take him," replied he of the Mephistopheles eye-brow. "He won't refuse me."

"Why not?"

"He is an old pal of mine, and I never found the thing I could not persuade him to. He does not know how to say me nay--you may bully him and queer him till all is blue, and he won't budge, and that is the lay you have been upon with him. Now I shall pull a long face--make up a story--take him by his soft bit--tell him I can't get on without him, and patter old lang syne to him. Then we'll get a fiddle and lots of whisky; and when we have had a reel and he has shaken his foot on the floor and drank a gill or two, you will see him thaw, and then you leave him to me and don't put in your jaw to spoil it. If we get him it will be all right--he is No. 1; his little finger has seen more than both our carcasses put together."

FOUR days after this, mephistopheles with a small m and brutus with a little b sat again in the filthy little cabin where men hatch burglaries--but this time the conference wore an air of expectant triumph.

"Didn't I tell you?"

"You didn't do it easy."

"No, I had almost to go on my knees to him."

"He isn't worth so much trouble."

"He is worth it ten times over. Look at this," and the speaker produced a plan of the premises they were plotting against. "Could you have done this?"

"I don't say I could."

"Could any man you know have done it? See here is every room and every door and window and passage put down, and what sort of keys and bolts and fastenings to each."

"How came he to know so much; he never was in the house but twice."

"A top-sawyer like him looks at everything with an eye to business. If he was in a church he'd twig the candlesticks and the fastenings, while the rest were mooning into the parson's face--he can't help it."

"Well, he may be a top-sawyer, but I don't like him. See how loth he was, and, when he did agree, how he turned to and drank as if he would drown his pluck before it could come to anything."

"Wait till you see him work. He will shake all that nonsense to blazes when he finds himself out under the moon with the swag on one side and the gallows on the other."

To go back a little. Mr. Miles did not return at the appointed day; and Robinson, who had no work to do, and could not amuse himself without money, pawned Mr. Eden's ring. He felt ashamed and sorrowful, but not so much so as the first time.

This evening, as he was strolling moodily through the suburbs, a voice hailed him in tones of the utmost cordiality. He looked up and there was an old pal, with whom he had been associated in many a merry bout and pleasant felony; he had not seen the man for two years; a friendly glass was offered and accepted. Two girls were of the party, to oblige whom Robinson's old acquaintance sent for Blind Bill, the fiddler, and soon Robinson was dancing and shouting with the girls like mad--"High cut," "side cut," "heel and toe," "sailor's fling," and the double shuffle.

He did not leave till three in the morning, and after a promise to meet the same little party again next evening--to dance and drink and drive away dull care.

ON a certain evening some days later, the two men whose faces were definitions sat on a bench outside that little public in the suburbs--one at the end of a clay-pipe, the other behind a pewter mug. It was dusk.

"He ought to be here soon," said the one into whose forehead holes seemed dug and little bits of some vitreous substance left at the bottom. "Well, mate," cried he harshly, "what do you want that you stick to us so tight?" This was addressed to a peddler who had been standing opposite showing the contents of his box with a silent eloquence. Now this very asperity made the portable shopman say to himself, "wants me out of the way--perhaps buy me out." So he stuck where he was, and exhibited his wares.

"We don't want your gim-cracks," said mephistopheles quietly.

The man eyed his customers and did not despair. "But, gents," said he, "I have got other things besides gim-cracks; something that will suit you if you can read."

"Of course we can read," replied sunken-eyes haughtily; and in fact they had been too often in jail to escape this accomplishment.

The peddler looked furtively in every direction; and after this precaution pressed a spring and brought a small drawer out from the bottom of his pack. The two rogues winked at one another. Out of the drawer the peddler whipped a sealed packet.

"What is it?" asked mephistopheles, beginning to take an interest.

"Just imported from England," said the peddler, a certain pomp mingling with his furtive and mysterious manner.

"---- England," was the other's patriotic reply.

"And translated from the French."

"That is better! but what is it?"

"Them that buy it--they will see!"

"Something flash?"

"Rather, I should say."

"Is there plenty about the women in it?"

The trader answered obliquely.

"What are we obliged to keep it dark for?"--the other put in, "Why of course there is."

"Well!" said sunken-eyes affecting carelessness. "What do you want for it? Got sixpence, Bill?"

"I sold the last to a gentleman for three-and-sixpence. But as this is the last I've got--say half a crown."

Sunken-eyes swore at the peddler.

"What! half a crown for a book no thicker than a quire of paper?"

"Only half a crown for a thing I could be put in prison for selling. Is not my risk to be paid as well as my leaves?"

This logic went home, and after a little higgling two shillings was offered and accepted, but in the very act of commerce the trader seemed to have a misgiving.

"I daren't do it unless you promise faithfully never to tell you had it of me. I have got a character to lose, and I would not have it known--not for the world, that James Walker had sold such loose--licentious--"

"Oh! what it is very spicy, is it? Come, hand it over. There's the two bob."

"My poverty and not my will consents," sighed the trader.

"There, you be off, or we shall have all the brats coming round us."

The peddler complied and moved off, and so willing was he to oblige his customers that on turning the corner he shouldered his pack and ran with great agility down the street, till he gained a network of small alleys in which he wriggled and left no trace.

Meantime sunken-eyes had put his tongue to the envelope and drawn out the contents. "I'll go into the light and see what it is all about."

mephistopheles left alone had hardly given his pipe two sucks ere brutus returned black with rage and spouting oaths like a whale.

"Why, what is the matter?"

"Matter! Didn't he sell this to me for a flash story?"

"Why he didn't say so. But certainly he dropped a word about loose books."

"Of course he did."

"Well! and ain't they?"

"Ain't they!" cried the other with fury. "Here, you young shaver, bring the candle out here. Ain't they? No they ain't----and----and----the ---- ----. Look here!"

mephisto. "'Mend your Ways,' a tract."

brutus. "I'll break his head instead."

mephisto. "'Narrative of Mr. James the Missionary.'"

brutus. "The cheating, undermining rip."

mephisto. "And here is another to the same tune."

brutus. "Didn't I tell you so. The hypocritical, humbugging rascal--"

mephisto. "Stop a bit. Here is a little one: 'Memoirs of a Gentleman's Housekeeper.'"

brutus. "Oh! is there? I did not see that."

mephisto. "You are so hasty. The case mayn't be so black as it looks. The others might be thrown in to make up the parcel. Hold the candle nearer."

brutus. "Ay! let us see about the housekeeper."

The two men read "The Housekeeper" eagerly, but as they read the momentary excitement of hope died out of their faces. Not a sparkle of the ore they sought; all was dross. "The Housekeeper" was one of those who make pickles, not eat them--and in a linen apron a yard wide save their master's money from the fangs of cook and footman, not help him scatter it in a satin gown.

There was not even a stray hint or an indelicate expression for the poor fellow's two shillings. The fraud, was complete. It was not like the ground coffee, pepper and mustard in a London shop--in which there is as often as not a pinch of real coffee, mustard and pepper to a pound of chicory and bullock's blood, of red lead, dirt, flour and turmeric. Here the do was pure.

Then brutus relieved his swelling heart by a string of observations partly rhetorical, partly zoological. He devoted to horrible plagues every square inch of the peddler, enumerating more particularly those interior organs that subserve vitality, and concluded by vowing solemnly to put a knife into him the first fair opportunity. "I'll teach the rogue to--" Sell you medicine for poison, eh?

mephistopheles, either because he was a more philosophic spirit or was not the one out of pocket, took the blow more coolly. "It is a bite and no mistake. But what of it? Our money," said he, with a touch of sadness, "goes as it comes. This is only two bob flung in the dirt. We should not have invested them in the Three per Cents; and to-night's swag will make it up."

He then got a fresh wafer and sealed the pamphlets up again. "There," said he, you keep dark and sell the first flat you come across the same way the varmint sold you.

brutus, sickened at heart by the peddler's iniquity, revived at the prospect of selling some fellow-creature as he had been sold. He put the paper-trap in his pocket; and, cheated of obscenity, consoled himself with brandy such as Bacchus would not own, but Beelzebub would brew for man if permitted to keep an earthly distillery.

Presently they were joined by the third man, and for two hours the three heads might all have been covered by one bushel-basket, and peddler Walker's heartless fraud was forgotten in business of a higher order.

At last mephistopheles gave brutus a signal, and they rose to interrupt the potations of the newcomer, who was pouring down fire and hot water in rather a reckless way.

"We won't all go together," said mephistopheles. "You two meet me at Jonathan's ken in an hour."

As brutus and the newcomer walked along an idea came to brutus. "Here is a fellow that passes for a sharp. What if I sell him my pamphlets and get a laugh at his expense. Mate," said he, "here is a flash book all sealed up. What will you give me for it?"

"Well! I don't much care for that sort of reading, old fellow."

"But this is cheap. I got it a bargain. Come--a shilling won't hurt you for it. See there is more than one under the cover."

Now the other had been drinking till he was in that state in which a good-natured fellow's mind if decomposed would be found to be all "Yes," and "Dine with me to-morrow," so he fell into the trap.

"I'll give it you, my boy," said he. "Let us see it? There are more than one inside it. You're an honest fellow. Owe you a shilling." And the sealed parcel went into his pocket. Then, seeing brutus look rather rueful at this way of doing business, he hiccoughed out, "Stop your bob out of the swag"--and chuckled.

A SNOW-WHITE suburban villa standing alone with its satellites that occupied five times as much space as itself; coach-house, stable, offices, greenhouse clinging to it like dew to a lily, and hot-house farther in the rear. A wall of considerable height inclosed the whole. It booked as secure and peaceful as innocent in the fleeting light the young moon cast on it every time the passing clouds left her clear a moment. Yet at this calm thoughtful hour crime was waiting to invade this pretty little place.

Under the scullery-window lurked brutus and mephistopheles--faces blackened, tools in hand--ready to whip out a pane of said window and so penetrate the kitchen, and from the kitchen the pantry, where they made sure of a few spoons, and up the back stairs to the plate-chest. They would be in the house even now but a circumstance delayed them--a light was burning on the second floor. Now it was contrary to their creed to enter a house where a light was burning, above all, if there was the least chance of that light being in a sitting-room. Now they had been some hours watching the house and that light had been there all the time, therefore, argued mephistopheles, "It is not a farthing glim in a bedroom or we should have seen it lighted. It is some one up. We must wait till they roost."

They waited and waited and waited. Still the light burned. They cursed the light. No wonder. Light seems the natural enemy of evil deeds.

They began to get bitter, and their bodies cold. Even burglary becomes a bore when you have to wait too long idle out in the cold.

At last, at about half past two, the light went out. Then, keenly listening, the two sons of darkness heard a movement in the house, and more than one door open and shut, and then the sound of feet going rapidly down the road toward Sydney.

"Why! it is a party only just broke up. Lucky I would not work till the glim was out."

"But I say, Bill--he is at that corner--the nobs must have passed close to him--suppose they saw him."

"He is not so green as let them see him."

The next question was how long they should wait to let the inmates close their peepers. All had been still and dark more than half an hour when the pair began to work. mephisto took out a large piece of putty and dabbed it on the middle of the pane; this putty he worked in the center up to a pyramid; this he held with his left hand, while with his right be took out his glazier's diamond and cut the pane all round the edges. By the hold the putty gave him, he prevented the pane from falling inside the house and making a noise, and finally whipped it out clean and handed it to brutus. A moment more the two men were in the scullery, thence into the kitchen through a door which they found open; in the kitchen were two doors--trying one they found it open into a larder. Here casting the light of his dark lantern round, brutus discovered some cold fowl and a ham; they took these into the kitchen, and somewhat coolly took out their knives and ate a hasty but hearty supper. Their way of hacking the ham was as lawless as all the rest. They then took off their shoes and dropped them outside the scullery window, and now the serious part of the game began. Creeping like cats, they reached the pantry, and sure enough found more than a dozen silver spoons and forks of different sizes that had been recently used. These they put into a small bag, and mephisto went back through the scullery into the back garden and hid these spoons in a bush. "Then, if we should be interrupted, we can come back for them."

And now the game became more serious and more nervous--the pair drew their clasp knives and placed them in their bosoms ready in case of extremity; then creeping like cats, one foot at a time and then a pause, ascended the back stairs, at the top of which was a door. But this door was not fastened, and in another moment they passed through it and were on the first landing. The plan, correct in every particular, indicated the plate closet to their right. A gleam from the lantern showed it; the key-hole was old-fashioned as also described, and in a moment brutus had it open. Then mephisto whipped out a green baize bag with compartments, and in a minute these adroit hands had stowed away cups, tureens, baskets, soup-spoons, etc., to the value of three hundred pounds, and scarce a chink heard during the whole operation. It was done; a look passed as much as to say this is enough, and they crept back silent and cat-like as they had come, brutus leading with the bag. Now just as he had his hand on the door through which they had come up--snick! click!--a door was locked somewhere down below.

brutus looked round and put the bag gently down. "Where?" he whispered.

"Near the kitchen," was the reply scarce audible. "Sounded to me to come from the hall," whispered the other.

Both men changed color, but retained their presence of mind and their cunning. brutus stepped back to the plate-closet, put the bag in it, and closed it, but without locking it. "Stay there," whispered he, "and if I whistle--run out the back way empty-handed. If I mew--out with the bag and come out by the front door; nothing but inside bolts to it, plan says."

They listened a moment, there was no fresh sound. Then brutus slipped down the front stairs in no time; he found the front door not bolted; he did not quite understand that, and drawing a short bludgeon, he opened it very cautiously; the caution was not superfluous. Two gentlemen made a dash at him from the outside the moment the door was open; one of their heads cracked like a broken bottle under the blow the ready ruffian struck him with his bludgeon, and he dropped like a shot; but another was coming flying across the lawn with a drawn cutlass, and brutus, finding himself overmatched, gave one loud whistle and flew across the hall, making for the kitchen. Flew he never so fast mephisto was there an instant before him. As for the gentleman at the door he was encumbered with his hurt companion, who fell across his knees as he rushed at the burglar. brutus got a start of some seconds and dashed furiously into the kitchen and flew to the only door between them and the scullery-window.

THE DOOR WAS LOCKED.

The burglar's eyes gleamed in their deep caverns, "Back, Will--and cut through them," he cried--and out flashed his long bright knife.

WHILE the two burglars were near the scullery-window watching the light in the upper story a third man stood sentinel on the opposite side of the house; he was but a few yards from the public road, yet hundreds would have passed and no man seen him; for he had placed himself in a thick shadow flat against the garden-wall. His office was to signal danger from his side should any come. Now the light that kept his comrades inactive was not on his side of the house; he waited therefore expecting every moment their signal that the job was done. On this the cue was to slip quietly off and all make by different paths for the low public-house described above and there divide the swag.

The man waited and waited and waited for this signal; it never came; we know why. Then he became impatient--miserable; he was out of his element--wanted to be doing something. At last all this was an intolerable bore. Not feeling warm toward the job, he had given the active business to his comrades, which he now regretted for two reasons. First, he was kept here stagnant and bored; and second, they must be a pair of bunglers; he'd have robbed a parish in less time. He would light a cigar. Tobacco blunts all ills, even ennui. Putting his hand in his pocket for a cigar, it ran against a hard, square substance. What is this?--oh! the book mephisto had sold him. No, he would not smoke, he would see what the book was all about; he knelt down and took off his hat, and put his dark-lantern inside it before he ventured to move the slide; then undid the paper, and putting it into the hat, threw the concentrated rays on the contents and peered in to examine them. Now the various little pamphlets had been displaced by mephisto, and the first words that met the thief's eye in large letters on the back of a tract were these, "THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH."

Thomas Robinson looked at these words with a stupid gaze. At first he did not realize all that lay in them. He did not open the tract; he gazed benumbed at the words, and they glared at him like the eyes of green fire when we come in the dark on some tiger-cat crouching in his lair.

Oh that I were a painter and could make you see what cannot be described--the features of this strange incident that sounds so small and was so great! The black night, the hat, the renegade peering under it in the wall's deep shadows to read something trashy, and the half-open lantern shooting its little strip of intense fire, and the grim words springing out in a moment from the dark face of night and dazzling the renegade's eyes and chilling his heart:

To his stupor now succeeded surprise and awe. "How comes this?" he whispered aloud, "was this a trick of ----'s? No! he doesn't know-- This is the devil's own doing--no! it is not--more likely it is-- The third time!-- I'll read it. My hands shake so I can hardly hold it. It is by him--yes--signed F. E. Heaven, have mercy on me!-- This is more than natural."

He read it, shaking all over as he read.

The tract was simply written. It began with a story of instances, some of them drawn from the histories of prisoners, and it ended with an earnest exhortation and a terrible warning. When the renegade came to this part, his heart beat violently; for along with the earnest, straightforward, unmincing words of sacred fire there seemed to rise from the paper the eloquent voice, the eye rich with love, the face of inexhaustible intelligence and sympathy that had so often shone on Robinson, while just words such as these issued from those golden lips.

He read on, but not to the end; for as he read he came to one paragraph that made him fancy that Mr. Eden was by his very side. "You, into whose hands these words of truth shall fall, and find you intending to do some foolish or wicked thing to-morrow, or the next day, or to-day, or this very hour--stop!--do not that sin! on your soul do it not!--fall on your knees and repent the sin you have meditated; better repent the base design than suffer for the sin, as suffer you shall so surely as the sky is pure, so surely as God is holy and sin's wages are death."

At these words, as if the priest's hand had been stretched across the earth and sea and laid on the thief's head, he fell down upon his knees with his back toward the scene of burglary and his face toward England, crying out, "I will, your reverence. I am!--Lord, help me!" cried he, then first remembering how he had been told to pray in temptation's hour. The next moment he started to his feet, he dashed his lantern to the ground, and leaped over a gate that stood in his way, and fled down the road to Sydney.

He ran full half a mile before he stopped; his mind was in a whirl. Another reflection stopped him. He was a sentinel, and had betrayed his post; suppose his pals were to get into trouble through reckoning on him; was it fair to desert them without warning? What if he were to go back and give the whistle of alarm, pretend he had seen some one watching, and so prevent the meditated crime, as well as be guiltless of it himself; but then, thought he, "and suppose I do go back what will become of me?"

While he hesitated, the question was decided for him. As he looked back irresolute, his keen eye noticed a shadow moving along the hedge-side to his left.

"Why, they are coming away," was his first thought. But looking keenly down the other edge which was darker still he saw another noiseless moving shadow. "Why are they on different sides of the road and both keeping in the shadow?" thought this shrewd spirit, and he liked it so ill that he turned at once and ran off toward Sydney.

At this out came the two figures with a bound into the middle of the road, and, with a loud view-halloo, raced after him like the wind.

Robinson, as he started and before he knew the speed of his pursuers, ventured to run sidewise a moment to see who or what they were. He caught a glimpse of white waistcoats and glittering studs, and guessed the rest.

He had a start of not more than twenty yards, but he was a good runner, and it was in his favor that his pursuers had come up at a certain speed, while he started fresh after a rest. He squared his shoulders, opened his mouth wide for a long race, and ran as men run for their lives.

In the silent night Robinson's highlows might have been heard half a mile off clattering along the hard road. Pit pit pit pat! came two pair of dress-boots after him. Robinson heard the sound with a thrill of fear: "They in their pumps and I in boots," thought he, and his pursuers heard the hunted one groan, and redoubled their efforts as dogs when the stag begins to sob.

He had scarce run a hundred yards with his ears laid back like a hare's, when he could not help thinking the horrible pit pit pit got nearer; he listened with agonized keenness as he ran, and so fine did his danger make his ear that he could tell the exact position of his pursuers. A cold sweat crept over him as he felt they had both gained ten yards out of the twenty on him; then he distinctly felt one pursuer gain upon the other, and this one's pit pit pit crept nearer and nearer, an inch every three or four yards; the other held his own--no more--no less.

At last so near crept No. 1 that Robinson felt his hot breath at his ear. He clinched his teeth and gave a desperate spurt, and put four or five yards between them; he could have measured the ground gained by the pit pit pat. But the pursuer put on a spurt, and reduced the distance by half.

"I may as well give in," thought the hunted one--but at that moment came a gleam of hope; this pursuer began suddenly to pant very loud. He had clinched his teeth to gain the twenty yards; he had gained them but had lost his wind. Robinson heard this, and feared him no longer, and in fact after one or two more puffs came one despairing snort, and No. 1 pulled up dead short, thoroughly blown.

As No. 2 passed him, he just panted out

"Won't catch him."

"Won't I!" ejaculated No 2, expelling the words rather than uttering them.

Klopetee klop, klopetee klop, klopetee, klopetee, klopetee klop.

Pit pat, pit pat, pit pat pat, pit pit pat. Ten yards apart, no more no less.

Nor nearer might the dog attain,
Nor farther might the quarry strain.

"They have done me between them," thought poor Robinson. "I could have run from either singly, but one blows me, and then the other runs me down. I can get out of it by fighting perhaps, but then there will be another crime."

Robinson now began to pant audibly, and finding he could not shake the hunter off, he with some reluctance prepared another game.

He began to exaggerate his symptoms of distress, and imperceptibly to relax his pace. On this the pursuer came up hand over head. He was scarce four yards behind when Robinson suddenly turned and threw himself on one knee, with both hands out like a cat's claws. The man ran on full tilt; in fact, he could not have stopped. Robinson caught his nearest ankle with both hands and rose with him and lifted him, aided by his own impulse, high into the air and sent his heels up perpendicular. The man described a parabola in the air, and came down on the very top of his head with frightful force; and as he lay, his head buried in his hat and his heels kicking, Robinson without a moment lost jumped over his body, and klopetee klop rang fainter and fainter down the road alone.

The plucky pursuer wrenched his head with infinite difficulty out of his hat, which sat on his shoulders with his nose pointing through a chasm from crown to brim, shook himself, and ran wildly a few yards in pursuit--but finding he had in his confusion run away from Robinson as well as Robinson from him, and hopeless of recovering the ground now lost, he gave a rueful sort of laugh, made the best of it, put his hands in his pockets and strolled back to meet No. 1.

Meantime, Robinson, fearful of being pursued on horseback, relaxed his speed but little and ran the three miles out into Sydney. He came home with his flank heating and a glutinous moisture on his lip, and a hunted look in his eye. He crept into bed, but spent the night thinking, ay, and praying, too, not sleeping.

THOMAS ROBINSON rose from his sleepless bed an altered man; altered above all in this that his self-confidence was clean gone. "How little I knew myself," said he, "and how well his reverence knew me! I am the weakest fool on earth--he saw that and told me what to do. He provided help for me--and I, like an ungrateful idiot, never once thought of obeying him; but from this hour I see myself as I am and as he used to call me--a clever fool. I can't walk straight without some honest man to hold by. Well, I'll have one, though I give up everything else in the world for it."

Then he went to his little box and took out the letter to George Fielding. He looked at it and reproached himself for forgetting it so long. "A letter from the poor fellow's sweetheart, too. I ought to have sent it by the post if I did not take it. But I will take it. I'll ask Mr. Miles's leave the moment he comes home, and start that very day." Then he sat down and read the tract again, and as he read it was filled with shame and contrition.

By one of those freaks of mind which it is so hard to account for, every good feeling rushed upon him with far greater power than when he was in ---- Prison, and, strange to say, he now loved his reverence more and took his words deeper to heart than he had done when they were together. His flesh crept with horror at the thought that he had been a criminal again, at least in intention, and that but for Heaven's mercy he would have been taken and punished with frightful severity, and above all would have wounded his reverence to the heart in return for more than mortal kindness, goodness and love. And, to do Robinson justice, this last thought made his heart sicken and his flesh creep more than all the rest. He was like a man who had fallen asleep on the brink of an unseen precipice--awoke--and looked down.

The penitent man said his prayers this morning and vowed on his knees humility and a new life. Henceforth he would know himself; he would not attempt to guide himself; he would just obey his reverence. And to begin, whenever a temptation came in sight he would pray against it then and there and fly from it, and the moment his master returned he would leave the town and get away to honest George Fielding with his passport--Susan's letter.

With these prayers and these resolutions a calm complacency stole over him; he put his reverence's tract and George's letter in his bosom and came down into the kitchen.

The first person he met was the housemaid, Jenny.

"Oh, here is my lord!" cried she. "Where were you last night?"

Robinson stammered out, "Nowhere in particular. Why?"

"Oh, because the master was asking for you, and you weren't to be found high or low."

"What, is he come home?"

"Came home last night."

"I'll go and take him his hot water."

"Why, he is not in the house, stupid. He dressed the moment he came home and went out to a party. He swore properly at your not being in the way to help him dress."

"What did he say?" asked Robinson, a little uneasy.

The girl's eyes twinkled. "He said, 'How ever am I to lace myself now that scamp is not in the way?'"

"Come, none of your chaff, Jenny."

"Why you know you do lace him, and pretty tight, too."

"I do nothing of the kind."

"Oh, of course you won't tell on one another. Tell me our head scamp does not wear stays! A man would not be as broadshouldered as that and have a waist like a wasp and his back like a board without a little lacing, and a good deal, too."

"Well, have it your own way, Jenny. Won't you give me a morsel of breakfast?"

"Well, Tom, I can give you some just for form's sake; but bless you, you won't able to eat it."

"Why not?"

"Gents that are out all night bring a headache home in the morning in place of an appetite."

"But I was not out all night. I was at home soon after twelve."

"Really?"

"Really!"

"Tom?"

"Well, Jane!"

"Those that ain't clever enough to hide secrets should trust them to those that are."

"I don't know what you mean, my lass."

"Oh, nothing; only I sat up till halfpast one in the kitchen, and I listened till three in my room.

"You took a deal of trouble on my account."

"Oh, it was more curiosity than regard," was the keen reply.

"So I should say."

The girl colored and seemed nettled by this answer. She set demurely about the work of small vengeance. "Now," said she with great cordiality, "you tell me what you were doing all night and why you broke into the house like a--a--hem! instead of coming into it like a man, and then you'll save me the trouble of finding it out whether you like or not."

These words chilled Robinson. What! had a spy been watching him--perhaps for days--and above all a female spy--a thing with a velvet paw, a noiseless step, an inscrutable countenance, and a microscopic eye.

He hung his head over his cup in silence. Jenny's eye was scanning him. He felt that without seeing it. He was uneasy under it, but his self-reproach was greater than his uneasiness.

At this juncture the street door was opened with a latch-key. "Here comes the head scamp,' said Jenny, with her eye on Robinson. The next moment a bell was rung sharply. Robinson rose.

"Finish your breakfast," said Jenny, "I'll answer the bell," and out she went. She returned in about ten minutes with a dressing-gown over her arm and a pair of curling-irons in her hand. "There," said she, "you are to go in the parlor, and get up the young buck; curl his nob and whiskers. I wish it was me, I'd curl his ear the first thing I'd curl."

"What, Jane, did you take the trouble to bring them down for me?"

"They look like it," replied the other tartly, as if she repented the good office.

Robinson went in to his master. He expected a rebuke for being out of the way; but no! he found the young gentleman in excellent humor and high spirits. "Help me off with this coat, Tom."

"Yes, sir."

"Oh! not so rough, confound you. Ah! Ugh!"

"Coat's a little too tight, sir."

"No it isn't--it fits me like a glove but I am stiff and sore. There, now, get me a shirt."

Robinson came back with the shirt, and aired it close to the fire; and this being a favorable position for saying what he felt awkward about, he began:

"Mr. Miles, sir."

"Hallo!"

"I am going to ask you a favor."

"Out with it!"

"You have been a kind master to me."

"I should think I have, too. By Jove, you won't find such another in a hurry."

"No, sir, I am sure I should not, but there is an opening for me of a different sort altogether. I have a friend, a squatter, near Bathurst, and I am to join him if you will be so kind as to let me go."

"What an infernal nuisance!" cried the young gentleman, who was like most boys, good-natured and selfish. "The moment I get a servant I like he wants to go to the devil."

"Only to Bathurst, sir," said Robinson deprecatingly, to put him in a good humor.

"And what am I to do for another?"

At this moment in came Jenny with all the paraphernalia of breakfast. "Here, Jenny," cried he, "here's Robinson wants to leave us. Stupid ass!"

Jenny stood transfixed with the tray in her hand. "Since when?" asked she of her master, but looking at Robinson.

"This moment. The faithful creature greeted my return with that proposal."

"Well, sir, a servant isn't a slave and suppose he has a reason?"

"Oh! they have always got a reason, such as it is. Wants to go and squat at Bathurst. Well, Tom, you are a fool for leaving us, but of course we shan't pay you the compliment of keeping you against your will, shall we?" looking at Jane.

"What have I to do with it?" replied she, opening her gray eyes. "What is it to me whether he goes or stays?"

"Come, I like that. Why you are the housemaid and he is the footman, and those two we know are always"--and the young gentleman eked out his meaning by whistling a tune.

"Mr. Miles," said Jenny, very gravely, like an elder rebuking a younger, "you must excuse me, sir, but I advise you not to make so free with your servants. Servants are encroaching, and they will be sure to take liberties with you in turn; and," turning suddenly red and angry, "if you talk like that to me I shall leave the room."

"Well, if you must! you must! but bring the tea-kettle back with you. That is a duck!"

Jenny could not help laughing, and went for the tea-kettle. On her return Robinson made signals to her over the master's head, which he had begun to frizz. At first she looked puzzled, but following the direction of his eye she saw that her master's right hand was terribly cut and swollen. "Oh!" cried the girl. "Oh, dear! Oh, dear!"

"Eh?" cried Mr. Miles, "what is the row?"

"Look at your poor hand, sir!"

"Oh, ay! isn't it hideous. Met with an accident. Soon get well."

"No, it won't, not of itself; but I have got a capital lotion for bruises, and I shall bathe it for you."

Jenny brought in a large basin of warm water and began to foment it first, touching it so tenderly. "And his hand that was as white as a lady's," said Jenny pitifully, "po-o-r bo-y!" This kind expression had no sooner escaped her than she colored and bent her head down over her work, hoping it might escape notice.

"Young woman," said Mr. Miles with paternal gravity, "servants are advised not to make too free with their masters; or the beggars will forget their place and take liberties with you. He! He! He!"

Jenny put his hand quietly down into the water and got up and ran across the room for the door. Her course was arrested by a howl from the jocose youth.

"Murder! Take him off, Jenny; kick him; the beggar is curling and laughing at the same time. Confound you, can't you lay the irons down when I say a good thing. Ha! Ha! Ha!"

This strange trio chuckled a space. Miles the loudest. "Tom, pour out my tea; and you, Jenny, if you will come to the scratch again, ha! ha!--I'll tell you how I came by this."

This promise brought the inquisitive Jenny to the basin directly.

"You know Hazeltine?"

"Yes, sir, a tall gentleman that comes here now and then. That is the one you are to run a race with on the public course," put in Jenny, looking up with a scandalized air.

"That is the boy; but how the deuce did you know?"

"Gentlemen to run with all the dirty boys looking on like horses," remonstrated the grammatical one, "it is a disgrace."

"So it is--for the one that is beat. Well, I was to meet Hazeltine to supper out of town. By-the-by, you don't know Tom Yates?"

"Oh," said Jenny, "I have heard of him, too."

"I doubt that; there are a good many of his name."

"The rake, I mean; lives a mile or two out of Sydney.

"So do half a dozen more of them."

"This one is about the biggest gambler and sharper unhung."

"All right! that is my friend! Well, he gave us a thundering supper--lots of lush."

"What is lush?"

"Tea and coffee and barley-water, my dear. Oh! can't you put the thundering irons down when I say a good thing? Well, I mustn't be witty any more, the penalty is too severe."

I need hardly say it was not Mr. Miles's jokes that agitated Robinson now; on the contrary, in the midst of his curiosity and rising agitation these jokes seemed ghastly impossibilities.

"Well, at ten o'clock we went upstairs to a snug little room, and all four sat down to a nice little green table."

"To gamble?"

"No! to whist; but now comes the fun. We had been playing about four hours, and the room was hot, and Yates was gone for a fresh pack, and old Hazeltine was gone into the drawing-room to cool himself. Presently he comes back and he says in a whisper, 'Come here, old fellows.' We went with him to the drawing-room, and at first sight we saw nothing, but presently flash came a light right in our eyes; it seemed to come from something glittering in the field. And these flashes kept coming and going. At last we got the governor, and he puzzled over it a little while. 'I know what it is,' cried he, 'it is my cucumber glass.'"

Jenny looked up. "Glass might glitter," said she, "but I don't see how it could flash."

"No more did we, and we laughed in the governor's face; for all that we were wrong. 'There is somebody under that wall with a dark lantern,' said Tom Yates, 'and every now and then the glass catches the glare and reflects it this way.' 'Solomon!' cried the rest of us. The fact is, Jenny, when Tom Yates gets half drunk he develops sagacity more than human. (Robinson gave a little groan.) Aha," cried Miles, "the beggar has burned his finger. I'm glad of it. Why should I be the only sufferer by his thundering irons? 'Here is a lark,' said I, 'we'll nab this dark lantern--won't we, Hazy?' 'Rather,' said Hazy. 'Wait till I get my pistols, and I'll give you a cutlass, George,' says Tom Yates. I forget who George was; but he said he was of noble blood, and I think myself he was some relation to the King-of-trumps, the whole family came about him so--mind my hair now. 'Oh, bother your artillery,' said I. 'Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just.' When I'm a little cut you may know it by my quoting Shakespeare. When I'm sober I don't remember a word of him--and don't want to."

"No, the Sporting Magazine, that is your Bible, sir," suggested Jenny.

"Yes, and let me read it without your commentary--mind my hair now. Where was I? Oh. Hazeltine and I opened the door softly and whipped out, but the beggar was too sharp for us. No doubt he heard the door. Anyway, before we could get through the shrubbery he was off, and we heard him clattering down the road ever so far off. However we followed quietly on the grass by the road-side at a fair traveling pace, and by and by what do you think? Our man had pulled up in the middle of the road and stood stock still. 'That is a green trick,' thought I. However, before we could get up to him he saw us or heard us, and off down the road no end of a pace. 'Tally ho!' cried I. Out came Hazy from the other hedge, and away we went--'Pug' ahead, 'Growler' and 'Gay-lad' scarce twenty yards from his brush, and the devil take the hindmost. Well, of course, we made sure of catching him in about a hundred yards--two such runners as Hazy and me--"

"And did not you?"

"I'll tell you. At first we certainly gained on him a few yards, but after that I could not near him. But Hazy put on a tremendous spurt, and left me behind for all I could do. 'Here is a go,' thought I, 'and I have backed myself for a hundred pounds in a half-mile race against this beggar.' Well, I was behind, but Hazy and the fox seemed to me to be joined together running, when all of a sudden--pouff! Hazy's wind and his pluck blew out together. He tailed off. Wasn't I pleased! 'Good-by, Hazy,' says I, as I shot by him and took up the running. Well, I tried all I knew; but this confounded fellow ran me within half a mile of Sydney (N. B., within two miles of it). My throat and all my inside was like an oven, and I was thinking of tailing off, too, when I heard the beggar puff and blow, so then I knew I must come up with him before long."

"And did you, sir?" asked Jenny in great excitement.

"Yes," said the other, "I passed him even."

"But did you catch him?"

"Well! why--yes--I caught him--as the Chinese caught the Tartar. This was one of your downy coves that are up to every move. When he found he hadn't legs to run from me he slips back to meet me. Down he goes under my leg--I go blundering over him twenty miles an hour. He lifts me clear over his head and I come flying down from the clouds heel over tip. I'd give twenty pounds to know how it was done, and fifty to see it done--to a friend, All I know is that I should have knocked my own brains out if it had not been for my hat and my hand--they bore the brunt between them, as you see."

"And what became of the poor man?" asked Jane.

"Well, when the poor man had flung me over his head he ran on faster than ever, and by the time I had shaken my knowledge-box and found out north from south, I heard the poor man's nailed shoes clattering down the road. To start again a hundred yards behind a poor man who could run like that would have been making a toil of a trouble, so I trotted back to meet Hazy.

"Well, I am glad he got off clear--ain't you, Tom?"

"Yes--no. A scoundrel that hashed the master like this--why, Jane, you must be mad!"

"Spare your virtuous indignation," said the other coolly. "Remember I had been hunting him like a wild beast till his heart was nearly broke, and, when I was down, he could easily have revenged himself by giving me a kick with his heavy shoes on the head or the loins that would have spoiled my running for a month of Sundays. What do you say to that?"

Robinson colored. "I say you are very good to make excuses for an unfortunate man--for a rascal--that is to say, a burglar; a--"

"And how do you know he was all that?" asked Jenny very sharply.

"Why did he run if he was not guilty?" inquired Robinson cunningly.

"Guilty--what of?" asked Jenny.

"That is more than I can tell you," replied Robinson.

"I dare say," said Jenny, "it was some peaceable man that took fright at seeing two wild young gentlemen come out like mad bulls after him."

"When I have told you my story you will be better able to judge."

"What, isn't the story ended?"

"Ended? The cream of it is coming."

"Oh, sir," cried Jenny, "please don't go on till I come back. I am going for the cold lotion now; I have fomented it enough."

"Well, look sharp, then--here is the other all in a twitter with excitement."

"Me, sir? No--yes. I am naturally interested."

"Well, you haven't been long. I don't think I want any lotion, the hot water has done it a good deal of good."

"This will do it more."

"But do you know it is rather a bore to have only one hand to cut bread and butter with?"

"I'll cut it, sir," said Robinson, laying down his irons for a moment.

"How long shall you be, Jenny?" asked Mr. Miles.

"I shall have done by when your story is done," replied she coolly.

Mr. Miles laughed. "Well, Jenny," said he, "I hadn't walked far before I met Hazeltine. 'Have you got him?' says he. 'Do I look like it?' said I rather crustily. Fancy a fool asking me whether I had got him! So I told him all about it, and we walked back together. By-and-by we met the other two just outside the gate. Well, just as we were going in Tom Yates said, 'I say, suppose we look round the premises before we go to bed.' We went softly round the house and what did we find but a window with the glass taken out; we poked about and we found a pair of shoes. 'Why, there's some one in the house,' says Tom Yates, 'as I'm a sinner.' So we held a council of war. Tom was to go into the kitchen, lock the door leading out, and ambush in the larder with his pistols; and we three were to go in by the front door and search the house. Well, Hazeltine and I had got within a yard or two of it and the knave of trumps in the rear with a sword or something, when, by George! sir, the door began to open, and out slips a fellow quietly. Long Hazy and I went at him, Hazy first. Crack he caught Hazy on the head with a bludgeon, down went daddy-long-legs, and I got entangled in him, and the robber cut like the wind for the kitchen. 'Come on,' shouted I to the honorable thingunibob, bother his name--there--the knave of trumps, and I pulled up Hazy but couldn't wait for him, and after the beggar like mad. Well, as I came near the kitchen-door I heard a small scrimmage, and back comes my man flying bludgeon in one hand and knife in the other, both whirling over his head like a windmill. I kept cool, doubled my right, and put in a heavy one from the armpit; you know, Tom; caught him just under the chin, you might have heard his jaw crack a mile off; down goes my man on his back flat on the bricks, and his bludgeon rattled one way and his knife the other--such a lark. Oh! oh! oh! what are you doing, Robinson, you hurt me most confoundedly--I won't tell you any more. So now he was down, in popped the knave of swords and fell on him, and Hazy came staggering in after and insulted him a bit and we bagged him."

"And the other, sir," asked Tom, affecting an indifferent tone, "he didn't get off, I hope?"

"What other?" inquired Jenny.

"The other unfor--the other rascal--the burglar."

"Why he never said there were two."

"Y--yes!--he said they found their shoes."

"No, he said he found a pair of shoes."

"For all that you are wrong, Jenny, and he is right--there were two; and, what is more, Tom Yates had got the other, threatening to blow out his brains if he moved, so down he sat on the dresser and took it quite easy and whistled a tune while we trussed the other beggar with his own bludgeon and our chokers. Tom Yates says the cool one tumbled down from upstairs just as we drove our one in. Tom let them try the door before he bounced out; then my one flung a chair at Tom's head and cut back, Tom nailed the other and I floored mine. Hurrah!"

Through this whole narrative Robinson had coolly and delicately to curl live hair with a beating heart, and to curl the very man who was relating all the time how he had hunted him and caught his comrades. Meantime a shrewd woman there listening with all her ears, a woman, too, who had certain vague suspicions about him, and had taken him up rather sharper than natural, he thought, when, being off his guard for a moment he anticipated the narrator, and assumed there were two burglars in the house.

Tom, therefore, though curious and anxious, shut his face and got on his guard, and it was with an admirable imitation of mere sociable curiosity that he inquired, "And what did the rascals say for themselves?"

"What could they say?" said Jenny, "they were caught in the fact."

"To do them justice they did not speak of themselves, but they said three or four words too--very much to the point."

"How interesting it is!" cried Jenny-- "what about?"

"Well! it was about your friend."

"My friend?"

"The peaceable gentleman the two young ruffians had chased down the road."

"Oh! he was one of them," said Jane, "that is plain enough now in course. What did they say about him?"

"'Sold!' says my one to Tom's. 'And no mistake,' says Tom's. Oh! they spoke out, took no more notice of us four than if we had no ears. Then says mine: 'What do you think of your pal now?' and what do you think Tom's answered, Jenny?--it was rather a curious answer--multum in parvo as we say at school, and one that makes me fear there is a storm brewing for our mutual friend, the peaceable gentleman, Jenny--alias the downy runner."

"Why, what did he say?"

"He said, 'I think--he won't be alive this day week! '"

"The wretches!"

"No! you don't see--they thought he had betrayed them."

"But, of course, you undeceived them," said Robinson.

"No! I didn't. Why, you precious greenhorn, was that our game?"

"Well, sir," cried Robinson cheerfully, "any way it was a good night's work. The only thing vexes me," added he, with an intense air of mortification, "is that the worst scoundrel of the lot got clear off; that is a pity--a downright pity."

"Make your mind easy," replied Mr. Miles calmly, "he won't escape; we shall have him before the day is out."

"Will you, sir? that is right--but how?"

"The honorable thingumbob, Tom Yates's friend, put us up to it. We sent the pair down to Sydney in the break and we put Yates's groom (he is a ticket-of-leave) in with them, and a bottle of brandy, and he is to condole with them and have a guinea if they let out the third man's name, and they will--for they are bitter against him."

Robinson sighed. "What is the matter?" said his master, trying to twist his head round.

"Nothing! only I am afraid they--they won't split; fellows of that sort don't split on a comrade where they can get no good by it."

"Well, if they don't, still we shall have him. One of us saw his face."

"Ah!"

"It was the honorable--the knave of trumps. While Yates was getting the arms, Trumps slipped out by the garden gate and caught a glimpse of our friend; he saw him take the lantern up and fling it down and run. The light fell full on his face and he could swear to it out of a thousand. So the net is round our friend and we shall have him before the day is out."

"Dring-a-dong-dring" (a ring at the bell).

"Have you done, Tom?"

"Just one more turn, sir."

"Then, Jenny, you see who that is?"

Jenny went and returned with an embossed card, "It is a young gentleman-- mustache and lavender gloves; oh, such a buck!"

"Who can it be? the 'Honorable George Lascelles?' why that is the very man. I remember he said he would do himself the honor to call on me. That is the knave of trumps; go down directly, Robinson, and tell him I'm at home and bring him up."

"Yes, sir!"

"Yes, sir! Well, then, why don't you go!"

"Um! perhaps Jenny will go while I clear these things away;" and without waiting for an answer Robinson hastened to encumber himself with the tea-tray, and flung the loaf and curling-irons into it, and bustled about and showed a sudden zeal lest this bachelor's room should appear in disorder; and as Jenny mounted the front stairs followed by the sprig of nobility, he plunged heavily laden down the back stairs into the kitchen and off with his coat and cleaned knives like a mad thing.

"Oh! if I had but a pound in my pocket," thought he, "I would not stay another hour in Sydney. I'd get my ring and run for Bathurst and never look behind me. How comfortable and happy I was until I fell back into the old courses, and now see what a life mine has been ever since! What a twelve hours! hunted like a wild beast, suspected and watched by my fellow-servant and forced to hide my thoughts from this one and my face from that one; but I deserve it and I wish it was ten times as bad. Oh! you fool--you idiot--you brute--it is not the half of what you deserve. I ask but one thing of Heaven--that his reverence may never know; don't let me break that good man's heart; I'd much rather die before the day is out!"

At this moment Jenny came in. Robinson cleaned the poor knives harder still and did not speak; his cue was to find out what was passing in the girl's mind. But she washed her cup and saucer and plates in silence. Presently the bell rang.

"Tom!" said Jenny quietly.

"Would you mind going, Jenny?"

"Me! it is not my business."

"No, Jenny! but once in a way if you will be so kind."

"Once! why I have been twice to the door for you to-day. You to your place and I to mine. Shan't go!"

"Look at me with my coat off and covered with brickdust."

"Put your coat on and shake the dust off."

"Oh, Jenny! that is not like you to refuse me such a trifle. I would not disoblige you so."

"I didn't refuse," said Jenny, making for the door; "I only said 'no' once or twice--we don't call that refusing;" but as she went out of the door she turned sharp as if to catch Robinson's face off its guard; and her gray eye dwelt on him with one of those demure, inexplicable looks her sex can give all ab extra--seeing all, revealing nothing.

She returned with her face on fire. "That is what I get for taking your place!"

"What is the matter?"

"That impudent young villain wanted to kiss me."

"Oh! is that all?"

"No! it is not all; he said I was the prettiest girl in Sydney" (with an appearance of rising indignation).

"Well! but, Jenny, that is no news, I could have told him that."

"Then why did you never tell me?"

"I thought by your manner--you knew it."

Having tried to propitiate the foe thus, Robinson lost no more time, but went upstairs and asked Mr. Miles for the trifle due to him as wages. Mr. Miles was very sorry, but he had been cleaned out at his friend Yates's--had not a shilling left and no hopes of any for a fortnight to come.

"Then, sir," said Robinson doggedly, "I hope you will allow me to go into the town and try and make a little for myself, just enough to pay my traveling expenses.

"By all means," was the reply; "tell me if you succeed--and I'll borrow a sovereign of you."

Out went Robinson into the town of Sydney. He got into a respectable street, and knocked at a good house with a green door. He introduced himself to the owner as a first-rate painter and engrainer, and offered to turn this door into a mahogany, walnut, oak or what-not door. "The house is beautiful, all but the door," said sly Tom; "it is blistered."

"I am quite content with it as it is," was the reply in a rude, supercilious tone.

Robinson went away discomfited; he went doggedly down the street begging them all to have their doors beautified, and wincing at every refusal. At last he found a shopkeeper who had no objection, but doubted Robinson's capacity. "Show me what you can do," said he slyly, "and then I'll talk to you."

"Send for the materials," replied the artist, "and give me a board and I'll put half a dozen woods on the face of it."

"And pray," said the man, "why should I lay out my money in advertising you? No! you bring me a specimen, and if it is all right I'll give you the job."

"That is a bargain," replied Robinson, and went off. "How hard they make honesty to a poor fellow," muttered he bitterly, "but I'll beat them," and he clinched his teeth.

He went to a pawnbroker and pawned the hat off his head--it was a new one; then for a halfpenny he bought a sheet of brown paper and twisted it into a workman's cap; he bought the brushes and a little paint and a little varnish, and then he was without a penny again. He went to a wheelwright's and begged the loan of a small valueless worm-eaten board he saw kicking about, telling him what it was for. The wealthy wheelwright eyed him with scorn. "Should I ever see it again?" asked he ironically.

"Keep it for your coffin," said Robinson fiercely, and passed on. "How hard they make honesty to a poor fellow! I was a fool for asking for it when I might have taken it. What was there to hinder me? Honesty, my lass, you are bitter."

Presently he came to the suburbs and there was a small wooden cottage. The owner, a common laborer, was repairing it as well as he could. Robinson asked him very timidly if he could spare a couple of square feet off a board he was sawing. "What for?" Robinson showed his paintpot and brushes, and told him how he was at a stand-still for want of a board. "It is only a loan of it I ask," said he.

The man measured the plank carefully, and after some hesitation cut off a good piece. "I can spare that much," said he; "poor folk should feel for one another."

"I'll bring it back, you may depend," said Robinson.

"You needn't trouble," replied the laboring man with a droll wink, as much as to say, "Gammon!"

When Robinson returned to the skeptical shopkeeper with a board on which oak, satin-wood, walnut, etc., were imitated to the life in squares, that worthy gave a start and betrayed his admiration, and Robinson asked him five shillings more than he would if the other had been more considerate. In short, before evening the door was painted a splendid imitation of walnut-wood, the shopkeeper was enchanted, and Robinson had fifteen shillings handed over to him. He ran and got Mr. Eden's ring out of pawn, and kissed it and put it on; next he liberated his hat. He slept better this night than the last. "One more such day and I shall have enough to pay my expenses to Bathurst."

He turned, out early and went into the town. He went into the street where he had worked last evening, and when he came near this door there was a knot of persons round it. Robinson joined them. Presently one of the shop-boys cried out, "Why, here he is; this is the painter!"

Instantly three or four hands were laid on Robinson. "Come and paint my door."

"No, come and paint mine!"

"No, mine!"

Tom had never been in such request since he was an itinerant quack. His sly eye twinkled, and this artist put himself up to auction then and there. He was knocked down to a tradesman in the same street--twenty-one shillings the price of this door (mock mahogany). While he was working commissions poured in and Robinson's price rose, the demand for him being greater than the supply. The mahogany door was really a chef-d'oeuvre. He came home triumphant with thirty shillings in his pocket, he spread them out on the kitchen table and looked at them with a pride and a thrill of joy money never gave him before. He had often closed the shutters and furtively spread out twice as many sovereigns, but they were only his, these shillings were his own. And they were not only his own but his own by labor. Each sacred shilling represented so much virtue; for industry is a virtue. He looked at them with a father's pride.

How sweet the butter our own hands have churned!--T. T.

He blessed his reverend friend for having taught him an art in a dunghole where idiots and savages teach crank. He blessed his reverence's four bones, his favorite imprecation of the benevolent kind. I conclude the four bones meant the arms and legs. If so it would have been more to the point had he blessed the fifth--the skull.

Jenny came in and found him gloating over his virtuous shillings. She stared. He told her what he had been about these two days past, his difficulties, his success, the admiration his work excited throughout the capital (he must exaggerate a little or it would not be Tom Robinson), and the wealth he was amassing.

Jenny was glad to hear this, very glad, but she scolded him well for pawning his hat. "Why didn't you ask me?" said she; "I would have lent you a pound or even two, or given them you for any honest purpose." And Jenny pouted and got up a little quarrel.

The next day a gentleman caught Robinson and made him paint two doors in his fancy villa. Satin-wood this time; and he received three pounds three shillings, a good dinner, and what Bohemians all adore--Praise. Now as he returned in the evening a sudden misgiving came to him. "I have not thought once of Bathurst to-day. I see--all this money-making is a contrivance to keep me in Sydney. It is absurd my coining paint at this rate. I see your game, my lad; either I am to fall into bad company again, or to be split upon and nabbed for that last job. To-morrow I will be on the road to Bathurst. I can paint there just as well as here; besides I have got my orders from his reverence to go, and I'll go."

He told Jane his resolution. She made no answer. While these two were sitting cozily by the fireside--for since Robinson took to working hard all day he began to relish the hearth at night--suddenly cheerful, boisterous voices, and Mr. Miles and two friends burst in and would have an extempore supper, and nothing else would serve these libertines but mutton-chops off the gridiron. So they invaded the kitchen. Out ran Jenny to avoid them--or put on a smarter cap; and Robinson was to cut the chops and lay a cloth on the dresser and help cook. While his master went off to the cellar the two rakes who remained chattered and laughed both pretty loud. They had dined together and the bottle had not stood still.

"I have heard that voice before," thought Robinson. "It is a very peculiar voice. Whose voice is that?"

He looked the gentleman full in the face and could hardly suppress a movement of surprise.

The gentleman by the instinct of the eye caught his, and his attention was suddenly attracted to Robinson, and from that moment his eye was never off Robinson, following him everywhere. Robinson affected not to notice this; the chops were grilling, Jenny came in and bustled about and pretended not to hear the side-compliments of the libertines. Presently the young gentleman with the peculiar voice took out his pocketbook and said, "I have a bet to propose. I'll bet you fifty pounds I find the man you two hunted down the road on Monday night."

"No takers," replied Mr. Hazeltine with his mouth full.

"Stop a bit. I don't care if I make a time bet," said Miles. "How soon will you bet you catch him?"

"In half an hour," was the cool reply. And the Honorable George while making it managed at the same time in a sauntering sort of way to put himself between Robinson and the door that led out into the garden. Robinson eyed him in silence and never moved.

"In half a hour. That is a fair bet," said Mr. Miles. "Shall I take him?"

"Better not; he is a knowing one. He has seen him to earth somewhere or he would not offer you such a bet."

"Well, I'll bet you five to three," proposed the Honorable George.

"Done!"

"Done!"

Robinson put in a hasty word: "And what is to become of Thimble-rig Jem, sir?" These words, addressed to Mr. Lascelles, produced a singular effect. That gentleman gave an immediate shiver, as if a bullet had passed clean through him and out again, then opened his eyes and looked first at one door then at the other as if hesitating which he should go by. Robinson continued, addressing him with marked respect, "What I mean, sir, is that there is a government reward of two hundred pounds for Thimble-rig Jem, and the police wouldn't like to be drawn away from two hundred pounds after a poor fellow like him you saw on Monday night, one that is only suspected and no reward offered. Now Jem is a notorious culprit."

"Who is this Jem, my man? What is he?" asked Mr. Lascelles with a composure that contrasted remarkably with his late emotion.

"A convict escaped from Norfolk Island, sir; an old offender. I fell in with him once. He has forgotten me I dare say, but I never forget a man. They say he has grown a mustache and whiskers and passes himself off for a nob; but I could swear to him."

"How? By what?" cried Mr. Miles.

"If he should ever be fool enough to get in my way--"

"Hang Thimble-rig Jem," cried Hazeltine. "Is it a bet, Lascelles?"

"What?"

"That you nab our one in half an hour?" Mr. Lascelles affected an aristocratic drawl. "No, I was joking. I couldn't afford to leave the fire for thirty pounds. Why should I run after the poor dayvil? Find him yourselves. He never annoyed me. Got a cigar, Miles?"

After their chops, etc., the rakes went off to finish the night elsewhere.

"There, they are gone at last! Why, Jenny, how pale you look!" said Robinson, not seeing the color of his own cheek. "What is wrong?" Jenny answered by sitting down and bursting out crying. Tom sat opposite her with his eyes on the ground.

"Oh, what I have gone through this day!" cried Jenny. "Oh! oh! oh! oh!" sobbing convulsively.

What could Tom do but console her? And she found it so agreeable to be consoled that she prolonged her distress. An impressionable Bohemian on one side a fireplace, and a sweet, pretty girl crying on the other, what wonder that two o'clock in the morning found this pair sitting on the same side of the fire aforesaid--her hand in his?

The next morning at six o'clock Jenny was down to make his breakfast for him before starting. If she had said, "Don't go," it is to be feared the temptation would have been too strong, but she did not; she said sorrowfully, "You are right to leave this town." She never explained. Tom never heard from her own lips how far her suspicions went. He was a coward, and seeing how shrewd she was, was afraid to ask her; and she was one of your natural ladies who can leave a thing unsaid out of delicacy.

Tom Robinson was what Jenny called "capital company." He had won her admiration by his conversation, his stories of life, and now and then a song, and by his good looks and good nature. She disguised her affection admirably until he was in danger and about to leave her--and then she betrayed herself. If she was fire he was tow. At last it came to this: "Don't you cry so, dear girl. I have got a question to put to you--IF I COME BACK A BETTER MAN THAN I GO, WILL YOU BE MRS. ROBINSON?"

"Yes."

ROBINSON started for Bathurst. Just before he got clear of the town he passed the poor man's cottage who had lent him the board. "Bless me, how came I to forget him?" said he. At that moment the man came out to go to work. "Here I am," said Robinson, meeting him full, "and here is your board;" showing it to him painted in squares. "Can't afford to give it you back--it is my advertisement. But here is half-a-crown for it and for your trusting me."

"Well, to be sure," cried the man. "Now who'd have thought this? Why, if the world is not turning honest. But half-a-crown is too much; 'tain't worth the half of it."

"It was worth five pounds to me. I got employment through it. Look here," and he showed him several pounds in silver; "all this came from your board; so take your half-crown and my thanks on the head of it."

The half-crown lay in the man's palm; he looked in Robinson's face. "Well," cried he with astonishment, "you are the honestest man ever I fell in with."

"I am the honestest man! You will go to heaven for saying those words to me," cried Robinson warmly and with agitation. "Good-by, my good, charitable soul; you deserve ten times what you have got," and Robinson made off.

The other, as soon as he recovered the shock, shouted after him, "Good-by, honest man, and good luck wherever you go."

And Robinson heard him scuttle about and hastily convene small boys and dispatch them down the road to look at an honest man. But the young wood did not kindle at his enthusiasm. Had the rarity been a bear with a monkey on him, well and good.

"I'm pretty well paid for a little honesty," thought Robinson. He stepped gallantly out in high spirits, and thought of Jenny, and fell in love with her, and saw in her affection yet another inducement to be honest and industrious. Nothing of note happened on his way to Bathurst, except that one day as he was tramping along very hot and thirsty a luscious prickly pear hung over a wall, and many a respectable man would have taken it without scruple; but Tom was so afraid of beginning again he turned his back on it and ran on instead of walking to make sure.

When he reached Bathurst his purse was very low, and he had a good many more miles to go, and not feeling quite sure of his welcome he did not care to be penniless, so he went round the town with his advertising-board and very soon was painting doors in Bathurst. He found the natives stingier here than in Sydney, and they had a notion a traveler like him ought to work much cheaper than an established man; but still he put by something every day.

He had been three days in the town when a man stepped up to him as he finished a job and asked him to go home with him. The man took him to a small but rather neat shop, plumber's, glazier's and painter's.

"Why, you don't want me," said Robinson; "we are in the same line of business."

"Step in," said the man. In a few words he let Robinson know that he had a great bargain to offer him. "I am going to sell the shop," said he. "It is a business I never much fancied, and I had rather sell it to a stranger than to a Bathurst man, for the trade have offended me. There is not a man in the colony can work like you, and you may make a little fortune here."

Robinson's eyes sparkled a moment, then he replied, "I am too poor to buy a business. What do you want for it?"

"Only sixty pounds for the articles in the shop and the good will and all."

"Well, I dare say it is moderate, but how am I to find sixty pounds?"

"I'll make it as light as a feather. Five pounds down. Five pounds in a month; after that--ten pounds a month till we are clear. Take possession and sell the goods and work the good-will on payment of the first five."

"That is very liberal," said Robinson. "Well, give me till next Thursday and I'll bring you the first five."

"Oh, I can't do that; I give you the first offer, but into the market it goes this evening, and no later."

"I'll call this evening and see if I can do it." Robinson tried to make up the money, but it was not to be done. Then fell a terrible temptation upon him. Handling George Fielding's letter with his delicate fingers, he had satisfied himself there was a bank-note in it. Why not borrow this bank-note? The shop would soon repay it. The idea rushed over him like a flood. At the same moment he took fright at it. "Lord, help me!" he ejaculated.

He rushed to a shop, bought two or three sheets of brown paper and a lot of wafers. With nimble fingers he put the letter in one parcel, that parcel in another, that in another, and so on till there were a dozen envelopes between him and the irregular loan. This done he confided the grand parcel to his landlord.

"Give it me when I start."

He went no more near the little shop till he had made seven pounds; then he went. The shop and business had been sold just twenty-four hours. Robinson groaned. "If I had not been so very honest! Never mind. I must take the bitter with the sweet."

For all that the town became distasteful to him. He bought a cheap revolver--for there was a talk of bushrangers in the neighborhood--and started to walk to George Fielding's farm. He reached it in the evening.

"There is no George Fielding here," was the news. "He left this more than six months ago."

"Do you know where he is?"

"Not I."

Robinson had to ask everybody he met where George Fielding was gone to. At last, by good luck, he fell in with George's friend, McLaughlan, who told him it was twenty-five miles off.

"Twenty-five miles? that must be for to-morrow, then."

McLaughlan told him he knew George Fielding very well. "He is a fine lad." Then he asked Robinson what was his business. Robinson took down a very thin light board with ornamented words painted on it.

"That is my business," said he.

At the sight of a real business the worthy Scot offered to take care of him for the night, and put him on the road to Fielding's next morning. Next morning Robinson painted his front door as a return for bed and breakfast. McLaughlan gave him somewhat intricate instructions for to-morrow's route. Robinson followed them and soon lost his way. He was set right again, but lost it again; and after a tremendous day's walk made up his mind he should have to camp in the open air and without his supper--when he heard a dog baying in the distance. "There is a house of some kind anyway," thought Robinson, "but where?--I see none--better make for the dog."

He made straight for the sound, but still he could not see any house. At last, however, coming over a hill he found a house beneath him, and on the other side of this house the dog was howling incessantly. Robinson came down the hill, walked round the house, and there sat the dog on the steps.

"Well, it is you for howling anyway," said Robinson.

"Anybody at home?" he shouted. No one answered, and the dog howled on.

"Why, the place is deserted, I think. Haven't I seen that dog before? Why, it is Carlo! Here, Carlo, poor fellow, Carlo, what is the matter?"

The dog gave a little whimper as Robinson stooped and patted him, but no sign of positive recognition, but he pattered into the house. Robinson followed him, and there he found the man he had come to see--stretched on his bed--pale and hollow-eyed and grisly--and looking like a corpse in the fading light.

Robinson was awestruck.

"Oh! what is this?" said he. "Have I come all this way to bury him?"

He leaned over and felt his heart; it beat feebly but equably, and he muttered something unintelligible when Robinson touched him. Then Robinson struck a light, and right glad he was to find a cauldron full of gelatinized beef soup. He warmed some and ate a great supper, and Carlo sat and whimpered, and then wagged his tail and plucked up more and more spirit, and finally recognized Tom all in a moment somehow and announced the fact by one great disconnected bark and a saltatory motion. This done he turned to and also ate a voracious supper. Robinson rolled himself up in George's great-coat and slept like a top on the floor. Next morning he was waked by a tapping, and there was Carlo seated bolt upright with his tail beating the floor because George was sitting up in the bed looking about him in a puzzled way.

"Jacky," said he, "is that you?"

Robinson got up, rubbed his eyes, and came toward the bed. George stared in his face and rubbed his eyes, too, for he thought he must be under an ocular delusion. "Who are you?"

"A friend."

"Well! I didn't think to see you under a roof of mine again."

"Just the welcome I expected," thought Robinson bitterly. He answered coldly: "Well, as soon as you are well you can turn me out of your house, but I should say you are not strong enough to do it just now."

"No, I am weak enough, but I am better--I could eat something."

"Oh, you could do that! what! even if I cooked it? Here goes, then."

Tom lit the fire and warmed some beef soup. George ate some, but very little; however he drank a great jugful of water--then dozed and fell into a fine perspiration. It was a favorable crisis, and from that moment youth and a sound constitution began to pull him through; moreover no assassin had been there with his lancet.

Behold the thief turned nurse! The next day as he pottered about clearing the room, opening or shutting the windows, cooking and serving, he noticed George's eye following him everywhere with a placid wonder which at last broke into words:

"You take a deal of trouble about me."

"I do," was the dry answer.

"It is very good of you, but--"

"You would as lieve it was anybody else; but your other friends have left you to die like a dog," said Robinson sarcastically. "Well, they left you when you were sick--I'll leave you when you are well."

"What for? Seems to me that you have earned a right to stay as long as you are minded. The man that stands by me in trouble I won't bid him go when the sun shines again."

And at this precise point in his sentence, without the least warning, Mr. Fielding ignited himself--and inquired with fury whether it came within Robinson's individual experience that George Fielding was of an ungrateful turn, or whether such was the general voice of fame. "Now, don't you get in a rage and burst your boiler," said Robinson. "Well, George--without joking, though--I have been kind to you. Not for nursing you--what Christian would not do that for his countryman and his old landlord sick in a desert?--but what would you think of me if I told you I had come a hundred and sixty miles to bring you a letter? I wouldn't show it you before, for they say exciting them is bad for fever, but I think I may venture now; here it is." And Robinson tore off one by one the twelve envelopes, to George's astonishment and curiosity. "There."

"I don't know the hand," said George. But opening the inclosure he caught a glance of a hand he did know, and let everything else drop on the bed, while he held this and gazed at it, and the color flushed into his white cheek. "Oh!" cried he, and worshipped it in silence again; then opened it and devoured it. First came some precious words of affection and encouragement. He kissed the letter. "You are a good fellow to bring me such a treasure; and I'll never forget it as long as I live!"

Then he went back to the letter. "There is something about you, Tom!"

"About me?"

"She tells me you never had a father, not to say a father--"

"She says true."

"Susan says that is a great disadvantage to any man, and so it is--and--poor fellow--"

"What?"

"She says they came between your sweetheart and you--Oh! poor Tom!"

"What?"

"You lost your sweetheart; no wonder you went astray after that. What would become of me if I lost my Susan? And--ay, you were always better than me, Susan. She says she and I have never been sore tempted like you."

"Bless her little heart for making excuses for a poor fellow; but she was always a charitable, kind-hearted young lady."

"Wasn't she, Tom?"

"And what sweet eyes!"

"Ain't they, Tom? brimful of heaven I call them."

"And when she used to smile on you, Master George, oh! the ivories."

"Now you take my hand this minute. How foolish I am. I can't see--now you shall read it on to me because you brought it."

"'And you, George, that are as honest a man as ever lived, do keep him by you a while, and keep him in the right way. He is well-disposed but weak--do it to oblige me.'"

"Will you stay with me, Tom?" inquired George, cheerful and business-like. "I am not a lucky man, but while I have a shilling there's sixpence for the man that brought me this--dew in the desert I call it. And to think you have seen her since I have; how was she looking; had she her beautiful color; what did she say to you with her own mouth?"

Then Robinson had to recall every word Susan had said to him; this done, George took the inclosure. "Stop, here is something for you: 'George Fielding is requested to give this to Robinson for the use of Thomas Sinclair.' There you are, Tom--well!--what is the matter?"

"Nothing. It is a name I have not heard a while. I did not know any creature but me knew it; is it glamour, or what?"

"Why, Tom! what is the matter? don't look like that. Open it, and let us see what there is inside."

Robinson opened it, and there was the five-pound note for him, with this line: "If you have regained the name of Sinclair, keep it."

Robinson ran out of the house, and walked to and fro in a state of exaltation. "I'm well paid for my journey; I'm well paid for not fingering that note! Who would not be honest if they knew the sweets? How could he know my name? is he really more than man? Keep it? Will I not!"

THE old attachment was revived. Robinson had always a great regard for George, and after nursing and bringing him through a dangerous illness this feeling doubled. And as for George, the man who had brought him a letter from Susan one hundred and sixty miles became such a benefactor in his eyes that he thought nothing good enough for him.

In a very few days George was about again and on his pony, and he and Robinson and Carlo went a shepherding. One or two bullocks had gone to Jericho while George lay ill, and the poor fellow's heart was sore when he looked at his diminished substance and lost time. Robinson threw himself heart and soul into the business, and was of great service to George; but after a bit he found it a dull life.

George saw this, and said to him: "You would do better in a town. I should he sorry to lose you, but if you take my advice you will turn your back on unlucky George, and try the paint-brush in Bathurst."

For Robinson had told him all about it--and painted his front door. "Can't afford to part from Honesty," was the firm reply.

George breathed again. Robinson was a great comfort to the weak, solitary, and now desponding man. One day for a change they had a thirty-mile walk, to see a farmer that had some beasts to sell a great bargain; he was going to boil them down if he could not find a customer. They found them all just sold. "Just my luck," said George.

They came home another way. Returning home, George was silent and depressed.

Robinson was silent, but appeared to be swelling with some grand idea. Every now and then he shot ahead under its influence. When they got home and were seated at supper, he suddenly put this question to George, "Did you ever hear of any gold being found in these parts?"

"No! never!"

"What, not in any part of the country?"

"No! never!"

"Well, that is odd!"

"I am afraid it is a very bad country for that."

"Ay to make it in, but not to find it in."

"What do you mean?"

"George," said the other, lowering his voice mysteriously, "in our walk to-day we passed places that brought my heart into my mouth; for if this was only California those places would be pockets of gold."

"But you see it is not California, but Australia, where all the world knows there is nothing of what your mind is running on."

"Don't say 'knows,' say 'thinks.' Has it ever been searched for gold?"

"I'll be bound it has; or, if not, with so many eyes constantly looking on every foot of soil a speck or two would have come to light."

"One would think so; but it is astonishing how blind folks are, till they are taught how to look, and where to look. 'Tis the mind that sees things, George, not the eye."

"Ah!" said George with a sigh, "this chat puts me in mind of 'The Grove.' Do you mind how you used to pester everybody to go out to California?"

"Yes! and I wish we were there now."

"And all your talk used to be gold--gold--gold."

"As well say it as think it."

"That is true. Well, we shall be very busy all day to-morrow, but in the afternoon dig for gold an hour or two--then you will be satisfied."

"But it is no use digging here; it was full five-and-twenty miles from here the likely-looking place."

"Then why didn't you stop me at the place?"

"Why?" replied Robinson, sourly, "because his reverence did so snub me whenever I got upon that favorite topic, that I really had got out of the habit. I was ashamed to say, 'George, let us stop on the road and try for gold with our finger-nails.' I knew I should only get laughed at."

"Well," said George sarcastically, "since the gold mine is twenty-five miles off, and our work is round about the door, suppose we pen sheep to-morrow--and dig for gold when there is nothing better to be done."

Robinson sighed. Unbucolical to the last degree was the spirit in which our Bohemian tended the flocks next morning.

His thoughts were deeper than the soil. And every evening up came the old topic. Oh! how sick George got of it. At last one night he said: "My lad, I should like to tell you a story--but I suppose I shall make a bungle of it; shan't cut the furrow clean I am doubtful."

"Never mind; try!"

"Well, then. Once upon a time there was an old chap that had heard or read about treasures being found in odd places, a pot full of guineas or something; and it took root in his heart till nothing would serve him but he must find a pot of guineas, too; he used to poke about all the old ruins grubbing away, and would have taken up the floor of the church, but the churchwardens would not have it. One morning he comes down and says to his wife, 'It is all right, old woman, I've found the treasure.'

"'No! have you, though?' says she.

"'Yes!' says he; 'leastways, it is as good as found; it is only waiting till I've had my breakfast, and then I'll go out and fetch it in.'

"'La, John, but how did you find it?'

"'It was revealed to me in a dream,' says he, as grave as a judge.

"'And where is it?' asks the old woman.

"'Under a tree in our own orchard--no farther,' says he.

"'Oh, John! how long you are at breakfast to-day!' Up they both got and into the orchard. 'Now, which tree is it under?'

"John, he scratches his head, 'Blest if I know.'

"'Why, you old ninny,' says the mistress, 'didn't you take the trouble to notice?'

"'That I did,' said he; 'I saw plain enough which tree it was in my dream, but now they muddle it all, there are so many of 'em.'

"'Drat your stupid old head,' says she, 'why didn't you put a nick on the right one at the time?'"

Robinson burst out laughing. George chuckled. "Oh!" said he, "there were a pair of them for wisdom, you may take your oath of that. 'Well,' says he, 'I must dig till I find the right one.' The wife she loses heart at this; for there was eighty apple-trees, and a score of cherry-trees. 'Mind you don't cut the roots,' says she, and she heaves a sigh. John he gives them bad language, root and branch. 'What signifies cut or no cut; the old faggots--they don't bear me a bushel of fruit the whole lot. They used to bear two sacks apiece in father's time. Drat 'em.'

"'Well, John,' says the old woman, smoothing him down; 'father used to give them a deal of attention.'--' 'Tain't that! 'tain't that!' says he quick and spiteful-like; 'they have got old like ourselves, and good for fire-wood.' Out pickax and spade and digs three foot deep round one, and finding nothing but mould goes at another, makes a little mound all round him, too--no guinea-pot. Well, the village let him dig three or four quiet enough; but after that curiosity was awakened, and while John was digging, and that was all day, there was mostly seven or eight watching through the fence and passing jests. After a bit a fashion came up of flinging a stone or two at John; then John he brought out his gun loaded with dust-shot along with his pick and spade, and the first stone came he fired sharp in that direction and then loaded again. So they took that hint, and John dug on in peace--till about the fourth Sunday--and then the parson had a slap at him in church. 'Folks were not to heap up to themselves treasures on earth,' was all his discourse."

"Well, but," said Robinson, "this one was only heaping up mould."

"So it seemed when he had dug the five-score holes, for no pot of gold didn't come to light. Then the neighbors called the orchard 'Jacobs' Folly;' his name was Jacobs--John Jacobs. 'Now then, wife,' says he, 'suppose you and I look out for another village to live in, for their gibes are more than I can bear.' Old woman begins to cry. 'Been here so long--brought me home here, John--when we were first married, John--and I was a comely lass, and you the smartest young man I ever saw, to my fancy any way; couldn't sleep or eat my victuals in any house but this.'

"'Oh! couldn't ye? Well, then, we must stay; perhaps it will blow over.' -- 'Like everything else, John; but, dear John, do ye fill in those holes; the young folk come far and wide on Sundays to see them.

Wife, I haven't the heart,' says he. 'You see, when I was digging for the treasure I was always a-going to find, it kept my heart up; but take out shovel and fill them in--I'd as lieve dine off white of egg on a Sunday.' So for six blessed months the heaps were out in the heat and frost till the end of February, and then when the weather broke the old man takes heart and fills them in, and the village soon forgot 'Jacobs' Folly' because it was out of sight. Comes April, and out burst the trees. 'Wife,' says he, 'our bloom is richer than I have known it this many a year, it is richer than our neighbors'.' Bloom dies, and then out come about a million little green things quite hard."

"Ay! ay!" said Robinson; "I see."

"Michaelmas-day the old trees were staggering and the branches down to the ground with the crop; thirty shillings on every tree one with another; and so on for the next year, and the next; sometimes more, sometimes less, according to the year. Trees were old and wanted a change. His letting in the air to them, and turning the subsoil up to the frost and sun, had renewed their youth. So by that he learned that tillage is the way to get treasure from the earth. Men are ungrateful at times, but the soil is never ungrateful, it always makes a return for the pains we give it."

"Well, George," said Robinson, "thank you for your story; it is a very good one, and after it I'll never dig for gold in a garden. But now suppose a bare rock or an old river's bed, or a mass of shingles or pipe-clay, would you dig or manure them for crops?"

"Why, of course not."

"Well, those are the sort of places in which nature has planted a yellower crop and a richer crop than tillage ever produced. And I believe there are plums of gold not thirty miles from here in such spots waiting only to be dug out."

"Well, Tom, I have wasted a parable, that is all. Good-night; I hope to sleep and be ready for a good day's work to-morrow. You shall dream of digging up gold here--if you like."

"I'll never speak of it again," said Robinson doggedly.

If you want to make a man a bad companion, interdict altogether the topic that happens to interest him. Robinson ceased to vent his chimera. So it swelled and swelled in his heart, and he became silent, absorbed, absent and out of spirits. "Ah!" thought George, "poor fellow, he is very dull. He won't stay beside me much longer."

This conviction was so strong that he hesitated to close with an advantageous offer that came to him from his friend, Mr. Winchester. That gentleman had taken a lease of a fine run some thirty miles from George. He had written George that he was to go and look at it, and if he liked it better than his own he was to take it. Mr. Winchester could make no considerable use of either for some time to come.

George hesitated. He felt himself so weak-handed with only Robinson, who might leave him, and a shepherd lad he had just hired. However his hands were unexpectedly strengthened.

One day as the two friends were washing a sheep an armed savage suddenly stood before them. Robinson dropped the sheep and stood on his defense, but George cried out, "No! no! it is Jacky! Why, Jacky, where on earth have you been?" And he came warmly toward him. Jacky fled to a small eminence and made warlike preparations. "You stop you a good while and I speak. Who you?"

"Who am I? stupid. Why, who should I be but George Fielding?"

"I see you one George Fielding, but I not know you dis George Fielding. George die. I see him die. You alive. You please you call dog Carlo! Carlo wise dog."

"Well, I never! Hie, Carlo! Carlo!"

Up came Carlo full pelt. George patted him, and Carlo wagged his tail and pranced about in the shape of a reaping-hook. Jacky came instantly down, showed his ivories, and admitted his friend's existence on the word of the dog. "Jacky a good deal glad because you not dead now. When black fellow die he never live any more. Black fellow stupid fellow. I tink I like white fellow a good deal bigger than black fellow. Now I stay with you a good while."

George's hands thus strengthened he wrote and told Mr. Winchester he would go to the new ground, which, as far as he could remember, was very good, and would inspect it, and probably make the exchange with thanks. It was arranged that in two days' time the three friends should go together, inspect the new ground and build a temporary hut there.

Meantime Robinson and Jacky make great friends. Robinson showed him one or two sleight-of-hand tricks that stamped him at once a superior being in Jacky's eyes, and Jacky showed Robinson a thing or two He threw his boomerang and made it travel a couple of hundred yards, and return and hover over his head like a bird and settle at his feet; but he was shy of throwing his spear. "Keep spear for when um angry, not throw him straight now.

"Don't you believe that, Tom," said George. "Fact is the little varmint can't hit anything with 'em. Now look at that piece of bark leaning against that tree. You don't hit it. Come, try, Jacky." Jacky yawned and threw a spear carelessly. It went close by but did not hit it.

"Didn't I tell you so?" said George. "I'd stand before him and his spears all day with nothing but a cricket-stump in my hand, and never be hit, and never brag, neither." Jacky showed his ivories. "When I down at Sydney white man put up a little wood and a bit of white money for Jacky. Then Jacky throw straight a good deal."

"Now hark to that! black skin or white skin 'tis all the same; we can't do our best till we are paid for it. Don't you encourage him, Tom, I won't have it."

The two started early one fine morning for the new ground, distant full thirty miles. At first starting Robinson was in high glee; his nature delighted in change; but George was sad and silent. Three times he had changed his ground and always for the better. But to what end. These starts in early morning for fresh places used once to make him buoyant, but not now. All that was over. He persisted doggedly, and did his best like a man, but in his secret heart not one grain of hope was left. Indeed it was but the other day he had written to Susan and told her it was not possible he could make a thousand pounds. The difficulties were too many, and then his losses had been too great. And he told her he felt it was scarcely fair to keep her to her promise. "You would waste all your youth, Susan, dear, waiting for me." And he told her how he loved her and never should love another; but left her free.

To add to his troubles he was scarcely well of the fever when he caught a touch of rheumatism; and the stalwart young fellow limped along by Robinson's side, and instead of his distancing Jacky as he used in better days, Jacky rattled on ahead and having got on the trail of an opossum announced his intention of hunting it down and then following the human trail. "Me catch you before the sun go, and bring opossum--then we eat a good deal." And off glided Jacky after his opossum.

The pair plodded and limped on in gloomy silence, for at a part of the road where they emerged from green meadows on rocks and broken ground Robinson's tongue had suddenly ceased.

They plodded on, one sad and stiff, the other thoughtful. Any one meeting the pair would have pitied them. Ill-success was stamped on them. Their features were so good, their fortunes so unkind. Their clothes were sadly worn, their beards neglected, their looks thoughtful and sad. The convert to honesty stole more than one look at the noble figure that limped beside him and the handsome face in which gentle, uncomplaining sorrow seemed to be a tenant for life; and to the credit of our nature be it said that his eyes filled and his heart yearned. "Oh, Honesty!" said he, "you are ill-paid here. I have been well paid for my little bit of you, but here is a life of honesty and a life of ill-luck and bitter disappointment. Poor George! poor, dear George! Leave you? never while I have hands to work and a brain to devise!"

They now began slowly to mount a gentle slope that ended in a long black snakelike hill. "When we get to that hill we shall see my new pasture," said George. "New or old, I doubt 'twill be all the same."

And he sighed and relapsed into silence. Meantime Jacky had killed his opossum and was now following their trail at an easy trot.

Leaving the two sad ones with worn clothes and heavy hearts plodding slowly and stiffly up the long rough slope, our story runs on before and gains the rocky platform they are making for and looks both ways--back toward the sad ones and forward over a grand, long, sweeping valley. This pasture is rich in proportion as it recedes from this huge backbone of rock that comes from the stony mountains and pierces and divides the meadows as a cape the sea. In the foreground the grass suffers from its stern neighbor, is cut up here and there by the channels of defunct torrents, and dotted with fragments of rock, some of which seem to have pierced the bosom of the soil from below, others have been detached at different epochs from the parent rock and rolled into the valley. But these wounds are only discovered on inspection; at a general glance from the rocky road into the dale the prospect is large, rich and laughing; fairer pastures are to be found in that favored land, but this sparkles at you like an emerald roughly set, and where the backbone of rock gives a sudden twist bursts out all at once broad smiling in your face--a land flowing with milk and every bush a thousand nosegays. At the angle above-mentioned, which commanded a double view, a man was standing watching some object or objects not visible to his three companions; they were working some yards lower down by the side of a rivulet that brawled and bounded down the hill. Every now and then an inquiry was shouted up to that individual, who was evidently a sort of scout or sentinel. At last one of the men in the ravine came up and bade the scout go down.

"I'll soon tell you whether we shall have to knock off work." And he turned the corner and disappeared.

He shaded both his eyes with his hands, for the sun was glaring. About a mile off he saw two men coming slowly up by a zig-zag path toward the very point where he stood. Presently the men stopped and examined the prospect, each in his own way. The taller one took a wide survey of the low ground, and calling his companion to him appeared to point out to him some beauty or peculiarity of the region. Our scout stepped back and called down to his companions, "Shepherds!"

He then strolled back to his post with no particular anxiety. Arrived there his uneasiness seemed to revive. The shorter of the two strangers had lagged behind his comrade, and the watcher observed, that he was carrying on a close and earnest inspection of the ground in detail.

He peered into the hollows and loitered in every ravine. This gave singular offense to the keen eye that was now upon him. Presently he was seen to stop and call his taller companion to him, and point with great earnestness first to something at their feet, then to the backbone of rocks; and it so happened by mere accident that his finger took nearly the direction of the very spot where the observer of all his movements stood. The man started back out of sight and called in a low voice to his comrades,

"Come here."

They came straggling up with troubled and lowering faces. "Lie down and watch them," said the leader. The men stooped and crawled forward to some stunted bushes, behind which they lay down and watched in silence the unconscious pair who were now about two furlongs distant. The shorter of the two still loitered behind his companion, and inspected the ground with particular interest. The leader of the band, who went by the name of Black Will, muttered a curse upon his inquisitiveness. The others assented all but one, a huge fellow whom the others addressed as Jem. "Nonsense," said Jem, "dozens pass this way and are none the wiser."

"Ay," replied Black Will, "with their noses in the air. But that is a notice-taking fellow. Look at him with his eyes forever on the rocks, or in the gullies, or-- there if he is not picking up a stone and breaking it!"

"Ha! ha!" laughed Jem incredulously, "how many thousand have picked up stones and broke them and all, and never known what we know."

"He has been in the same oven as we," retorted the other.

Here one of the others put in his word. "That is not likely, captain; but if it is so there are no two ways. A secret is no secret if all the world is to know it."

"You remember our oath, Jem," said the leader sternly.

"Why should I forget it more than another?" replied the other angrily.

"Have you all your knives?" asked the captain gloomily. The men nodded assent.

"Cross them with me as we did when we took our oath first."

The men stretched out each a brawny arm, and a long sharp knife, so that all the points came together in a focus; and this action suited well with their fierce and animal features, their long neglected beards, their matted hair and their gleaming eyes. It looked the prologue to some deed of blood. This done, at another word from their ruffianly leader they turned away from the angle in the rock and plunged hastily down the ravine; but they had scarcely taken thirty steps when they suddenly disappeared.

In the neighborhood of the small stream I have mentioned was a cavern of irregular shape that served these men for a habitation and place of concealment. Nature had not done all. The stone was soft, and the natural cavity had been enlarged and made a comfortable retreat enough for the hardy men whose home it was. A few feet from the mouth of the cave on one side grew a stout bush that added to the shelter and the concealment, and on the other the men themselves had placed two or three huge stones, which, from the attitude the rogues had given them, appeared, like many others, to have rolled thither years ago from the rock above.

In this retreat the whole band were now silently couched, two of them in the mouth of the cave, Black Will and another lying flat on their stomachs watching the angle of the road for the two men who must pass that way, and listening for every sound. Black Will was carefully and quietly sharpening his knife on one of the stones and casting back every now and then a meaning glance to his companions. The pertinacity with which he held to his idea began to tell on them, and they sat in an attitude of sullen and terrible suspicion. But Jem wore a look of contemptuous incredulity. However small a society may be, if it is a human one jealousy shall creep in. Jem grudged Black Will his captaincy. Jem was intellectually a bit of a brute. He was a stronger man than Will, and therefore thought it hard that merely because Will was a keener spirit, Will should be over him. Half an hour passed thus, and the two travelers did not make their appearance.

"Not even coming this way at all," said Jem.

"Hush!" replied Will sternly, "hold your tongue. They must come this way, and they can't be far off. Jem, you can crawl out and see where they are, if you are clever enough to keep that great body out of sight."

Jem resented this doubt cast upon his adroitness, and crawled out among the bushes. He had scarcely got twenty yards when he halted and made a signal that the men were in sight. Soon afterward he came back with less precaution. "They are sitting eating their dinner close by, just on the sunny side of the rock--shepherds, as I told you--got a dog. Go yourself if you don't believe me."

The leader went to the spot, and soon after returned and said quietly, "Pals, I dare say he is right. Lie still till they have had their dinner; they are going farther, no doubt."

Soon after this he gave a hasty signal of silence, for George and Robinson at that moment came round the corner of the rock and stood on the road not fifty yards above them. Here they paused as the valley burst on their view, and George pointed out its qualities to his comrade. "It is not first-rate, Tom, but there is good grass in patches, and plenty of water."

Robinson, instead of replying or giving his mind to the prospect said to George, "Why, where is he?"

"Who?"

"The man that I saw standing at this corner a while ago. He came round this way I'll be sworn."

"He is gone away, I suppose. I never saw any one, for my part."

"I did, though. Gone away? How could he go away? The road is in sight for miles, and not a creature on it. He is vanished."

"I don't see him anyway, Tom."

"Of course you don't, he is vanished into the bowels of the earth. I don't like gentlemen that vanish into the bowels of the earth."

"How suspicious you are! Bushrangers again, I suppose. They are always running in your mind--them and gold."

"You know the country, George. Here, take my stick." And he handed George a long stick with a heavy iron ferule. "If a man is safe here he owes it to himself, not to his neighbor."

"Then why do you give me your weapon?" said George with a smile.

"I haven't," was the reply. "I carry my sting out of sight, like a humble bee." And Mr. Robinson winked mysteriously, and the process seemed to relieve his mind and soothe his suspicions. He then fell to inspecting the rocks; and when George pointed out to him the broad and distant pasture he said, in an absent way, "Yes;" and turning round George found him with his eyes glued to the ground at his feet, and his mind in a deep reverie. George was vexed, and said somewhat warmly, "Why, Tom, the place is worth looking at now we are come to it, surely."

Robinson made no direct reply. "George," said he thoughtfully, "how far have you got toward your thousand pounds?"

"Oh, Tom! don't ask me, don't remind me! How can I ever make it? No market within a thousand miles of any place in this confounded country! Forced to boil down sheep into tallow and sell them for the price of a wild duck! I have left my Susan, and I have lost her. Oh, why did you remind me?"

"So much for the farming lay. Don't you be down-hearted, there's better cards in the pack than the five of spades; and the farther I go and the more I see of this country the surer I am. There is a good day coming for you and me. Listen, George. When I shut my eyes for a moment now where I stand, and then open them--I'm in California."

"Dreaming?"

"No, wide awake--wider than you are now. George, look at these hills; you could not tell them from the golden range of California.. But that is not all; when you look into them you find they are made of the same stuff, too--granite, mica and quartz. Now don't you be cross."

"No! no! why should I? Show me," said George, trying out of kindheartedness to take an interest in this subject, which had so often wearied him.

"Well, here are two of them. That great dark bit out there is mica, and all this that runs in a vein like is quartz. Quartz and mica are the natural home of gold; and some gold is to be found at home still, but the main of it has been washed out and scattered like seed all over the neighboring clays. You see, George, the world is a thousand times older than most folks think, and water has been working upon gold thousands and thousands of years before ever a man stood upon the earth, ay or a dog either, Carlo, for as wise as you look squatting out there thinking of nothing and pretending to be thinking of everything."

"Well, drop gold," said George, "and tell me what this is," and he handed Robinson a small fossil.

Robinson eyed it with wonder and interest. "Where on earth did you find this?"

"Hard by; what is it?"

"Plenty of these in California. What is it? Why, I'll tell you; it is a pale old Joey."

"You don't say so; looks like a shell."

"Sit down a moment, George, and let us look at it. He bids me drop gold--and then goes and shows me a proof of gold that never deceived us out there."

"You are mad. How can this be a sign of gold? I tell you it is a shell."

"And I tell you that where these things are found among mica, quartz and granite, there gold is to be found if men have the wit, the patience and the skill to look for it. I can't tell you why; the laws of gold puzzle deeper heads than mine, but so it is. I seem to smell gold all round me here." And Robinson flushed all over, so powerfully did the great idea of gold seated here on his native throne grapple and agitate his mind.

"Tom," said the other doggedly, "if there is as much gold on the ground of New South Wales as will make me a wedding-ring--I am a Dutchman;" and he got up calmly and jerked the pale old Joey a tremendous way into the valley.

This action put Robinson's blood up. "George," cried he, springing up like fire and bringing his foot down sharp upon the rocky floor, "IF I DON'T STAND UPON GOLD--I'M D----D!"

And a wild but true inspiration seemed to be upon the man; a stranger could hardly have helped believing him, but George had heard a good deal of this, though the mania had never gone quite so far. He said quickly, "Come, let us go down into the pasture."

"Not I," replied Robinson. "Come, George, prejudice is for babies, experience for men. Here is an unknown country with all the signs of gold thicker than ever. I have got a calabash--stay and try for gold in this gully; it looks to me just like the mouth of a purse."

"Not I."

"I will, then."

"Why not? I don't think you will find anything in it, but anyway you will have a better chance when I am not by to spoil you. Luck is all against me. If I want rain, comes drought; if I want sun, look for a deluge, if there is money to be made by a thing I'm out of it; to be lost, I'm in it; if I loved a vixen she'd drop into my arms like a medlar; I love an angel and that is why I shall never have her, never. From a game of marbles to the game of life I never had a grain of luck like other people. Leave me, Tom, and try if you can find gold; you will have a chance, my poor fellow, if unlucky George is not aside you."

"Leave you, George! not if I know it."

"You are to blame if you don't. Turn your back on me as I did on you in England."

"Never! I'd rather not find gold than part with honesty. There, I'm coming-- let us go--quick--come, let us leave here." And the two men left the road and turned their faces and their steps across the ravine.

During all this dialogue the men in the cave had strained both eyes and ears to comprehend the speakers. The distance was too great for them to catch all the words, but this much was clear from the first, that one of the men wished to stay on the spot for some purpose, and the other to go on; but presently, as the speakers warmed, a word traveled down the breeze that made the four ruffians start and turn red with surprise, and the next moment darken with anger and apprehension. The word came again and again; they all heard it--its open vowel gave it a sonorous ring; it seemed to fly farther than any other word the speaker uttered, or perhaps when he came to it he spoke it louder than smaller words, or the hearers' ears were watching for it.

The men interchanged terrible looks, and then they grasped their knives and watched their leader's eye for some deadly signal. Again and again the word "g-o-l-d" came like an Æolian note into the secret cave, and each time eye sought eye and read the unlucky speaker's death-warrant there. But when George prevailed and the two men started for the valley, the men in the cave cast uncertain looks on one another, and he we have called Jem drew a long breath and said brutally, yet with something of satisfaction, "You have saved your bacon this time." The voices now drew near and the men crouched close, for George and Robinson passed within fifteen yards of them. They were talking now about matters connected with George's business, for Robinson made a violent effort and dropped his favorite theme to oblige his comrade. They passed near the cave, and presently their backs were turned to it.

"Good-by, my lads," whispered Jem. "And curse you for making us lose a good half hour," muttered another of the gang. The words were scarce out of his mouth before a sudden rustle was heard and there was Carlo. He had pulled up in mid career and stood transfixed with astonishment, literally pointing the gang; it was but for a moment--he did not like the looks of the men at all; he gave a sharp bark that made George and Robinson turn quickly round, and then he went on hunting.

"A kangaroo!" shouted Robinson, "it must have got up near that bush; come and look--if it is we will hunt it down."

George turned back with him, but on reflection he said, "No! Tom, we have a long road to go, let us keep on, if you please;" and they once more turned their backs to the cave, whistled Carlo, and stepped briskly out toward the valley. A few yards before them was the brook I have already noticed--it was about three yards broad at this spot. However, Robinson, who was determined not to make George lose any more time, took the lead and giving himself the benefit of a run, cleared it like a buck. But as he was in the air his eye caught some object on this side the brook, and making a little circle on the other side, he came back with ludicrous precipitancy, and jumping short, landed with one foot on shore and one in the stream. George burst out laughing.

"Do you see this?" cried Robinson.

"Yes; somebody has been digging a hole here," said George very coolly.

"Come higher up," cried Robinson, all in a flutter--"do you see this?"

"Yes; it is another hole."

"'It is. Do you see this wet, too?"

"I see there has been some water spilled by the brook side."

"What kind of work has been done here? have they been digging potatoes, farmer?"

"Don't be foolish, Tom."

"Is it any kind of work you know? Here is another trench dug."

"No! it is nothing in my way, that is the truth."

"But it is work the signs of which I know as well as you know a plowed field from a turnpike-road."

"Why, what is it then?"

"It is gold washing."

"You don't say so, Tom."

"This is gold washing as beginners practice it in California and Mexico and Peru, and wherever gold-dust is found. They have been working with a pan, they haven't got such a thing as a cradle in this country. Come lower down; this was yesterday's work, let us find to-day's."

The two men now ran down the stream busy as dogs hunting an otter. A little lower down they found both banks of the stream pitted with holes about two feet deep and the sides drenched with water from it.

"Well, if it is so, you need not look so pale; why, dear me, how pale you are, Tom!"

"You would be pale," gasped Tom, "if you could see what a day this is for you and me, ay! and for all the world, old England especially. George, in a month there will be five thousand men working round this little spot. Ay! come," cried he, shouting wildly at the top of his voice, "there is plenty for all. GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! I have found it. I, Tom Robinson, I've found it, and I grudge it to no man. I, a thief that was, make a present of it to its rightful owner, and that is all the world. Here GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!"

Though George hardly understood his companion's words, he was carried away by the torrent of his enthusiasm, and even as Robinson spoke his cheeks in turn flushed and his eyes flashed, and he grasped his friend's hands warmly, and cried, "GOLD! GOLD! blessings on it if it takes me to Susan; GOLD! GOLD!"

The poor fellows' triumph and friendly exultation lasted but a moment; the words were scarce out of Robinson's mouth when to his surprise George started from him, turned very pale, but at the same time lifted his iron-shod stick high in the air and clinched his teeth with desperate resolution. Four men with shaggy beards and wild faces and murderous eyes were literally upon them, each with a long glittering knife raised in the air.

At that fearful moment George learned the value of a friend that had seen adventure and crime; rapid and fierce and unexpected as the attack was, Robinson was not caught off his guard. His hand went like lightning into his bosom, and the assailants, in the very act of striking, were met in the face by the long glistening barrels of a rifle revolver, while the cool, wicked eye behind it showed them nothing was to be hoped in that quarter from flurry, or haste, or indecision.

The two men nearest the revolver started back, the other two neither recoiled nor advanced, but merely hung fire. George made a movement to throw himself upon them; but Robinson seized him fiercely by the arm--he said steadily but sternly, "Keep cool, young man--no running among their knives while they are four. Strike across me and I shall guard you till we have thinned."

"Will you?" said Black Will, "here, pals!" The four assailants came together like a fan for a moment and took a whisper from their leader. They then spread out like a fan and began to encircle their antagonists, so as to attack on both sides at once.

"Back to the water, George," cried Robinson quickly, "to the broad part here." Robinson calculated that the stream would protect his rear, and that safe he was content to wait and profit by the slightest error of his numerous assailants; this, however, was to a certain degree a miscalculation, for the huge ruffian we have called Jem sprang boldly across the stream higher up and prepared to attack the men behind, the moment they should be engaged with his comrades. The others no sooner saw him in position than they rushed desperately upon George and Robinson in the form of a crescent, and as they came on Jem came flying knife in hand to plunge it into Robinson's back. As the front assailants neared them, true to his promise, Robinson fired across George, and the outside man received a bullet in his shoulder-blade, and turning round like a top fell upon his knees. Unluckily George wasted a blow at this man which sung idly over him, he dropping his head and losing his knife and his powers at the very moment. By this means Robinson, the moment he had fired his pistol, had no less than three assailants; one of these George struck behind the neck so furiously with a back-handed stroke of his iron-shod stick that he fell senseless at Robinson's feet. The other, met in front by the revolver, recoiled, but kept Robinson at bay while Jem sprang on him from the rear. This attack was the most dangerous of all; in fact, neither Robinson nor George had time to defend themselves against him even if they had seen him, which they did not. Now as Jem was in the very act of making his spring from the other side of the brook, a spear glanced like a streak of light past the principal combatants and pierced Jem through and through the fleshy part of the thigh, and there stood Jacky at forty yards' distance, with the hand still raised from which the spear had flown, and his emu-like eye glittering with the light of battle.

Jem, instead of bounding clear over the stream, fell heavily into the middle of it and lay writhing and floundering at George's mercy, who turning in alarm at the sound stood over him with his long deadly staff whirling and swinging round his head in the air, while Robinson placed one foot firmly on the stunned man's right arm and threatened the leader Black Will with his pistol, and at the same moment with a wild and piercing yell Jacky came down in leaps like a kangaroo, his tomahawk flourished over his head, his features entirely changed, and the thirst of blood written upon every inch of him. Black Will was preparing to run away and leave his wounded companions, but at sight of the fleet savage he stood still and roared out for mercy. "Quarter! quarter!" cried Black Will.

"Down on your knees!" cried Robinson in a terrible voice.

The man fell on his knees, and in that posture Jacky would certainly have knocked out his brains but that Robinson pointed the pistol at his head and forbade him; and Carlo, who had arrived hastily at the sound of battle, in great excitement but not with clear ideas, seeing Jacky, whom he always looked on as a wild animal, opposed in some way to Robinson, seized him directly by the leg from behind and held him howling in a vise. "Hold your cursed noise, all of you," roared Robinson. "D'ye ask quarter?"

"Quarter!" cried Black Will.

"Quarter!" gurgled Jem.

"Quarter!" echoed more faintly the wounded man. The other was insensible.

"Then throw me your knives."

The men hesitated.

"Throw me them this instant, or--"

They threw down their knives.

"George, take them and tie them up in your wipe." George took the knives and tied them up.

"Now pull that big brute out of the water or he'll drown himself." George and Jacky pulled Jem out of the water with the spear sticking in him; the water was discolored with his blood.

"Pull the spear out of him!" George pulled and Jem roared with pain, but the spear-head would not come back through the wound; then Jacky came up and broke the light shaft off close to the skin, and grasping the head drew the remainder through the wound forward, and grinned with a sense of superior wisdom.

By this time the man whom George had felled sat up on his beam ends winking and blinking and confused, like a great owl at sunrise.

Then Robinson, who had never lost his presence of mind, and had now recovered his sang-froid, made all four captives sit around together on the ground in one little lot, "While I show you the error of your ways," said he. "I could forgive a rascal but I hate a fool. You thought to keep such a secret as this all to yourselves--you dunces--the very birds in the air would carry it; it never was kept secret in any land and never will. And you would spill blood sooner than your betters should know it--ye ninny-cumpoops! What the worse are you for our knowing it? If a thousand knew it to-day would that lower the price of gold a penny an ounce? No! All the harm they could do you would be this, that some of them would show you where it lies thickest, and then you'd profit by it. You had better tie that leg of yours up; you have lost blood enough I should say by the look of you; haven't you got a wipe? here, take mine--you deserve it, don't you? No man's luck hurts his neighbor at this work; how clever you were, you have just pitched on the unlikeliest place in the whole gulley, and you wanted to kill the man that would have taught you which are the likelier ones. I shall find ten times as much gold before the sun sets as you will find in a week by the side of that stream; why, it hasn't been running above a thousand years or two, I should say, by the look of it; you have got plenty to learn, you bloody-minded greenhorns! Now I'll tell you what it is," continued Robinson, getting angry about it, "since you are for keeping dark what little you know, I'll keep you dark; and in ten minutes my pal here and the very nigger shall know more about gold-finding than you know, so be off, for I'm going to work. Come, march!"

"Where are we to go, mate?" said the leader sullenly.

"Do you see that ridge about three miles west? well, if we catch you on this side of it we will hang you like wild cats. On the other side of it do what you like, and try all you know; but this gully belongs to us now; you wanted to take something from us that did not belong to you--our blood--so now we take something from you that didn't belong to us a minute or two ago. Come, mizzle, and no more words, or--" and he pointed the tail of his discourse with his revolver.

The men rose, and with sullen, rueful, downcast looks moved off in the direction of the boundary; but one remained behind, the man was Jem.

"Well!"

"Captain, I wish you would let me join in with you!"

"What for?"

"Well, captain, you've lent me your wipe, and I think a deal of it, for it's what I did not deserve; but that is not all. You are the best man, and I like to be under the best man if I must be under anybody."

Robinson hesitated a moment. "Come here," said he. The man came and fronted him. "Look me in the face! now give me your hand--quick, no thinking about how." The man gave him his hand readily. Robinson looked into his eyes. "What is your name?"

"Jem."

"Jem, we take you on trial."

Jem's late companions, who perfectly comprehended what was passing, turned and hooted the deserter; Jem, whose ideas of repartee were primitive, turned and hooted them in reply.

While the men were retreating Robinson walked thoughtfully with his hands behind him, backward and forward, like a great admiral on his quarter deck--enemy to leeward. Every eye was upon him and watched him in respectful, inquiring silence. "Knowledge is power;" this was the man now, the rest children.

"What tools have you?"

"There is a spade and trowel in that bush, captain."

"Fetch them, George. Hadn't you a pan?"

"No, captain; we used a calabash. He will find it lower down."

George, after a little search, found all these objects, and brought them back. "Now," cried Robinson, "these greenhorns have been washing in a stream that runs now, but perhaps in the days of Noah was not a river at all; but you look at the old bed of a stream down out there. That was a much stronger stream than this in its day, and it ran for more than a hundred thousand years before it dried up."

"How can you tell that?" said George, resuming some of his incredulity.

"Look at those monstrous stones in it here, there and everywhere. It has been a powerful stream to carry such masses with it as that, and it has been running many thousand years, for see how deep it has eaten into its rocky sides here and there. That was a river, my lads, and washed gold down for hundreds of thousands of years before ever Adam stood on the earth."

The men gave a hurrah, and George and Jacky prepared to run and find the treasure. "Stop," cried Robinson, "you are not at the gold yet. Can you tell in what parts of the channel it lies thick and where there isn't enough to pay the labor of washing it? Well, I can--look at that bend where the round pebbles are collected so; there was a strong eddy there. Well, under the ridge of that eddy is ten times as much gold lying as in the level parts. Stop a bit again. Do you know how deep or how shallow it lies--do you think you can find it by the eye? Do you know what clays it sinks through, as if they were a sieve, and what stops it like an iron door? Your quickest way is to take Captain Robinson's time--and that is now."

He snatched the spade, and giving full vent to the ardor he had so long suppressed with difficulty, plunged down a little declivity that led to the ancient stream, and drove his spade into its shingle, the debris of centuries of centuries. George sprang after him, his eyes gleaming with hope and agitation; the black followed in wonder and excitement, and the wounded Jem limped last, and, unable through weakness to work, seated himself with glowing eyes upon that ancient river's bank.

"Away with all this gravel and shingle--these are all newcomers--the real bed of the stream is below all this, and we must go down to that."

Trowel and spade and tomahawk went furiously to work, and soon cleared away the gravel from a surface of three or four feet.

Beneath this they found a bed of gray clay.

"Let us wash that, captain," said Jem eagerly.

"No! Jem," was the reply; "that is the way novices waste their time. This gray clay is porous, too porous to hold gold--we must go deeper."

Tomahawk, spade and trowel went furiously to work again.

"Give me the spade," said George, and he dug and shoveled out with herculean strength and amazing ardor; his rheumatism was gone and nerves came back from that very hour. "Here is a white clay."

"Let me see it. Pipe-clay! go no deeper, George; if you were to dig a hundred feet you would not find an ounce of gold below that."

George rested on his spade. "What are we to do, then? try somewhere else?"

"Not till we have tried here first."

"But you say there is nothing below this pipe-clay."

"No more there is."

"Well, then."

"But I don't say there is nothing above it!!!"

"Well, but there is nothing much above it except the gray, without 'tis this small streak of brownish clay; but that is not an inch thick."

"George! in that inch lies all the gold we are likely to find; if it is not there we have only to go elsewhere. Now while I get water you stick your spade in and cut the brown clay away from the white it lies on. Don't leave a spot of the brown sticking to the white--the lower part of the brown clay is the likeliest."

A shower having fallen the day before, Robinson found water in a hole not far distant. He filled his calabash and returned; meantime George and Jacky had got together nearly a barrowful of the brown or rather chocolate-colored clay, mixed slightly with the upper and lower strata, the gray and white.

"I want yon calabash and George's as well." Robinson filled George's calabash two-thirds full of the stuff, and pouring some water upon it, said good-naturedly to Jem, "There--you may do the first washing, if you like."

"Thank you, captain," said Jem, who proceeded instantly to stir and dissolve the clay and pour it carefully away as it dissolved. Jacky was sent for more water, and this, when used as described, had left the clay reduced to about one-sixth of its original bulk.

"Now, captain," cried Jem in great excitement.

"No, it's not now, captain, yet," said Robinson; "is that the way you do pan-washing?"

He then took the calabash from Jem, and gave him Jacky's calabash two-thirds full of clay to treat like the other, and this being done he emptied the dry remains of one calabash into the other, and gave Jem a third lot to treat likewise. This done, you will observe he had in one calabash the results of three first washings. But now he trusted Jem no longer. He took the calabash and said, "You look faint, you are not fit to work; besides you have not got the right twist of the hand yet, my lad. Pour for me, George." Robinson stirred and began to dissolve the three remainders, and every now and then with an artful turn of the hand he sent a portion of the muddy liquid out of the vessel. At the end of this washing there remained scarce more than a good handful of clay at the bottom. More water was poured on this. "Now," said Robinson, "we shall know this time, and if you see but one spot of yellow among it, we are all gentlemen and men of fortune."

He dissolved the clay, and twisted and turned the vessel with great dexterity, and presently the whole of the clay was liquefied.

"Now," said Robinson, "all your eyes upon it, and if I spill anything I ought to keep--you tell me." He said this conceitedly but with evident agitation. He was now pouring away the dirty water with the utmost care, so that anything, however small, that might be heavier than clay should remain behind. Presently he paused and drew a long breath. He feared to decide so great a question. It was but for a moment; he began again to pour the dirty water away very slowly and carefully. Every eye was diving into the vessel. There was a dead silence!

Robinson poured with great care. There was now little more than a wine-glassful left.

DEAD SILENCE!

Suddenly a tremendous cry broke from all these silent figures at the same instant. A cry! it was a yell. I don't know what to compare it to. But imagine that a score of wolves had hunted a horse for two centuries up and down, round and round, sometimes losing a yard, sometimes gaining one on him, and at last, after a thousand disappointments and fierce alternations of hope and despair, the horse had suddenly stumbled and the wild gluttons had pounced on him at last. Such a fierce yell of triumph burst from four human bosoms now.

"Hurrah! we are the greatest men above ground. If a hundred emperors and kings died to-day, their places could be filled to-morrow; but the world could not do without us and our find. We are gentlemen--we are noblemen--we are whatever we like to be. Hurrah!" cried Robinson.

"Hurrah!" cried George, "I see my Susan's eyes in you, you beauty."

"Hurrah!" whined Jem feebly, "let me see how much there is," and clutching the calabash he fainted at that moment from loss of blood and fell forward insensible, his face in the vessel that held the gold, and his hands grasping it so tight that great force had to be used to separate them.

They lifted Jem and set him up again, and sprinkled water in his face. The man's thick lip was cut by the side of the vessel, and more than one drop of blood had trickled down its sides and mingled with the gold-dust.

No comment was made on this at the time. They were so busy.

"There, he's coming to, and we've no time to waste in nursing the sick. Work!" and they sprang up on to the work again.

It was not what you have seen pass for work in Europe, it was men working themselves for once as they make horses work forever. Work? It was battle; it was humanity fighting and struggling with Nature for her prime treasure--(so esteemed). How they dug and scraped, and fought tooth, and spade, and nail, and trowel, and tomahawk for gold! Their shirts were wet through with sweat, yet they felt no fatigue. Their trousers were sheets of clay, yet they suffered no sense of dirt. The wounded man recovered a portion of his strength, and, thirsting for gold, brought feeble hands but indomitable ardor to the great cause. They dug, they scraped, they bowed their backs, and wrought with fury and inspiration unparalleled; and when the sun began to decline behind the hills these four human mutes felt injured. They lifted their eyes a moment from the ground, and cast a fretful look at the great, tranquil luminary.

"Are you really going to set this afternoon the same as usual, when we need your services so?"

Would you know why that wolfish yell of triumph? Would you see what sight so electrified those gloating eyes and panting bosoms? Would you realize that discovery, which in six months peopled that barren spot with thousands of men from all the civilized tribes upon earth, and in a few years must and will make despised Australia a queen among the nations--nations who must and will come with the best thing they have, wealth, talent, cunning, song, pencil, pen, tongue, arm, and lay them all at her feet for this one thing?

Would you behold this great discovery the same in appearance and magnitude as it met the eyes of the first discoverers, picked with a knife from the bottom of a calabash, separated at last by human art and gravity's great law from the meaner dust it had lurked in for a million years-- Then turn your eyes hither, for here it is:

MR. MEADOWS dispatched his work in Shropshire twice as fast as he had calculated, and returned home with two forces battling inside him--love and prudence. The battle was decided for him.

William Fielding's honest but awkward interference had raised in Susan Merton a desire to separate her sentiments from his by showing Mr. Meadows a marked respect. She heard of his arrival and instantly sent her father to welcome him home. Old Merton embraced the commission, for he happened to need Meadows's advice and assistance. The speculations into which he had been led by Mr. Clinton, after some fluctuations, wore a gloomy look, "which could only be temporary," said that gentleman. Still a great loss would be incurred by selling out of them at a period of depression, and Mr. Clinton advised him to borrow a thousand pounds and hold on till things brightened.

Mr. Meadows smiled grimly as the fly came and buzzed all this in his web: "Dear! dear! what a pity my money is locked up! Go to Lawyer Crawley. Use my name. He won't refuse my friend, for I could do him an ill turn if I chose."

"I will. You are a true friend. You will look in and see us, of course, market-day?"

"Why not?"

Meadows did not resume his visits at Grassmere without some twinges of conscience and a prudent resolve not to anchor his happiness upon Susan Merton. "That man might come here any day with his thousand pounds and take her from me," said he. "He seems by his letters to be doing well, and they say any fool can make money in the colonies. Well, if he comes home respectable and well to do--I'll go out. If I am not to have the only woman I ever loved or cared for, let thousands and thousands of miles of sea lie between me and that pair." But still he wheeled about the flame.

Ere long matters took a very different turn. The tone of George's letters began to change. His repeated losses of bullocks and sheep were all recorded in his letters to Susan, and these letters were all read with eager anxiety by Meadows a day before they reached Grassmere.

The respectable man did not commit this action without some iron passing through his own soul--Nemo repente turpissimus. The first letter he opened it was like picking a lock. He writhed and blushed, and his uncertain fingers fumbled with another's property as if it had been red-hot. The next cost him some shame, too, but the next less, and soon these little spasms of conscience began to be lost in the pleasure the letters gave him. "It is clear he will never make a thousand pounds out there, and if he doesn't the old farmer won't give him Susan. Won't? He shan't! He shall be too deep in my debt to venture on it even if he was minded." Meadows exulted over the letters; and as he exulted they stabbed him, for by the side of the records of his ill fortune the exile never failed to pour out his love and confidence in his Susan and to acknowledge the receipt of some dear letter from her, which Meadows could see by George's must have assured him of undiminished or even increased affection.

Thus did sin lead to sin. By breaking a seal which was not his and reading letters which were not his, Meadows filled himself with the warmest hopes of possessing Susan one day, and got to hate George for the stabs the young man innocently gave him. At last he actually looked on George as a sort of dog in the manger, who could not make Susan happy, yet would come between her heart and one who could. All weapons seemed lawful against such a mere pest as this--a dog in the manger.

Meadows started with nothing better nor worse than a commonplace conscience. A vicious habit is an iron that soon sears that sort of article. When he had opened and read about four letters, his moral nature turned stone-blind of one eye. And now he was happier (on the surface) than he had been ever since he fell in love with Susan.

Sure now that one day or another she must be his, he waited patiently, enjoyed her society twice a week, got everybody into his power, and bided his time. And one frightful thing in all this was that his love for Susan was not only a strong but in itself a good love. I mean it was a love founded on esteem; it was a passionate love, and yet a profound and tender affection. It was the love which, under different circumstances, has often weaned men, ay, and women, too, from a frivolous, selfish, and sometimes from a vicious life. This love Meadows thought and hoped would hallow the unlawful means by which he must crown it. In fact, he was mixing vice and virtue. The snow was to whiten the pitch, not the pitch blacken the snow. Thousands had tried this before him and will try it after him. Oh, that I could persuade them to mix fire and gunpowder instead! Men would bless me for this when all else I have written has been long, long forgotten.

He felt good all over when he sat with Susan and thought how his means would enable that angel to satisfy her charitable nature, and win the prayers of the poor as well as the admiration of the wealthy. "If ever a woman was cherished she shall be! If ever a woman was happy she shall be!" And as for him, if he had done wrong to win her, he would more than compensate it afterward. In short, he had been for more than twenty years selling, buying, swapping, driving every conceivable earthly bargain--so now he was proposing one to Heaven.

At last came a letter in which George told Susan of the fatal murrain among his sheep, of his fever that had followed immediately, of the further losses while he lay ill, and concluded by saying that he had no right to tie her to his misfortunes, and that he felt it would be more manly to set her free.

When he read this, Meadows' exultation broke all bounds. "Ah ha!" cried he, "is it come to that at last? Well, he is a fine fellow after all, and looks at it the sensible way, and if I can do him a good turn in business I always will."

The next day he called at Grassmere. Susan met him all smiles and was more cheerful than usual. The watchful man was delighted. "Come, she does not take it to heart." He did not guess that Susan had cried for hours and hours over the letter, and then had sat quietly down and written a letter and begged George to come home and not add separation to their other misfortunes; and that it was this decision, and having acted upon it, that had made her cheerful. Meadows argued in his own favor, and now made sure to win. The next week he called three times at Grassmere instead of twice, and asked himself how much longer he must wait before he should speak out. Prudence said, "A little more patience;" and so he still hid in his bosom the flame that burned him the deeper for this unnatural smothering. But he drank deep, silent draughts of love, and reveled in the bright future of his passion. It was no longer hope, it was certainty. Susan liked him; her eye brightened at his coming; her father was in his power. There was nothing between them but the distant shadow of a rival; sooner or later she must be his. So passed three calm, delicious weeks away.

MEADOWS sat one day in his study receiving Crawley's report.

"Old Mr. Merton came yesterday. I made difficulties as instructed. Is to come to-morrow."

"He shall have the eight hundred."

"That makes two thousand four hundred; why, his whole stock won't cover it."

"No!"

"Don't understand it, it is too deep for me. What is the old gentleman doing?"

"Hunting Will-o'-the-wisp. Throwing it away in speculations that are colored bright for him by a man that wants to ruin him."

"Aha!" cackled Crawley.

"And do him no harm."

"Augh! How far is it to the bottom of the sea, sir, if you please? I'm sure you know? Mr. Levi and you."

"Crawley," said Meadows, suddenly turning the conversation, "the world calls me close-fisted, have you found me so?"

"Liberal as running water, sir. I sometimes say how long will this last before such a great man breaks Peter Crawley and flings him away and takes another?" and Crawley sighed.

"Then your game is to make yourself necessary to me."

"I wish I could," said Peter, with mock candor. "Sir," he crept on, "if the most ardent zeal, if punctuality, secrecy, and unscrupulous fidelity--"

"Hold your gammon! Are we writing a book together! Answer me this in English. How far dare you go along with me?"

"As far as your purse extends: only--"

"Only what? Only your thermometer is going down already, I suppose."

"No, sir; but what I mean is, I shouldn't like to do anything too bad."

"What d'ye mean by too bad?"

"Punishable by law."

"It is not your conscience you fear, then?" asked the other gloomily.

"Oh, dear, no, sir, only the law."

"I envy you. There is but one crime punishable by law, and that I shall never counsel you to."

"Only one--too deep, sir, too deep. Which is that?"

"The crime of getting found out."

"What a great man! how far would I go with you? To the end of the earth. I have but one regret, sir."

"And what is that?"

"That I am not thought worthy of your confidence. That after so many years I am still only a too--I mean an honored instrument, and not a humble friend."

"Crawley," said Meadows, solemnly, "let well alone. Don't ask my confidence, for I am often tempted to give it you, and that would be all one as if I put the blade of a razor in your naked hand."

"I don't care, sir! You are up to some game as deep as a coal-pit; and I go on working and working all in the dark. I'd give anything to be in your confidence."

"Anything is nothing; put it in figures," sneered Meadows, incredulously.

"I'll give twenty per cent off all you give me if you will let me see the bottom."

"The bottom?"

"The reason, sir--the motive!--the why!--the wherefore--the what it is all to end in. The bottom!"

"Why not say you would like to read John Meadows' heart?"

"Don't be angry, sir; it is presumption, but I can't help it. Deduct twenty per cent for so great a honor."

"Why, the fool is in earnest."

"He is; we have all got our little vanity, and like to be thought worthy of confidence."

"Humph!"

"And then I can't sleep for puzzling. Why should you stop every letter that comes here from Australia. Oh, bless me, how neglectful I am; here is a letter from there, just come. To think of me bringing it, and then forgetting."

"Give it me, directly."

"There it is. And then, why on earth are we ruining old Mr. Merton without benefiting you? and you seem so friendly with him; and indeed, you say he is not to be harmed--only ruined; it makes my head ache. Why, what is the matter, Mr. Meadows, sir? What is wrong? No ill news, I hope. I wish I'd never brought the letter."

"That will do, Crawley," said Meadows, faintly, "you may go."

Crawley rose with a puzzled air.

"Come here to-morrow evening at nine o'clock, and you shall have your wish. All the worse for you," added he, moodily. "All the worse for me. Now go, without one word."

Crawley retired dumfounded. He saw the iron man had received some strange, unexpected and terrible blow; but for a moment awe suppressed curiosity, and he went off on tiptoe, saying almost in a whisper, "To-morrow night at nine, sir."

Meadows spread George's letter on the table and leaned on his two hands over it.

The letter was written some weeks after the last desponding one. It was full of modest, but warm and buoyant exultation. Heaven had been very good to Susan and him. Robinson had discovered gold; gold in such abundance and quality as beat even California. The thousand pounds, so late despaired of, was now a certainty. Six months' work, with average good fortune, would do it. Robinson said five thousand apiece was the least they ought to bring home; but how could he (George) wait so long as that would take! "And, Susan, dear, if anything could make this wonderful luck sweeter, it is to think that I owe it to you and to your goodness. It was you that gave Tom the letter, and bade me be kind to him, and keep him by me for his good; he has repaid me by making us two man and wife, please God. See what a web life is! Tom and I often talk of this. But Tom says it is Parson Eden I have to thank for it, and the lessons he learned in the prison; but I tell him if he goes so far back as that, he should go farther, and thank Farmer Meadows, for he it was that sent Tom to the prison, where he was converted, and became as honest a fellow as any in the world, and a friend to your George as true as steel."

The letter concluded as it began, with thanks to Heaven, and bidding Susan expect his happy return in six months after this letter. In short, the letter was one "Hurrah!" tempered with simple piety and love.

Meadows turned cold as death in reading it. At the part where Farmer Meadows was referred to as the first link in the golden chain, he dashed it to the ground and raised his foot to trample on it, but forbore lest he should dirty a thing that must go to Susan.

Then he walked the room in great agitation.

"Too late, George Fielding," he cried aloud-- "too late; I can't shift my heart like a weathercock to suit the changes in your luck. You have been feeding me with hopes till I can't live without them. I never longed for a thing yet but what I got it, and I'll have this though I trample a hundred George Fieldings dead on my way to it. Now let me think."

He pondered deeply, his great brows knitted and lowered. For full half an hour invention and resource poured scheme after scheme through that teeming brain, and prudence and knowledge of the world sat in severe and cool judgment on each in turn, and dismissed the visionary ones. At last the deep brow began to relax, and the eye to kindle; and when he rose to ring the bell his face was a sign-post with Eureka written on it in Nature's vivid handwriting. In that hour he had hatched a plot worthy of Machiavel---a plot complex yet clear. A servant-girl answered the bell.

"Tell David to saddle Rachel directly."

And in five minutes Mr. Meadows, with a shirt, a razor, a comb, and a map of Australia, was galloping by cross lanes to the nearest railway station. There he telegraphed Mr. Clinton to meet him at Peel's Coffee-House at two o'clock. The message flashed up to town like lightning. The man followed it slowly like the wind.

MEADOWS found Mr. Clinton at Peel's. "Mr. Clinton, I want a man of intelligence to be at my service for twenty-four hours. I give you the first offer."

Mr. Clinton replied that really he had so many irons in the fire that twenty-four hours--

Meadows put a fifty-pound note on the table.

"Will all your irons iron you out fifty pounds as flat as that?"

"Why, hem?"

"No, nor five. Come, sir, sharp is the word. Can you be my servant for twenty-four hours for fifty pounds? yes or no!"

"Why, this is dramatic--yes!"

"It is half-past two. Between this and four o'clock I must buy a few hundred acres in Australia, a fair bargain."

"Humph! Well, that can be done. I know an old fellow that has land in every part of the globe."

"Take me to him."

In ten minutes they were in one of those dingy, narrow alleys in the city of London, that look the abode of decent poverty, and they could afford to buy Grosvenor Square for their stables; and Mr. Clinton introduced his friend to a blear-eyed merchant in a large room papered with maps; the windows were incrusted; mustard and cress might have been grown from them. Beauty in clean linen collar and wristbands would have shown here with intolerable luster; but the blear-eyed merchant did not come out bright by contrast; he had taken the local color. You could see him and that was all. He was like a partridge in a furrow. A snuff-colored man; coat rusty all but the collar, and that greasy; poor as its color was, his linen had thought it worth emulating; blackish nails, cotton wipe, little bald place on head, but didn't shine for the same reason the windows didn't. Mr. Clinton approached this "dhirrrty money," this rusty coin, in the spirit of flunkyish.

"Sir," said he, in a low reverential tone, "this party is disposed to purchase a few hundred acres in the colonies."

Mr. Rich looked up from his desk and pointed with a sweep of his pen to the walls.

"There are the maps; the red crosses are my land. They are numbered. Refer to the margin of map, and you will find the acres and the latitude and longitude calculated to a fraction. When you have settled in what part of the world you buy, come to me again; time is gold."

And the blear-eyed merchant wrote and sealed and filed and took no notice of his customers. They found red crosses in several of the United States, in Canada, in Borneo, in nearly all the colonies, and as luck would have it they found one small cross within thirty miles of Bathurst, and the margin described it as five hundred acres. Mr. Meadows stepped toward the desk.

"I have found a small property near Bathurst."

"Bathurst? where is that?"

"In Australia."

"Suit?"

"If the price suits. What is the price, sir?"

"The books must tell us that."

Mr. Rich stretched out his arm and seized a ledger, and gave it Meadows.

"I have but one price for land, and that is five per cent profit on my outlay. Book will tell you what it stands me in, you can add five per cent to that, and take the land away or leave it."

With this curt explanation, Mr. Rich resumed his work.

"It seems you gave five shillings an acre, sir," said Mr. Clinton. "Five times five hundred shillings, one hundred and twenty-five pounds. Interest at five per cent, six pounds five."

"When did I buy it?" asked Mr. Rich.

"Oh, when did you buy it, sir?"

Mr. Rich snatched the book a little pettishly, and gave it to Meadows.

"You make the calculation," said he; "the figures are all there. Come to me when you have made it."

The land had been bought twenty-seven years and some months ago. Mr. Meadows made the calculation in a turn of the hand and announced it. Rich rang a hand bell. Another snuffy figure with a stoop and a bald head and a pen came through a curtain.

"Jones, verify that calculation."

"Penny, halfpenny, twopence, penny, halfpenny, twopence. Mum, mum! Halfpenny wrong, sir."

"There is a halfpenny wrong!" cried Mr. Rich to Meadows, with a most injured air.

"There is, sir," said Meadows, "but it is on the right side for you. I thought I would make it even money against myself."

"There are only two ways, wrong and right," was the reply. "Jones, make it right. There, that is the price for the next half hour; after business hours to-day add a day's interest; and, Jones--if he does not buy, write your calculation into the book with date--save time, next customer comes for it."

"You need not trouble, Mr. Jones," said Meadows. "I take the land. Here is two hundred and fifty pounds--that is rather more than half the purchase-money.

"Jones--count."

"When can I have the deeds?"

"Ten, to-morrow."

"Receipt for two hundred and fifty pounds," said Meadows, falling into the other's key.

"Jones, write receipt--two five naught."

"Write me an agreement to sell," proposed Meadows.

"No, you write it; I'll sign it. Jones, enter transaction in the books. Have you anything to do, young gentleman?" addressing Clinton.

"No, sir."

"Then draw this pen through the two crosses on the map and margin. Good morning, gentlemen."

And the money-making machine rose and dismissed them, as he had received them, with a short, sharp business congé.

Ye fair, who turn a shop head over heels, maul sixty yards of ribbon and buy six, which being sent home insatiable becomes your desire to change it for other six which you had fairly, closely, and with all the powers of your mind compared with it during the seventy minutes the purchase occupied, let me respectfully inform you that the above business took just eight minutes, and that "when it was done, 'twas done." (Shakespeare.)

"You have given too much, my friend," said Mr. Clinton.

"Come to my inn," was all the reply. "This is the easy part, the game is behind."

After dinner. "Now," said Meadows, "business. Do you know any respectable firm disposed toward speculation in mines?"

"Plenty."

"Any that are looking toward gold?"

"Why, no. Gold is a metal that ranks very low in speculation. Stop! yes, I know one tip-top house that has gone a little way in it, but they have burned their fingers, so they will go no farther."

"You are wrong; they will be eager to go on--first to recover the loss on that article of account, and next to show their enemies, and in particular such of them as are their friends, that they didn't blunder. You will go to them to-morrow and ask if they can allow you a commission for bringing them an Australian settler on whose land gold has been found."

"Now, my good sir," began Mr. Clinton, a little superciliously, "that is not the way to gain the ear of such a firm as that. The better way will be for you to show me your whole design and leave me to devise the best means for carrying it into effect."

Up to this moment Meadows had treated Mr. Clinton with a marked deference, as from yeoman to gentleman. The latter, therefore, was not a little surprised when the other turned sharp on him thus:

"This won't do; we must understand one another. You think you are the man of talent and I am the clodhopper. Think so to-morrow night; but for the next twenty-four hours you must keep that notion out of your head or you will bitch my schemes and lose your fifty pounds. Look here, sir. You began life with ten thousand pounds; you have been all your life trying all you know to double it--and where is it? The pounds are pence and the pence on the road to farthings. I started with a whip and a smock-frock, and this," touching his head, "and I have fifty thousand pounds in government securities. Which is the able man of these two--the bankrupt that talks like an angel and loses the game, or the wise man that quietly wins it and pockets what all the earth are grappling with him for? So much for that. And now which is master, the one who pays or the one who is paid? I am not a liberal man, sir; I am a man that looks at every penny. I don't give fifty pounds. I sell it. That fifty pounds is the price of your vanity for twenty-four hours. I take a day's loan of it. You are paid fifty pounds per diem to see that there is more brains in my little finger than in all your carcass. See it for twenty-four hours or I won't fork out, or don't see it but obey me as if you did see it. You shan't utter a syllable or move an inch that I have not set down for you. Is this too hard? then accept ten pounds for to-day's work, and let us part before you bungle your master's game as you have done your own."

Mr. Clinton was red with mortified vanity, but forty pounds! He threw himself back in his chair.

"This is amusing," said he. "Well, sir, I will act as if you were Solomon and I nobody. Of course under these circumstances no responsibility rests with me."

"You are wasting my time with your silly prattle," said Meadows, very sternly. "Man alive! you never made fifty pounds cash since you were calved. It comes to your hand to-day, and even then you must chatter and jaw instead of saying yes and closing your fingers on it like a vise."

"Yes!" shouted Clinton; "there."

"Take that quire," said Meadows, sharply. "Now I'll dictate the very words you are to say; learn them off by heart and don't add a syllable or subtract one or--no fifty pounds."

Meadows being a general by nature (not Horse-Guards) gave Clinton instructions down to the minutest matters of detail, and he whose life had been spent in proving he would succeed--and failing--began to suspect the man who had always succeeded might perhaps have had something to do with his success.

Next morning, well primed by Meadows, Mr. Clinton presented himself to Messrs. Brathwaite & Stevens and requested a private audience. He inquired whether they were disposed to allow him a commission if he would introduce them to an Australian settler on whose land gold had been discovered.

The two members of the firm looked at one another. After a pause one of them said:

"Commission really must depend on how such a thing turned out. They had little confidence in such statements, but would see the settler and put some questions to him."

Clinton went out and introduced Meadows. This happened just as Meadows had told him it would. Outside the door Mr. Meadows suddenly put on a rustic carriage and so came in and imitated natural shyness with great skill; he had to be twice asked to sit down.

The firm cross-examined him. He told them gold had been discovered within a stone's throw of his land, thirty miles from Bathurst; that his friends out there had said go home to England and they will give you a heavy price for your land now; that he did hope to get a heavy price, and so be able to live at home--didn't want to go out there again; that the land was worth money--for there was no more to be sold in that part; government land all round and they wouldn't sell, for he had tried them (his sharp eye had seen this fact marked on Mr. Rich's map).

"Well," said the senior partner, "we have information that gold has been discovered in that district; the report came here two days ago by the Anne Amelia. But the account is not distinct as yet. We do not hear on whose land it is found if at all. I presume you have not seen gold found."

"Could I afford to leave my business out there and come home--on a speculation?"

The eyes of the firm began to glitter.

"Have you got any gold to show us?"

"Nothing to speak of, sir; only what they chucked me for giving them a good dinner. But they are shoveling it about like grains of wheat, I assure you."

The firm became impatient.

"Show us what they gave you as the price of a dinner?"

Meadows dug into a deep pocket, and chased into a corner, and caught, and produced a little nugget of quartz and gold worth about four pounds, also another of somewhat less value.

"They don't look handsome, gents," said he, "but you may see the stuff glitter here and there; and here is some of the dust. I had to buy this; gave them fifty shillings an ounce for it. I wish I had bought a hundred-weight, for they tell me it is worth three pound ten here."

"May we inspect these specimens?"

"Why not, sir? I'll trust it with you. I wouldn't with everybody, though."

The partners retired with the gold, tested it with muriatic acid, weighed it, and after a short, excited interview one of them brought it back and asked with great nonchalance the price of the land.

Meadows hung his head.

"Twenty thousand pounds."

"Twenty thousand pounds!" and the partner laughed in his face.

"I don't wonder you are surprised, sir. I wonder at myself asking so much. Why, before this, if you had offered me five thousand, I would have jumped into your arms, as the saying is; but they all say I ought to have twenty thousand, and they have talked to me till they make me greedy."

The partner retired and consulted, and the firm ended by offering ten thousand.

"I am right down ashamed to say no," was the answer, "but I suppose I must not take it."

The firm undertook to prove it was a magnificent offer. Meadows offered no resistance, he thought so too; but he must not take it, everybody told him it was worth more. At last, when his hand was on the door, they offered him twelve thousand five hundred.

He begged to consider it.

No! they were peremptory. If he was off, they were off.

He looked this way and that way with a frightened air.

"What shall I do, sir?" said he, helplessly, to Clinton, and nudged him secretly.

"Take it, and think yourself very lucky," said that gentleman, exchanging a glance with the firm.

"Well, then, if you say so, I will. You shall have it, gentlemen, five hundred acres in two lots--400 and 100."

Clinton, acting on his secret instructions, now sought a private interview with the firm.

"I am to have a commission, gentlemen?"

"Yes! fifty pounds; but, really, we can hardly afford it."

"Well, then, as you give me an interest in it, I say--pin him."

"Why?"

"Don't you see he is one of those soft fellows who listen to everybody. If he goes away, and they laugh at him for not getting more for it, I really could hardly answer for his ever coming back here."

The firm came in cheerfully.

"Well, Mr. ---- Mr."

"Not Mr., sir. Crawley--plain John Crawley."

"We will terminate this affair with you. We will have a contract of sale drawn up and make you an advance. When can you give us the title deeds?"

"In a couple of hours, if the lawyer is at home."

"By the by, you will not object to draw upon us at three months for one half of the money?"

"No, sir. I should say by the look of you you were as good as the bank."

"The other half by check in two hours." The parties signed the contract respectively.

Then Meadows and Clinton went off to the Five-per-Center, completed with him, got the title deeds, brought them, received check and accepted draft. Clinton, by Meadows' advice, went in and dunned for his commission then and there, and got it, and the confederates went off and took a hasty dinner together. After dinner they settled.

"As you showed me how to get this commission out of them, it belongs to you," said Clinton, sorrowfully.

"It does, sir. Give it to me. I return it to you, sir; do me the favor to accept it."

"You are very generous, Mr. Meadows."

"And here is the other fifty you have earned."

"Thank you, my good sir. Are you satisfied with the day's work?"

"Amply, sir. Your skill and ingenuity brought us through triumphant," said Meadows, resuming the deferential, since he risked nothing by it now.

"Well, I think I managed it pretty well. By the by, that gold you showed them, was it really gold?"

"Certainly."

"Oh! because I thought--"

"No, sir, you did not. A man of your ability knows I would not risk ten thousand pounds for want of a purchase I could not lose ten shillings by. Ore is not a fancy article."

"Oh! ah! yes, very true; no, of course not. One question more. Where did the gold come from?"

"California."

"But, I mean, how did you get it?"

"I bought it out of a shop window those two knowing ones pass twice every day of their lives."

"Ha! ha! ha!"

"You pass it oftener than that, sir. Excuse me, sir; I must catch the train. But one word before I go. My name must never be mentioned in this business."

"Very well; it never shall transpire, upon my honor."

Meadows felt pretty safe. As he put on his greatcoat he thought to himself: "When the story is blown and laughed over, this man's vanity will keep my name out of it. He won't miss a chance of telling the world how clever he is. My game is to pass for honest, not for clever, no, thank you."

"Good-by, sir," was his last word. "It is you for hoodwinking them."

"Ha! ha! ha! Good-by, farmer" (in a patronizing tone).

Soon after this, Meadows was in a corner of a railway-carriage, twelve thousand four hundred and fifty pounds in his pocket, and the second part of his great complex scheme boiling and bubbling in his massive head. There he sat silent as the grave, his hat drawn over his powerful brows that were knitted all the journey by one who never knitted them in vain.

He reached home at eight and sat down to his desk and wrote for more than half an hour. Then he sealed up the paper, and when Crawley came he found him walking up and down the room. At a silent gesture Crawley took a chair and sat quivering with curiosity. Meadows walked in deep thought.

"You demanded my confidence. It is a dangerous secret, for once you know it you must serve me with red-hot zeal, or be my enemy and be crushed out of life like a blind-worm, or an adder, Peter Crawley."

"I know that, dear sir," assented Peter, ruefully.

"First, how far have you guessed?"

"I guess Mr. Levi is somehow against us."

"He is," replied Meadows, carelessly.

"Then that is a bad job. He will beat us. He is as cunning as a fox."

Meadows looked up contemptuously; but as he could not afford to let such a sneak as Crawley think him anything short of invincible, he said coolly, "He is, and I have measured cunning with a fox."

"You have? That must have been a tight match."

"A fox used to take my chickens one hard winter; an old fox cautious and sly as the Jew you rate so high. The men sat up with guns for him--no; a keeper set traps in a triangle for him--no. He had the eye of a hawk, the ear of a hare, and his own nose. He would have the chickens, and he would not get himself into trouble. The women complained to me of the fox. I turned a ferret loose into the rabbit-hutch, and in half a minute there was as nice a young rabbit dead as ever you saw."

"Lookee there now," cried Crawley.

"I choked the ferret off, but never touched the rabbit. I took the rabbit with a pair of tongs; the others had handled their baits and pug crept round 'em and nosed the trick. I poured twenty drops of croton oil into the little hole ferret had made in bunny's head, and I dropped him in the grass near pug's track. Next morning rabbit had been drawn about twenty yards and the hole in his head was three times as big. Pug went the nearest way to blood; went in at ferret's hole. I knew he would."

"Yes, sir! yes! yes! yes! and there lay the fox."

"No signs of him. Then I said: 'Go to the nearest water. Croton oil makes 'em dry.' They went along the brook--and on the very bank there lay an old dog-fox blown up like bladder, as big as a wolf and as dead as a herring. Now for the Jew. Look at that;" and he threw him a paper.

"Why, this is the judgment on which I arrested Will Fielding, and here is the acceptance."

"Levi bought them to take the man out of my power. He left them with old Cohen. I have got them again, you see, and got young Fielding in my power spite of his foxy friend."

"Capital, sir, capital!" cried the admiring Crawley. He then looked at the reconquered documents. "Ah!" said he, spitefully, "how I wish I could alter one of these names, only one!"

"What d'ye mean?"

"I mean that I'd give fifty pound (if I had it) if it was but that brute George Fielding that was in our power instead of this fool William."

Meadows opened his eyes: "Why?"

"Because he put an affront upon me," was the somewhat sulky reply.

"What was that?"

"Oh, no matter, sir!"

"But it is matter. Tell me. I am that man's enemy."

"Then I am in luck. You are just the enemy I wish him."

"What was the affront?"

"He called me a pettifogger."

"Oh, is that all?"

"No. He discharged me from visiting his premises."

"That was not very polite."

"And threatened to horsewhip me next time I came there."

"Oh, is that where the shoe pinches?"

"No, it is not!" cried Crawley, almost in a shriek; "but he altered his mind, and did horsewhip me then and there. Curse him!"

Meadows smiled grimly. He saw his advantage. "Crawley," said he, quickly, "he shall rue the day he lifted his hand over you. You want to see to the bottom of me."

"Oh, Mr. Meadows, that is too far for the naked eye to see," was the despondent reply.

"Not when it suits my book. I am going to keep my promise and show you my heart."

"Ah!"

"Listen and hear the secret of my life. Are you listening?"

"What do you think, sir?" was the tremulous answer.

"I--love--Miss--Merton;" and for once his eyes sank before Crawley's.

"Sir! you--love--a--woman?"

"Not as libertines love, nor as boys flirt and pass on. Heaven have mercy on me, I love her with all my heart and soul and brain! I love her with more force than such as you can hate!"

"The deuce you do!"

"I love the sweetheart--of the man--who lashed you--like a dog."

Crawley winced and rubbed his hands.

"And your fortune is made if you help me to win her."

Crawley rubbed his hands.

"Old Merton has promised the woman I love to this George Fielding if he comes back with a thousand pounds."

"Don't you be frightened, sir; that he will never do."

"Will he not? Read this letter."

"Ah! the letter that put you out so. Let me see--Mum! mum! Found gold. Pheugh! Pheugh! Pheeeugh!!"

"Crawley, most men reading that letter would have given in then and there, and not fought against such luck as this. I only said to myself, 'Then it will cost me ten thousand pounds to win the day.' Well, between yesterday eleven forenoon and this hour I made the ten thousand pounds."

He told him briefly how.

"Beautiful, sir! What, did you make the ten thousand out of your own rival's letter?"

"Yes, I taxed the enemy for the expenses of the war."

"Oh, Mr. Meadows, what a fool, what a villain I was to think Mr. Levi was as great a man as you! I must have been under a hallucination."

"Crawley, the day that John and Susan Meadows walk out of church man and wife I put a thousand pounds into your hand and set you up in any business you like; in any honest business, for from that day our underhand dealings must end. The husband of that angel must never grind the poor or wrong a living creature. If Heaven consents to my being happy in this way, the least I can do is to walk straight and straightforward the rest of my days, and I will, s'help me God."

"That is fair. I knew you were a great man, but I had no idea you were such a good one."

"Crawley," said the other, with a sudden gloomy misgiving, "I am trying to cheat the devil. I fear no man can do that;" and he hung his head.

"No ordinary man, sir," replied the parasite, "but your skill has no bounds. Your plan, sir, at once, that I may co-operate and not thwart your great skill through ignorance."

"My plan has two hands; one must work here, the other a great many miles from here. If I could but cut myself in two, all would be well; but I can't; I must be one hand, you the other. I work thus: Post-office here is under my thumb. I stop all letters from him to her. Presently comes a letter from Australia telling among pork, grains, etc., how George Fielding has made his fortune and married a girl out there."

"But who is to write the letter?"

Can't you guess?"

"Haven't an idea. She won't believe it."

"Not at first, perhaps, but when she gets no more letters from him she will."

"So she will. So then you will run him down to her."

"Not such a fool, she would hate me. I shall never mention his name. I make one of my tools hang jail over old Merton. Susan thinks George married. I strike upon her pique and her father's distress. I ask him for his daughter. Offer to pay my father-in-law's debts and start him afresh."

"Beautiful! Beautiful!"

"Susan likes me already. I tell her all I suffered silent while she was on with George. I press her to be mine. She will say no perhaps three or four times, but the fifth she will say yes!"

"She will; you are a great man."

"And she will be happy."

"Can't see it."

"A man that marries a virtuous woman and loves her is no man at all if he can't make her love him; they can't resist our stronger wills except by flight or by leaning upon another man. I'll be back directly."

Mr. Meadows returned with a bottle of wine and two glasses. Crawley was surprised. This was a beverage he had never seen his friend drink or offer him. Another thing puzzled him. When Mr. Meadows came back with the wine he had not so much color as usual in his face--not near so much.

"Crawley," said Meadows, in a low voice, "suppose, while I am working, this George Fielding were to come home with money in both pockets?"

"He would kick it all down in a moment."

"I am glad you see that. Then you see one hand is not enough; another must be working far away."

"Yes, but I don't see--"

"You will see. Drink a glass of wine with me, my good friend; your health."

"Same to you, sir."

"Is it to your mind?"

"Elixir! This is the stuff that sharpens a chap's wit and puts courage in his heart."

"I brought it for that. You and I have no chicken's play on hand. Another glass."

"Success to your scheme, sir."

"Crawley, George Fielding must not come back this year with one thousand pounds."

"No, he must not--thank you, sir, your health. Mustn't, he shan't; but how on earth can you prevent him?"

"That paper will prevent him; it is a paper of instructions. My very brains lie in that paper--put it in your pocket."

"In my pocket, sir? Highly honored--shall be executed to the letter. What, wine!"

"And this is a check-book."

"No! is it though?"

"You will draw on me for one hundred pounds per month."

"No! shall I, though? Sir, you are a king!"

"Of which you will account for fifty pounds only."

"Liberal, sir; as I said before, liberal as running water."

"You are going a journey."

"Am I? well! Don't you turn pale for that--I'll come back to you--nothing but death shall part us. Have a drop of this, sir; it will put blood into your cheek, and fire into your heart. That is right. Where am I going, sir?"

"What, don't you know?"

"No! nor I don't care, so long as it is in your service I go."

"Still it is a long journey."

"Oh, is it? Your health then, and my happy return."

"You are not afraid of the sea or the wind?"

"I am afraid of nothing but your wrath, and--and--the law. The sea be hanged, and the wind be blowed! When I see your talent and energy, and hold your checkbook in my hand and your instructions in my pocket, I feel to play at football with the world. When shall I start?"

"To-morrow morning."

"To-night, if you like. Where am I to go to?"

"To AUSTRALIA!"

That single word suspended the glass going to Crawley's lips, and the chuckle coming from them. A dead silence on both sides followed it. And now two colorless faces looked into one another's eyes across the table.

THREE days the gold-finders worked alone upon the pre-Adamite river's bed. At evening on the third day they looked up and saw a figure perched watching them with a pipe in its mouth. It disappeared in silence. Next day there were men on their knees beside them, digging, scraping, washing and worshipping gold. Soon they were the center of a group--soon after of a humming mob. As if the birds had really carried the secret north, south, east and west, men swarmed and buzzed and settled like locusts on the gold-bearing tract. They came in panting, gleaming, dusty and travel-stained and flung off their fatigue at sight, and, running up, dived into the gullies and plied spade and pickax with clinched teeth and throbbing hearts. They seamed the face of Nature for miles; turned the streams to get at their beds; pounded and crushed the solid rock to squeeze out the subtle stain of gold it held in its veins; hacked through the crops as through any other idle impediment; pecked and hewed and fought and wrestled with Nature for the treasure that lay so near yet in so tight a grip.

We take off our clothes to sleep and put them on to play at work, but these put on their clothes to sleep in, and tore them off at peep of day, and labor was red-hot till night came and cooled it; and in this fight lives fell as quickly as in actual war, and by the same enemy--Disease. Small wonder, when hundreds and hundreds wrought the livelong day one half in icy water, the other half dripping with sweat.

Men rotted like sheep, and died at the feet of that Gold whom they stormed here in his fortress; and some alas met a worse fate. For that befell which the world has seen in every age and land where gold has come to light upon a soil; men wrestling fiercely with Nature jostled each other; cupidity inflamed hate to madness, and human blood flowed like water over that yellow dirt. And now from this one burning spot gold fever struck inward to the heart of the land; burned its veins and maddened its brain. The workman sold his tools, bought a spade and a pickax, and fled to the gold; the lawyer flung down his parchment and off to the gold; the penny-a-liner his brass pen and off to a greater wonder than he had ever fabricated; the schoolmaster to whom little boys were puzzling out

Quid non mortalia pectora cogis
Auri sacra fames--

made the meaning perfectly clear; he dropped ferrule and book and ran with the national hunt for gold. Shops were closed for want of buyers and sellers; the grass crept up between the paving-stones in great thoroughfares; outward-bound ships lay deserted and helpless in the roads; the wilderness was peopled and the cities desolate; commerce was paralyzed, industry contracted. The wise and good trembled for the destiny of the people, the government trembled for itself--idle fear. That which shook this colony for a moment settled it as firm as a granite mountain and made it great with a rapidity that would have astounded the puny ages cant appeals to as the days of wonders.

The sacra fames was not Australian, but human; and so at the first whisper of gold the old nations poured the wealth they valued--their food and clothes and silk and coin--and the prime treasure they valued not, their men--into that favored land.

Then did great Labor, insulted and cheated so many years in narrow, overcrowded corners of the huge unpeopled globe, lift his bare arm and cry, "Who bids for this?" and a dozen gloved hands jumped and clutched at the prize. And in bargains where a man went on one side and money on the other, the money had to say, "Thank you," over it instead of the man.

But still, though the average value of labor was now full as high in the cities as in the mine, men flowed to the desert and the gold, tempted by the enormous prizes there, that lay close to all and came to fortune's favorites.

Hence a new wonder, a great moral phenomenon the world had never seen before on such a wide scale. At a period of unparalleled civilization and refinement, society, with its artificial habits and its jealous class distinctions on its back, took a sudden unprepared leap from the heights it had been centuries constructing--into a gold mine; it emerged, its delicate fabric crushed out of all recognizable shape, its petty prides annihilated, and even its just distinctions turned topsy-turvey. For mind is really more honorable than muscle, yet when these two met in a gold mine it fared ill with mind. Classical and mathematical scholars joined their forces with navvies to dig gold; and nearly always the scholars were found after a while cooking, shoe cleaning, and doing generally menial offices for the navvies.

Those who had no learning, but had good birth, genteel manners and kid gloves and feeble loins, sunk lower and became the dregs of gold-digging society ere a week's digging had passed over their backs. Not that all wit yielded to muscle. Low cunning often held its own; hundreds of lazy leeches settled on labor's bare arm and bled it. Such as could minister to the diggers' physical needs, appetites, vices, had no need to dig; they made the diggers work for them, and took toll of the precious dust as it fell into their hands.

One brute that could not spell chicory to save himself from the gallows cleared two thousand pounds a month by selling it and hot water at a pinch a cup. Thus ran his announcement, "Cofy allus rady."

Meantime Trigonometry was frying steaks and on Sunday blacking boots.

After a while lucky diggers returned to the towns clogged with gold, and lusting and panting for pleasure.

They hired carriages and sweethearts, and paraded the streets all day, crying, "We be the hairy-stocracy, now!!"

The shopkeepers bowed down and did them homage.

Even here Nature had her say. The sexes came out--the men sat in the carriages in their dirty fustian and their checkered shirts and no jacket; their inamoritas beside them glittered in silk and satin. And some fiend told these poor women it was genteel to be short-sighted; so they all bought gold spy-glasses, and spied without intermission.

Then the old colonial aristocracy, who had been born in broadcloth and silk, and unlike the new had not been transported, but only their papas and mammas, were driven to despair; but at last they hit upon a remedy. They would be distinguished by hook or by crook, and the only way left now was always to go on foot. So they walked the pavement--wet or dry, nothing could induce them to enter the door of a carriage. Item: they gave up being shortsighted; the few who for reasons distinct from fashion could not resign the habit concealed it, as if it was a defect instead of a beauty.

This struggle of classes in the towns, with its hundred and one incidents, was an excellent theme for satire of the highest class. How has it escaped? is it that even Satire, low and easy art, is not so low and easy as Detraction? But these are the outskirts of a great theme. The theme itself belonged, not to little satire, but to great epic.

In the sudden return of a society far more complex, artificial and conventional than Pericles ever dreamed of, to elements more primitive than Homer had to deal with; in this, with its novelty, and nature, and strange contrasts,

In the old barbaric force and native color of the passions, as they burst out undisguised around the gold,

In the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning,

In a desert peopled, and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity,

In a huge army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one man's constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by his own heart,

In "the siege of Gold," defended stoutly by Rock and Disease,

In the world-wide effect of the discovery, the peopling of the earth at last according to Heaven's long-published and resisted design,

Fate offered poetry a theme broad and high, yet piquant, and various as the dolphin and the rainbow.

I cannot sing this song, because I am neither Lamartine, nor Hugo, nor Walter Scott. I cannot hum this song, because the severe conditions of my story forbid me even to make the adventurous attempt. I am here to tell, not the great tale of gold, but the little story of how Susan Merton was affected thereby. Yet it shall never be said that my pen passed close to a great man or a great thing without a word of homage and sympathy to set against the sneers of groveling criticasters, the blindness of self-singing poetasters, and the national itch for detraction of all great things and men that live, and deification of dead dwarfs.

God has been bountiful to the human race in this age. Most bountiful to Poets; most bountiful to all of us who have a spark of nobleness in ourselves, and so can see and revere at sight the truly grand and noble (any snob can do this after it has been settled two hundred years by other minds that he is to do it). He has given us warlike heroes more than we can count--far less honor as they deserve; and valor as full of variety as courage in the Iliad is monotonous--except when it takes to its heels.

He has given us one hero, a better man than Hector or Achilles. For Hector ran away from a single man; this hero was never known to run away at all. Achilles was a better egotist than soldier; wounded in his personal vanity, he revenged himself, not on the man who had wronged him--Prudence forbade--but on the army, and on his country. This antique hero sulked; my hero, deprived of the highest command, retained a higher still--the command that places the great of heart above all petty personal feeling. He was a soldier, and could not look from his tent on battle and not plunge into it. What true soldier ever could? He was not a Greek but a Frenchman--and could not love himself better than his country. Above all, he was not Achilles, but Canrobert.

He has given us to see Nineveh disinterred by an English hero.

He has given us to see the northwest passage forced, and winter bearded on his everlasting throne, by another. (Is it the hero's fault if self and snowdrop-singing poetasters cannot see this feat with the eyes of Camoens?)

He has given us to see Titans enslaved by man; Steam harnessed to our carriages and ships; Galvanism tamed into an alphabet--a Gamut, and its metal harp-strings stretched across the earth malgré mountains and the sea, and so men's minds defying the twin monsters Time and Space; and now, gold revealed in the East and West at once, and so mankind now first in earnest peopling the enormous globe. Yet old women and children of the pen say, this is a bad, a small, a lifeless, an unpoetic age--and they are not mistaken. For they lie.

As only tooth-stoppers, retailers of conventional phrases, links in the great cuckoo-chain, universal pill-venders, Satan, and ancient booksellers' ancient nameless hacks can lie, they lie.

It is they who are small-eyed. Now, as heretofore, weaklings cannot rise high enough to take a bird's-eye view of their own age, and calculate its dimensions.

The age, smaller than epochs to come, is a giant compared with the past, and full of mighty materials for any great pen in prose or verse.

My little friends aged nineteen and downward--fourscore and upward--who have been lending your ears to the stale little cant of every age, as chanted in this one by Buffo-Bombastes and other foaming-at-the-pen old women of both sexes--take by way of antidote to all that poisonous, soul-withering drivel, ten honest words.

I say before heaven and earth that the man who could grasp the facts of this day and do an immortal writer's duty by them, i.e., so paint them as a later age will be content to engrave them, would be the greatest writer ever lived. Such is the force, weight and number of the grand topics that lie this day on the world's face. I say that he who has eyes to see may now see greater and far more poetic things than human eyes have seen since our Lord and his Apostles and his miracles left the earth.

It is very hard to write a good book or a good play, or to invent a good picture, and having invented paint it. But it always was hard, except to those--to whom it was impossible. Bunglers will not mend matters by blackening the great canvases they can't paint on, nor the impotent become males by detraction.

"Justice!"

When we write a story or sing a poem of the great nineteenth century, there is but one fear--not that our theme will be beneath us, but we miles below it; that we shall lack the comprehensive vision a man must have from heaven to catch the historical, the poetic, the lasting features of the Titan events that stride so swiftly past IN THIS GIGANTIC AGE.

THE life of George Fielding and Thomas Robinson for months could be composed in a few words: tremendous work from sunrise to sundown, and on Sunday welcome rest, a quiet pipe, and a book.

At night they slept in a good tent, with Carlo at their feet and a little bag between them; this bag never left their sight; it went out to their work and in to sleep.

It is dinner-time; George and Tom are snatching a mouthful, and a few words over it.

"How much do you think we are, Tom?"

"Hush! don't speak so loud, for Heaven's sake;" he added in a whisper, "not a penny under seven hundred pounds' worth."

George sighed.

"It is slower work than I thought; but it is my fault, I am so unlucky."

"Unlucky! and we have not been eight months at it."

"But one party near us cleared four thousand pounds at a haul; one thousand pounds apiece--ah!"

"And hundreds have only just been able to keep themselves. Come, you must not grumble, we are high above the average."

George persisted.

"The reason we don't get on is we try for nothing better than dust. You know what you told me, that the gold was never created in dust, but in masses, like all metals; the dust is only a trifle that has been washed off the bulk. Then you said we ought to track the gold-dust coarser and coarser till we traced the metal to its home in the great rocks."

"Ay! ay! I believe I used to talk so; but I am wiser now. Look here, George, no doubt the gold was all in block when the world started, but how many million years ago was that? This is my notion, George; at the beginning of the world the gold was all solid, at the end it is all to be dust; now which are we nearer, the end or the beginning?"

"Not knowing, can't say, Tom."

"Then I can, for his reverence told me. We are fifty times nearer the end than the beginning, follows there is fifty times as much gold-dust in nature as solid gold."

"What a head you ha' got, Tom! but I can't take it up so. Seems to me this dust is like the grain that is shed from a ripe crop before it comes to the sickle. Now if we could trace--"

"How can you trace syrup to the lump when the lump is all turned to syrup?"

George held his peace--shut up, but not convinced.

"Hallo! you two lucky ones," cried a voice distant about thirty yards. "Will you buy our hole, it is breaking our heart here."

Robinson went up and found a large hole excavated to a great depth; it was yielding literally nothing, and this determined that paradoxical personage to buy it if it was cheap. "What there is must be somewhere all in a lump."

He offered ten pounds for it, which was eagerly snapped at.

"Well done, Gardiner," said one of the band. "We would have taken ten shillings for it," explained he to Robinson.

Robinson paid the money, and let himself down into the hole with his spade. He drove his spade into the clay, and the bottom of it just reached the rock; he looked up. "I would have gone just one foot deeper before I gave in," said he; he called George. "Come, George, we can know our fate in ten minutes."

They shoveled the clay away down to about one inch above the rock, and there in the white clay they found a little bit of gold as big as a pin's head.

"We have done it this time," cried Robinson, "shave a little more off, not too deep, and save the clay." This time a score of little nuggets came to view sticking in the clay; no need for washing, they picked them out with their knives.

The news soon spread, and a multitude buzzed round the hole and looked down on the men picking out peas and beans of pure gold with their knives.

Presently a voice cried, "Shame, give the men back their hole!"

"Gammon," cried others, "they paid for a chance, and it turned out well; a bargain is a bargain." Gardiner and his mates looked sorrowfully down. Robinson saw their faces and came out of the hole a moment. He took Gardiner aside and whispered, "Jump into our hole like lightning, it is worth four pound a day."

"God bless you!" said Gardiner. He ran and jumped into the hole just as another man was going to take possession. By digger's law no party is allowed to occupy two holes.

All that afternoon there was a mob looking down at George and Robinson picking out peas and beans of gold, and envy's satanic fire burned many a heart. These two were picking up at least a hundred pounds an hour.

Now it happened late in the afternoon that a man of shabby figure, evidently not a digger, observing that there was always more or less crowd in one place, shambled up and looked down with the rest; as he looked down, George happened to look up; the newcomer drew back hastily. After that his proceedings were singular; he remained in the crowd more than two hours, not stationary, but winding in and out. He listened to everything that was said, especially if it was muttered and not spoken out; and he peered into every face, and peering into every face it befell that at last his eye lighted on one that seemed to fascinate him; it belonged to a fellow with a great bull neck, and hair and beard flowing all into one--a man more like the black-maned lion of North Africa than anything else. But it was not his appearance that fascinated the serpentine one, it was the look he cast down upon those two lucky diggers; a scowl of tremendous hatred--hatred unto death. Instinct told the serpent there must be more in this than extempore envy. He waited and watched, and, when the black-maned one moved away, he followed him about everywhere till at last he got him alone.

Then he sidled up, and in a cringing way said:

"What luck some men have, don't they?"

The man answered by a fierce grunt.

The serpent was half afraid of him, but he went on.

"There will be a good lump of gold in their tent to-night."

The other seemed struck with these words.

"They have been lucky a long time," explained the other, "and now this added--"

"Well, what about it?"

"Nothing! only I wish somebody else had it instead."

"Why?"

"That is a secret for the present. I only tell you because I think somehow they are no friends of yours either."

"Perhaps not! what then."

"Then we might perhaps do business together; it will strike you singular, but I have a friend who would give money to any one that would take a little from those two."

"Say that again."

"Would give money to any one that would take it from those two."

"And you won't ask for any share of the swag?"

"Me? I have nothing to do with it."

"Gammon! well, your friend! will he?"

"Not a farthing!"

"And what will he give, suppose I have a friend that will do the trick?"

"According to the risk!"

The man gave a whistle. A fellow with forehead villainously low came from behind some tents.

"What is it, Will?" asked the newcomer.

"A plant."

"This one in it?"

"Yes! This is too public, come to Bevan's store."

"GEORGE, I want you to go to Bathurst."

"What for?"

"To buy some things."

"What things?"

"First of all, a revolver; there were fellows about our tent last night, creeping and prowling."

"I never heard them."

"No more you would an earthquake--but I heard them, and got up and pointed my revolver at them; so then they cut--all the better for them. We must mind our eye, George; a good many tents are robbed every week, and we are known to have a good swag."

"Well, I must start this moment if I am to be back."

"And take a pound of dust and buy things that we can sell here to a profit."

George came back at night looking rather sheep-faced.

"Tom," said he, "I am afraid I have done wrong. You see there was a confounded auction, and what with the hammer, and the folk bidding, and his palaver, I could not help it."

"But what is it you have bought?"

"A bit o' land, Tom."

Robinson groaned; but, recovering himself, he said gayly:

"Well, have you brought it with you?"

"No, it is not so small as all that; as nice a bit of grass as ever you saw, Tom, and just outside the town of Bathurat; only I didn't ought to have spent your money as well as my own."

"Stuff and nonsense--I accept the investment. Let me load your new revolver. Now look at my day's work. I wouldn't take a hundred pound for these little fellows."

George gloated over the little nuggets, for he saw Susan's eyes in them. To-night she seemed so near. The little bag was placed between them, the day's spoils added to it, and the tired friends were soon asleep.

"HELP! help! murder! help! murder!" Such were the cries that invaded the sleepers' ears in the middle of the night, to which horrible sounds was added the furious barking of Carlo.

The men seized their revolvers and rushed out of the tent. At about sixty yards distant they saw a man on the ground struggling under two fellows, and still crying, though more faintly, "murder" and "help."

"They are killing him!" cried George; and Robinson and he cocked their revolvers and ran furiously toward the men. But these did not wait the attack. They started up and off like the wind, followed by two shots from Robinson that whistled unpleasantly near them.

"Have they hurt you, my poor fellow ?" said Robinson.

The man only groaned for answer.

Robinson turned his face up in the moonlight, and recognized a man to whom he had never spoken, but whom his watchful eye had noticed more than once in the mine--it was, in fact, the peddler Walker.

"Stop, George, I have seen this face in bad company. Oh! back to our tent for your life, and kill any man you see near it!"

They ran back. They saw two dark figures melting into the night on the other side the tent. They darted in--they felt for the bag. Gone! They felt convulsively all round the tent. Gone! With trembling hands Robinson struck a light. Gone--the work of months in a moment---the hope of a life snatched out of a lover's very hand, and held out a mile off again!

The poor fellows rushed wildly out into the night. They saw nothing but the wretched decoy vanishing behind the nearest tents. They came into the tent again. They sat down and bowed to the blow in silence, and looked at one another, and their lips quivered, and they feared to speak lest they should break into unmanly rage or sorrow. So they sat like stone till daybreak.

And when the first streak of twilight came in, George said in a firm whisper:

"Take my hand, Tom, before we go to work."

So the two friends sat hand in hand a minute or two; and that hard grip of two workingmen's hands, though it was not gently eloquent like beauty's soft, expressive palm, did yet say many things good for the heart in this bitter hour.

It said: "A great calamity has fallen; but we do not blame each other, as some turn to directly and do. It is not your fault, George. It is not your fault, Tom."

It said: "We were lucky together; now we are unlucky together--all the more friends. We wrought together; now we have been wronged together--all the more friends." With this the sun rose, and for the first time they crept to their work instead of springing to it.

They still found gold in it, but not quite so abundant or so large. They had raised the cream of it for the thieves. Moreover, a rush had been made to the hole, claims measured off actually touching them; so they could not follow the gold-bearing strata horizontally--it belonged to their neighbors. They worked in silence, they ate their meal in silence. But as they rose to work again, Robinson said, very gravely, even solemnly:

"George, now I know what an honest man feels when he is robbed of the fruits of his work and his self-denial and his sobriety. If I had known it fifteen years ago, I should never have been a--what I have been."

For two months the friends worked stoutly with leaden hearts, but did little more than pay their expenses. The bag lay between them light as a feather. One morning Tom said to George:

"George, this won't do. I am going prospecting. Moore will lend me his horse for a day."

That day George worked alone. Robinson rode all over the country with a tin pan at his back, and tested all the places that seemed likely to his experienced eye. At night he returned to their tent. George was just lying down.

"No sleep to-night, George," said he, instinctively lowering his voice to a whisper; "I have found surface gold ten miles to the southward."

"Well, we will go to it to-morrow."

"What, by daylight, watched as we are? We, the two lucky ones," said Robinson bitterly. "No. Wait till the coast is clear--then strike tent and away."

At midnight they stole out of the camp. By peep of day they were in a little dell with a brook running at the bottom of it.

"Now, George, listen to me. Here is ten thousand pounds if we could keep this gully and the creek a fortnight to ourselves."

"Oh, Tom! and we will. Nobody will find us here, it is like a box."

Robinson smiled sadly. The men drove their spades in close to the little hole which Robinson had made prospecting yesterday, and the very first cradleful yielded an ounce of gold-dust extremely small and pure. They found it diffused with wonderful regularity within a few inches of the surface. Here for the first time George saw gold-dust so plentiful as to be visible. When a spadeful of the clay was turned up it glittered all over. When they tore up the grass, which was green as an emerald, specks of bright gold came up clinging to the roots. They fell like spaded tigers on the prey.

"What are you doing, George?"

"Going to light a fire for dinner. We must eat, I suppose, though I do grudge the time."

"We must eat, but not hot."

"Why not?"

"Because, if you light a fire, the smoke will be seen miles off, and half the diggings will be down upon us. I have brought three days' cold meat---here it is."

"Will this be enough?" asked George, simply, his mouth full.

"Yes, it will be enough," replied the other, bitterly. "Do you hear that bird, George? They call him a leather-head. What is he singing?"

George laughed. "Seems to me he is saying, 'Off we go!' 'Off we go!' 'Off we go!'"

"That is it. And look now, off he is gone; and, what is more, he has gone to tell all the world he saw two men pick up gold like beans."

"Work!" cried George.

That night the little bag felt twice as heavy as last night, and Susan seemed nearer than for many a day. These two worked for their lives. They counted each minute, and George was a Goliath; the soil flew round him like the dust about a wmnnowing-machine. He was working for Susan. Robinson wasted two seconds admiring him.

"Well," said he, "gold puts us all on our mettle, but you beat all I ever saw. You are a man."

It was the morning of the third day, and the friends were filling the little bag fast; and at breakfast George quizzed Robinson's late fears.

"The leather-head didn't tell anybody, for here we are all alone."

Robinson laughed.

"But we should not have been, if I had let you light a fire. However, I really begin to hope now they will let us alone till we have cleared out the gully. Hallo!"

"What is the matter?"

"Look there, George."

"What is it? Smoke rising--down the valley ?"

"We are done! Didn't I tell you?"

"Don't say so, Tom. Why, it is only smoke, and five miles off."

"What signifies what it is or where it is? It is on the road to us."

"I hope better."

"What is the use of hoping nonsense? Was it there yesterday? Well, then."

"Don't you be faint-hearted," said George. "We are not caught yet. I wonder whether Susan would say it was a sin to try and mislead them?"

"A sin! I wish I knew how, I'd soon see. That was a good notion. This place is five hundred pound a day to us. We must keep it to-day by hook or by crook. Come with me, quick. Bring your tools and the bag."

George followed Robinson in utter ignorance of his design; that worthy made his way as fast as he could toward the smoke. When they got within a mile of it the valley widened and the smoke was seen rising from the side of the stream. Concealing themselves, they saw two men beating the ground on each side like pointers. Robinson drew back. "They are hunting up the stream," said he, "it is there we must put the stopper on them."

They made eastward for the stream which they had left.

"Come," said Robinson, "here is a spot that looks likely to a novice; dig and cut it up all you can."

George was mystified but obeyed, and soon the place looked as if men had been at work on it some time. Then Robinson took out a handful of gold-dust and coolly scattered it over a large heap of mould.

"What are you at? Are you mad, Tom? Why, there goes five pounds. What a sin!"

"Did you never hear of the man that flung away a sprat to catch a whale? Now turn back to our hole. Stop, leave your pickax, then they will think we are coming back to work."

In little more than half an hour they were in their little gully working like mad. They ate their dinner working. At five o'clock George pointed out to Robinson no less than seven distinct columns of smoke rising about a mile apart all down the valley.

"Ay!" said Robinson, "those six smokes are hunting the smoke that is hunting us! but we have screwed another day out."

Just as the sun was setting, a man came into the gully with a pickax on his shoulder.

"Ah! how d'ye do?" said Robinson, in a mock friendly accent. "We have been expecting you. Thank you for bringing us our pickax."

The man gave a sort of rueful laugh and came and delivered the pick and coolly watched the cradle.

"Why don't you ask what you want to know?" said Robinson.

The man sneered. "Is that the way to get the truth from a digger?" said he.

"It is from me, and the only one."

"Oh! then what are you doing, mate?"

"About ten ounces of gold per hour."

The man's mouth and eyes both opened. "Come, my lad," said Robinson, good-naturedly, "of course I am not glad you have found us, but since you are come, call your pals, light fires, and work all night. To-morrow it will be too late."

The man whistled. He was soon joined by two more and afterward by others. The whole party was eight. A hurried conference took place, and presently the captain, whose name was Ede, came up to Robinson with a small barrel of beer and begged him and his pal to drink as much as they liked. They were very glad of the draught and thanked the men warmly.

The newcomers took Robinson's advice, lighted large fires, divided their company, and groped for gold. Every now and then came a shout of joy, and, in the light of the fires, the wild figures showed red as blood against the black wall of night, and their excited eyes glowed like carbuncles as they clawed the sparkling dust. George and Robinson, fatigued already by a long day, broke down about three in the morning. They reeled into their tent, dug a hole, put in their gold bag, stamped it down, tumbled dead asleep down over it, and never woke till morn.

Gn l r-r-r! gn l r-r-r!

"What is the matter, Carlo?"

Gn l r-r-r.

Hum! hum! hum! Crash! crash!

At these sounds Robinson lifted up the corner of his tent. The gully was a digging. He ran out to see where he was to work, and found the whole soil one enormous tan-yard, the pits ten feet square, and so close there was hardly room to walk to your hole without tumbling into your neighbor's. You had to balance yourself like boys going along a beam in a timber-yard. In one of these he found Ede and his gang working. Mr. Ede had acquired a black eye, ditto one of his mates.

"Good-morning, Captain Robinson," said this personage, with a general gayety of countenance that contrasted most drolly with the mourning an expressive organ had gone into.

"Well, was I right?" asked Robinson, looking ruefully round the crowded digging.

"You were, Captain Robinson, and thank you for last night."

"Well, you have picked up my name somehow. Now just tell me how you picked up something else. How did you suspect us in this retired spot?"

"We were working just clear of the great digging by the side of the creek, and doing no good, when your cork came down."

"My cork?"

"Cork out of your bottle."

"I had no bottle. Oh, yes! my pal had a bottle of small beer."

"Ay, he must have thrown it into the creek, for a cork came down to us. Then I looked at it, and I said, 'Here is a cork from Moore's store; there is a party working up stream by this cork.'"

Robinson gave a little groan. "We are never to be at the bottom of gold digging," said he.

"So we came up the stream and tried several places as we came, but found nothing; at last we came to your pickax and signs of work, so my lads would stay and work there, and I let them an hour or two, and then I said, 'Come now, lads, the party we are after is higher up.'"

"Now how could you pretend to know that?" inquired Robinson, with curiosity.

"Easy enough. The water came down to us thick and muddyish, so I knew you were washing up stream."

"Confound my stupid head," cried Robinson, "I deserve to have it cut off after all my experience."

And he actually capered with vexation.

"The best may make a mistake," said the other soothingly. "Well, captain, you did us a good turn last night, so here is your claim. We put your pal's pick in it--here close to us. Oh! there was a lot that made difficulties, but we over-persuaded them."

"Indeed! How?"

"Gave them a hiding, and promised to knock out any one's brains that went into it. Oh! kindness begets kindness, even in a gold mine."

"It does," cried Robinson, "and the proof is--that I give you the claim. Here come this way and seem to buy it of me. All their eyes are upon us. Now split your gang, and four take my claim."

"Well, that is good of you. But what will you do, captain? Where shall you go?" And his eyes betrayed his curiosity.

"Humph! Well, I will tell you on condition that you don't bring two thousand after me again. You should look behind you as well as before, stupid."

These terms agreed to, Robinson let Ede know that he was going this moment back to the old digging. The other was greatly surprised. Robinson then explained that in the old digging gold lay at various depths and was inexhaustible; that this afternoon there would be a rush made from it to Robinson's Gully (so the spot where they stood was already called); that thousands of good claims would thus by diggers' law be vacated; and that he should take the best before the rush came back, which would be immediately, since Robinson's Gully would be emptied of its gold in four hours.

"So clear out your two claims," said he. "It won't take you two hours. All the gold lies in one streak four inches deep. Then back after me; I'll give you the office. I'll mark you down a good claim."

Mr. Ede, who was not used to this sort of thing since he fought for gold, wore a ludicrous expression of surprise and gratitude. Robinson read it and grinned superior, but the look rendered words needless, so he turned the conversation.

"How did you get your black eye?"

"Oh! didn't I tell you? Fighting with the blackguards for your claim."

It was now Robinson's turn to be touched.

"You are a good fellow. You and I must be friends. Ah! if I could but get together about forty decent men like you, and that had got gold to lose."

"Well," said Ede, "why not? Here are eight that have got gold to lose, thanks to you, and your own lot--that makes ten. We could easy make up forty for any good lay; there is my hand for one. What is it?"

Robinson took Ede's hand with a haste and an energy that almost startled him, and his features darkened with an expression unusual now to his good-natured face. "To put down thieving in the camp," said he, sternly.

"Ah!" said the other, half sadly (the desirableness of this had occurred to him before now); "but how are we to do that?" asked he, incredulously. "The camp is choke-full of them."

Robinson looked blacker, uglier and more in earnest. So was his answer when it came.

"Make stealing death by the law."

"The law! What law?"

"Lynch!"

ABOUT a fortnight after Robinson's return to the diggings two men were seated in a small room at Bevan's store. There was little risk of their being interrupted by any honest digger, for it was the middle of the day.

"I know that well enough," growled the black-maned one, "everybody knows the lucky rip has got a heavier swag than ever, but we shan't get it so cheap, if we do at all."

"Why not?"

"He is on his guard now, night and day, and what is more he has got friends in the mine that would hang me or you either up to dry, if they but caught us looking too near his tent."

"The ruffians. Well, but if he has friends he has enemies."

"Not so many; none that I know of but you and me. I wonder what he has done to you?"

The other waived this question and replied: "I have found two parties that hate him; two that came in last week."

"Have you? then, if you are in earnest, make me acquainted with them, for I am weak-handed; I lost one of my pals yesterday."

"Indeed! how?"

"They caught him at work and gave him a rap over the head with a spade. The more ---- fool he for being caught. Here is to his memory."

"Ugh! what, is he, is he--"

"Dead as a herring."

"Where shall we all go to? What lawless fellows these diggers are. I will bring you the men."

For the last two months the serpentine man had wound in and out the camp, poking about for a villain of the darker sort as minutely as Diogenes did for an honest man, and dispensing liquor and watching looks and words. He found rogues galore, and envious spirits that wished the friends ill, but none of them seemed game to risk their lives against two men, one of whom said openly he would kill any stranger he caught in his tent, and whom some fifty stout fellows called Captain Robinson, and were ready to take up his quarrel like fire. But at last he fell in with two old lags, who had a deadly grudge against the captain, and a sovereign contempt for him into the bargain. By the aid of liquor he wormed out their story. This was the marrow of it: The captain had been their pal, and, while they were all three cracking a crib, had with unexampled treachery betrayed them, and got them laid by the heels for nearly a year; in fact, if they had not broken prison they would not have been here now. In short, in less than half an hour he returned with our old acquaintances, brutus and mephistopheles.

These two came half reluctant, suspicious and reserved. But at sight of Black Will they were reassured, villain was so stamped on him. With instantaneous sympathy and an instinct of confidence the three compared notes, and showed how each had been aggrieved by the common enemy. Next they held a council of war, the grand object of which was to hit upon some plan of robbing the friends of their new swag.

It was a difficult and very dangerous job. Plans were proposed and rejected, and nothing agreed upon but this, that the men should be carefully watched for days to find out where they kept their gold at night and where by day, and an attempt timed and regulated accordingly. Moreover, the same afternoon a special gang of six was formed, including Walker, which pitiful fox was greatly patronized by the black-maned lion. At sight of him, brutus, who knew him not indeed by name but by a literary transaction, was "for laying on," but his patron interposed, and, having inquired and heard the offense, bellowed with laughter, and condemned the ex-peddler to a fine of half a crown in grog. This softened brutus, and a harmonious debauch succeeded. Like the old Egyptians they debated first sober and then drunk, and to stagger my general notion that the ancients were unwise, candor compels me to own, it was while stammering, maudling, stinking and in every sense drunk that mephistopheles driveled out a scheme so cunning and so new as threw everybody and everything into the shade. It was carried by hiccoughation.

To work this scheme mephistopheles required a beautiful large new tent; the serpentine man bought it. Money to feed the gang; serpent advanced it.

Robinson's tent was about thirty yards from his claim, which its one opening faced. So he and George worked with an eye ever upon their tent. At night two men of Robinson's party patrolled armed to the teeth; they relieved guard every two hours. Captain Robinson's orders to these men, if they saw anybody doing anything suspicious after dark, were these:

First fire,
Then inquire.

This general order was matter of publicity for a quarter of a mile round Robinson's tent, and added to his popularity and our rascals' perplexities.

These orders had surely the double merit of conciseness and melody; well, for all that, they were disgustingly offensive to one true friend of the captain, viz., to George Fielding.

"What is all the gold in the world compared with a man's life?" said he, indignantly.

"An ounce of it is worth half a dozen such lives as some here," was the cool reply.

"I have heard you talk very different. I mind when you could make excuses even for thieves that were never taught any better, poor unfortunate souls."

"Did I?" said the captain, a little taken aback. "Well, perhaps I did; it was natural, hem, under the circumstances. No! not for such thieves as these, that haven't got any honor at all."

"Honor, eh?"

"Yes! honor. Look here, suppose in my unconverted days I had broke into a jeweler's shop (that comes nearest to a mine) with four or five pals, do you think I should have held it lawful to rob my pals of any part of the swag just because we happened to be robbing a silversmith? Certainly not; I assure you, George, the punishment of such a nasty, sneaking, dishonorable act would be death in every gang, and cheap, too. Well, we have broken into Nature's shop here, and we are to rifle her, and not turn to like unnatural monsters, and rob our ten thousand pals."

"Thieving is thieving, in my view," was the prejudiced reply.

"And hanging is hanging--as all thieves shall find if caught convenient."

"You make my flesh creep, Tom. I liked you better when you were not so great a man, more humble like; have you forgotten when you had to make excuses for yourself; then you had Susan on your side and brought me round, for I was bitter against theft; but never so bad as you are now."

"Oh, never mind what I said in those days; why, you must be well aware I did not know what I was talking about. I had been a rogue and a fool, and I talked like both. But now I am a man of property, and my eyes are open and my conscience revolts against theft, and the gallows is the finest institution going, and next to that comes a jolly good prison. I wish there was one in this mine as big as Pentonville, then property--"

Here the dialogue was closed by the demand the pick made upon the man of property's breath. But it rankled, and on laying down the pick he burst out: "Well, to think of an honest man like you having a word to say for thieving. Why, it is a despicable trait in a gold mine. I'll go farther, I'll prove it is the sin of sins all round the world. Stolen money never thrives--goes for drink and nonsense. Now you pick and I'll wash. Theft corrupts the man that is robbed as well as the thief; drives him to despair and drink and ruin temporal and eternal. No country could stand half an hour without law!! The very honest would turn thieves if not protected, and there would be a go. Besides, this great crime is like a trunk railway, other little crimes run into it and out of it; lies buzz about it like these Australian flies--drat you! Drunkenness precedes and follows it, and perjury rushes to its defense."

"Well, Tom, you are a beautiful speaker."

"I haven't done yet. What wonder it degrades a man when a dog loses his dignity under it. Behold the dog who has stolen; look at Carlo yesterday when he demeaned himself to prig Jem's dinner (the sly brute won't look at ours). How mean he cut with his tail under his belly, instead of turning out to meet folk all jolly and waggle-um-tail-um as on other occasions-- Hallo, you, sir! what are you doing so near our tent?" and up jumped the man of property and ran cocking a revolver to a party who was kneeling close to the friends' tent.

The man looked up coolly; he was on his knees.

"We are newly arrived and just going to pitch, and a digger told us we must not come within thirty yards of the captain's tent, so we are measuring the distance."

"Well, measure it--and keep it."

Robinson stayed by his tent till the man, whose face was strange to him, had measured and marked the ground. Soon after the tent in question was pitched, and it looked so large and new that the man of property's suspicions were lulled.

"It is all right," said he, "tent is worth twenty pounds at the lowest farthing."

While Black Will and his gang were scheming to get the friends' gold, Robinson, though conscious only of his general danger, grew more and more nervous as the bag grew heavier, and strengthened his defenses every day.

This very day one was added to the cause of order in a very characteristic way. I must first observe that Mr. McLaughlan had become George's bailiff, that is, on discovery of the gold he had agreed to incorporate George's flocks, to use his ground and to account to him, sharing the profits, and George running the risks. George had, however, encumbered the property with Abner as herdsman. That worthy had come whining to him lame of one leg from a blow on the head, which he convinced George Jacky had given him with his battle-ax.

"I'm spoiled for life and by your savage. I have lost my place; do something for me."

Good-hearted George did as related, and moreover promised to give Jacky a hiding if ever he caught him again. George's aversion to bloodshed is matter of history; it was also his creed that a good hiding did nobody any harm.

Now it was sheep-shearing time and McLaughlan was short of hands; he came into the mine to see whether out of so many thousands he could not find four or five who would shear instead of digging.

When he put the question to George, George shook his head doubtfully. "However," said he, "look out for some unlucky ones, that is your best chance, leastways your only one."

So McLaughlan went cannily about listening here and there to the men who were now at their dinners, and he found Ede's gang grumbling and growling with their mouths full; in short, enjoying at the same time a good dinner and an Englishman's grace.

"This will do," thought the Scot, misled like continental nations by that little trait of ours; he opened the ball.

"I'm saying--my lads--will ye gie ower this weary warrk a wee whilee and sheer a wheen sheep to me?"

The men looked in his face, then at one another, and the proposal struck them as singularly droll. They burst out laughing in his face.

McLaughlan (keeping his temper thoroughly, but not without a severe struggle). "Oh, fine I ken I'll ha'e to pay a maist deevelich price for your highnesses--aweel, I'se pay--aw thing has its price; jaast name your wage for shearing five hunder sheep."

The men whispered together. The Scot congratulated himself on his success; it would be a question of price, after all.

"We will do it for--the wool."

"Th' 'oo?--oo ay! but hoo muckle o' th' 'oo? for ye ken--"

"How muckle? why, all."

"A' the 'oo! ye blackguard, ye're no blate."

"Keep your temper, farmer, it is not worth our while to shear sheep for less than that."

"De'il go wi' ye then!" and he moved off in great dudgeon.

"Stop," cried the captain, "you and I are acquainted--you lived out Wellington way--me and another wandered to your hut one day and you gave us our supper."

"Ay, lad, I mind o' ye the noo!"

"The jolliest supper ever I had--a haggis you called it."

"Ay, did I, my fine lad. I cookit it till ye myssel. Ye meicht help me for ane."

"I will," said Captain Ede; and a conference took place in a whisper between him and his men.

"It is a' reicht the noo!" thought McLaughlan.

"We have an offer to make you," said Ede, respectfully.

"Let us hear't."

"Our party is large; we want a cook for it, and we offer you the place in return for past kindness."

"Me a cuik, y' impudent vagabond!" cried the Caledonian, red as a turkey-cock; and, if a look could have crushed a party of eight, their hole had been their grave.

McLaughlan took seven ireful steps--wide ones--then his hot anger assumed a cold, sardonic form, he returned, and with blighting satire speered this question by way of gratifying an ironical curiosity.

"An' whaat would ye ha'e the cheek t'offer a McLanghlan to cuik till ye, you that kens sae fine the price o' wark?"

"Thirty shillings."

"Thretty shilling the week for a McLaughlan!"

"The week," cried Ede, "nonsense--thirty shillings a day of course. We sell work for gold, sir, and we give gold for it; look here!" and he suddenly bared a sturdy brown arm, and, smacking it, cried, "That is dirt where you come from, but it is gold here."

"Ye're a fine lad," said the Scot, smoothly, "and ye've a boeny aerm," added he, looking down at it. "I'se no deny that. I'm thinking--I'll just come--and cuik till ye a wee--for auld lang syne--thretty schelln the day--an' ye'll buy the flesh o' me. I'll sell it a hantle cheaper than thir warldly-minded fleshers."

Bref, he came to be shorn, and remained to fleece.

He went and told George what he had done.

"Hech! hech!" whined he, "thir's a maist awfu' come doon for the McLaughlans---but wha wadna' stuip to lift gowd?"

He left his head man, a countryman of his own, in charge of the flocks, and tarried in the mine. He gave great satisfaction, except that he used to make his masters wait for dinner while he pronounced a thundering long benediction; but his cookery compensated the delay.

Robinson enrolled him in his police and it was the fashion openly to quiz, and secretly respect him.

Robinson also made friends with the women, in particular with one Mary McDogherty, wife of a very unsuccessful digger. Many a pound of potatoes Pat and she had from the captain, and this getting wind secured the good will of the Irish boys.

GEORGE was very homesick.

"Haven't we got a thousand pounds apiece yet?"

"Hush! no! not quite; but too much to bawl about."

"And we never shall till you take my advice, and trace the gold to its home in the high rocks. Here we are plodding for dust, and one good nugget would make us."

"Well! well!" said Robinson, "the moment the dry weather goes you shall show me the home of the gold." Poor George and his nuggets!

"That is a bargain," said George, "and now I have something more to say. Why keep so much gold in our tent? It makes me fret. I am for selling some of it to Mr. Levi.

"What, at three pounds the ounce? not if I know it."

"Then why not leave it with him to keep?"

"Because it is safer in its little hole in our tent. What do the diggers care for Mr. Levi? You and I respect him, but I am the man they swear by. No, George, Tom Weasel isn't caught napping twice in the same year. Don't you see I've been working this four months past to make my tent safe? and I've done it. It is watched for me night and day, and if our swag was in the Bank of England it wouldn't be safer than it is. Put that in your pipe. Well, Carlo, what is the news in your part?"

Carlo came running up to George, and licked his face, which just rose above the hole.

"What is it, Carlo?" asked George, in some astonishment.

"Ha! ha!" laughed the other. "Here is the very dog come out to encourage his faint-hearted master."

"No!" said George, "it can't be that--he means something--be quiet, Carlo, licking me to pieces--but what it is Heaven only knows; don't you encourage him; he has no business out of the tent--go back, Carlo--go into kennel, sir;" and off slunk Carlo back into the tent, of which he was the day sentinel.

"Tom," remarked George, thoughtfully, "I believe Carlo wanted to show me something; he is a wonderful wise dog."

"Nonsense," cried Robinson, sharply, "he heard you at the old lay, grumbling, and came to say cheer up, old fellow."

While Robinson was thus quizzing George, a tremendous noise was suddenly heard in their tent. A scuffle--a fierce, muffled snarl--and a human yell; with a cry, almost as loud, the men bounded out of their hole, and, the blood running like melting ice down their backs with apprehension, burst into the tent; then they came upon a sight that almost drew the eyes out of their heads.

In the center of the tent, not six inches from their buried treasure, was the head of a man emerging from the bowels of the earth, and cursing and yelling, for Carlo had seized his head by the nape of the neck, and bitten it so deep that the blood literally squirted, and was stamping and going back snarling and pulling and hauling in fierce jerks to extract it from the earth, while the burly-headed ruffian it belonged to, cramped by his situation, and pounced on unawares by the fiery teeth, was striving and battling to get down into the earth again. Spite of his disadvantage, such were his strength and despair that he now swung the dog backward and forward. But the men burst in. George seized him by the hair of his head, Tom by the shoulder, and with Carlo's help, wrenched him on to the floor of the tent, where he was flung on his back with Tom's revolver at his temple, and Carlo flew round and round barking furiously, and now and then coming flying at him; on which occasions he was always warded off by George's strong arm, and passed devious, his teeth clicking together like machinery, the snap and the rush being all one design that must succeed or fail together. Captain Robinson put his lips to his whistle, and the tent was full of his friends in a moment.

"Get me a bullock rope."

"Ay!"

"And drive a stout pole into the ground."

"Ay!"

In less than five minutes brutus was tied up to a post in the sun, with a placard on his breast on which was written in enormous letters--

(and underneath in smaller letters--)

Then a crier was sent through the mine to invite inspection of brutus's features, and ere sunset thousands looked into his face, and when he tried to lower it pulled it savagely up.

"I shall know you again, my lad," was the common remark, "and, if I catch you too near my tent, rope or revolver, one of the two."

Captain Robinson's men did not waste five minutes with brutus. They tied him to the stake, and dashed into their holes to make up lost time, but Robinson and George remained quiet in their tent.

"George," said Tom, in a low, contrite, humble voice, "let us return thanks to Heaven, for vain is man's skill."

And they did.

"George," said Tom, rising from his knees, "the conceit is taken out of me for about the twentieth time; I felt so strong and I was nobody. The danger came in a way I never dreamed, and when it had come we were saved by a friend I never valued. Give a paw, Carlo."

Carlo gave a paw.

"He has been a good friend to us this day," said George. "I see it all now; he must have heard the earth move and did not understand it so he came for me, and, when you would not let me go, he went back, and says he, 'I dare to say it is a rabbit burrowing up.' So he waited still as death, watching, and nailed six feet of vermin instead of bunny."

Here they both fell to caressing Carlo, who jumped and barked and finished with a pretended onslaught on the captain as he was kneeling, looking at their so late imperiled gold, and knocked him over and slobbered his face when he was down. Opinions varied, but the impression was he knew he had been a clever dog. This same evening, Jem made a collar for him on which was written "Policeman C."

The fine new tent was entered and found deserted, nothing there but an enormous mound of earth that came out of the subterranean, which Robinson got a light and inspected all the way to its débouchure in his own tent. As he returned, holding up his light and peering about, he noticed something glitter at the top of the arch; he held the light close to it and saw a speck or two of gold sparkling here and there. He took out his knife and scraped the roof in places, and brought to light in detached pieces a layer of gold-dust about the substance of a sheet of blotting-paper and full three yards wide; it crossed the subterranean at right angles, dipping apparently about an inch in two yards. The conduct of brutus and co. had been typical. They had been so bent on theft, that they were blind to the pocketfuls of honest, safe, easy gold they rubbed their very eyes and their thick skulls against on their subterraneous path to danger and crime.

Two courses occurred to Robinson; one was to try and monopolize this vein of gold, the other to take his share of it and make the rest add to his popularity and influence in the mine. He chose the latter, for the bumptiousness was chilled in him. This second attack on his tent made him tremble.

"I am a marked man," said he. "Well, if I have enemies, the more need to get friends all round me."

I must here observe that many men failed altogether at the gold diggings and returned in rags and tatters to the towns; many others found a little, enough to live like a gentleman anywhere else, but too little for bare existence in a place where an egg cost a shilling, a cabbage a shilling, and baking two pounds of beef one shilling and sixpence, and a pair of mining boots eight pounds, and a frying-pan thirty shillings, and so on.

Besides, the hundreds that fell by diarrhea, their hands clutching in vain the gold that could not follow them, many a poor fellow died of a broken heart and hardships suffered in vain, and some, long unlucky but persevering, suddenly surprised by a rich find of gold, fell by the shock of good fortune, went raving mad, dazzled by the gold, and perished miserably. For here all was on a great heroic scale, starvation, wealth, industry, crime, retribution, madness and disease.

Now the good-natured captain had his eye upon four unlucky men at this identical moment.

No. 1, Mr. Miles, his old master, who, having run through his means, had come to the diggings. He had joined a gang of five; they made only about three pounds a week each, and had expelled him, alleging that his work was not quite up to their mark. He was left without a mate and earned a precarious livelihood without complaining, for he was game; but Robinson's quick eye and ear saw his clothes were shabby and that he had given up his ha! ha! ha!

No. 2, Jem, whose mate had run away and robbed him, and he was left solus with his tools.

No. 3, Mr. Stevens, an accomplished scholar, and, above all, linguist, broad in the forehead but narrow in the chest, who had been successively rejected by five gangs and was now at a discount. He picked up a few shillings by interpreting, but it was a suspicious circumstance that he often came two miles from his end of the camp to see Robinson just at dinner-time. Then a look used to pass between those two good-hearted creatures, and Mr. Stevens was served first and Carlo docked till evening. Titles prevailed but little in the mine. They generally addressed the males of our species thus:

"Hi! man!"

The females thus:

"Hi! woman!"

The Spartans! but these two made an exception in favor of this reduced scholar. They called him "Sir," and felt abashed his black coat should be so rusty; and they gave him the gristly bits, for he was not working, but always served him first.

No. 4, Unlucky Jack, a digger. This man really seemed to be unlucky. Gangs would find the stuff on four sides of him, and he none; his last party had dissolved, owing they said to his ill-luck, and he was forlorn. These four Robinson convened, with the help of Mary McDogherty, who went for Stevens; and made them a little speech, telling them he had seen all their four ill-lucks, and was going to end that with one blow. He then, taking the direction of brutus's gold-vein, marked them out a claim full forty yards off, and himself one close to them; organized them, and set them working in high spirits, tremulous expectation, and a fervor of gratitude to him, and kindly feeling toward their unlucky comrades.

"You won't find anything for six feet," said the captain. "Meantime, all of you turn to and tell the rest how you were the unluckiest man in the whole mine--till you fell in with me--he! he!"

And the captain chuckled. His elastic vanity was fast recovering from brutus, and his spirits rising.

Toward evening he collected his whole faction, got on the top of two cradles, made a speech, thanked them for their good-will, and told them he had now an opportunity of making them a return. He had discovered a vein of gold which he could have kept all to himself, but it was more just and more generous to share it with his partisans.

"Now, pass through this little mine one at a time," said he, "and look at the roof, where I have stuck the two lighted candles, and then pass on quick to make room for others."

The men dived one after another, examined the roof, and, rushing wildly out at the other end in great excitement, ran and marked out claims on both sides of the subterranean.

But, with all their greediness and eagerness, they left ten feet square untouched on each side the subterranean.

"What is this left for?"

"That is left for the clever fellow that found the gold after a thief had missed it," cried one.

"And for the generous fellow that parted his find," roared another, from a distance.

Robinson seemed to reflect.

"No! I won't spoil the meat by cutting myself the fat--no! I am a digger, but not only a digger, I aspire to the honor of being a captain of diggers; my claim lies out there."

"Hurrah; three cheers for Captain Robinson!"

"Will you do me a favor in return?"

"Hurrah! won't we?"

"I am going to petition the governor to send us out police to guard our tents."

"Hurrah!"

"And even beaks, if necessary" (doubtful murmurs). "And, above all, soldiers to take our gold safe down to Sydney."

"Hurrah!"

"Where we can sell it at three fifteen the ounce."

"Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!"

"Instead of giving it away here for three pounds, and then being robbed. If you will all sign, Mr. Stevens and I will draw up the petition; no country can stand without law!"

"Hurrah for Captain Robinson, the diggers' friend."

And the wild fellows jumped out of the holes, and four seized the diggers' friend, and they chaired him in their rough way, and they put Carlo into a cradle, and raised him high, and chaired him; and both man and dog were right glad to get safe out of the precarious honor.

The proceedings ended by brutus being loosed and set between two long lines of men with lumps of clay, and pelted and knocked down, and knocked up again, and driven, bruised, battered and bleeding, out of that part of the camp. He found his way to a little dirty tent not much bigger than a badger's hole, crawled in, and sank down in a fainting state, and lay on his back stiff and fevered, and smarting soul and body many days.

And while Robinson was exulting in his skill, his good fortune, his popularity, his swelling bag, and the constabulary force he was collecting and heading, this tortured ruffian, driven to utter desperation by the exposure of his features to all the camp with "Thief" blazing on him, lay groaning stiff and sore--but lived for revenge.

"Let him keep his gold--I don't care for his gold now. I'll have his blood!"

"I WONDER at you giving away the claim that lay close to the gold; it is all very well to be generous, but you forget--Susan."

"Don't you be silly, George. The vein dips, and those that cut down on it where it is horizontalish will get a little; we, that nick it nearly verticalish, will get three times as much out of a ten-foot square claim."

"Well! you are a sharp fellow, to be sure; but, if it is so, why on earth did you make a favor to them of giving them the milk and taking the cream?"

"Policy, George! policy!"

"TOM, I invite you to a walk."

"Ay! ay! I'd give twenty pounds for one; but the swag?"

"Leave it this one day with Mr. Levi; he has got two young men always armed in his tent, and a little peevish dog, and gutta-percha pipes running into all the Jews' tents that are at his back like chicks after the old hen."

"Oh, he is a deep one."

"And he has got mouth-pieces to them, and so he could bring thirty men upon a thief in less than half a minute."

"Well, then, George! a walk is a great temptation, this beautiful day."

In short, by eight o'clock the gold was deposited, and the three friends, for Policeman C must count for one, stepped lustily out in the morning air.

It was the month of January; a blazing hot day was beginning to glow through the freshness of morning; the sky was one cope of pure blue, and the southern air crept slowly up, its wings clogged with fragrance, and just tuned the trembling leaves--no more.

"Is not this pleasant, Tom--isn't it sweet?"

"I believe you, George! and what a shame to run down such a country as this. There they come home, and tell you the flowers have no smell, but they keep dark about the trees and bushes being haystacks of flowers. Snuff the air as we go, it is a thousand English gardens in one. Look at all those tea-scrubs each with a thousand blossoms on it as sweet as honey, and the golden wattles on the other side, and all smelling like seven o'clock; after which flowers be hanged!"

"Ay, lad! it is very refreshing; and it is Sunday, and we have got away from the wicked for an hour or two; but in England there would be a little white church out yonder, and a spire like an angel's forefinger pointing from the grass to heaven, and the lads in their clean smock-frocks like snow, and the wenches in their white stockings and new shawls, and the old women in their scarlet cloaks and black bonnets, all going one road, and a tinkle-tinkle from the belfry, that would turn all these other sounds and colors and sweet smells holy, as well as fair, on the Sabbath morn. Ah! England. Ah!"

"You will see her again--no need to sigh."

"Oh, I was not thinking of her in particular just then."

"Of who?"

"Of Susan!"

"Prejudice be hanged, this is a lovely land."

"So 'tis, Tom, so 'tis. But I'll tell you what puts me out a little bit; nothing is what it sets up for here. If you see a ripe pear and go to eat it,--it is a lump of hard wood. Next comes a thing the very sight of which turns your stomach--and that is delicious, a loquot, for instance. There now, look at that magpie! well, it is Australia--so that magpie is a crow and not a magpie at all. Everything pretends to be some old friend or other of mine, and turns out a stranger. Here is nothing but surprises and deceptions. The flowers make a point of not smelling, and the bushes that nobody expects to smell, or wants to smell, they smell lovely.

"What does it matter where the smell comes from, so that you get it?"

"Why, Tom," replied George, opening his eyes, "it makes all the difference. I like to smell a flower--flower is not complete without smell--but I don't care if I never smell a bush till I die. Then the birds they laugh and talk like Christians; they make me split my sides, God bless their little hearts; but they won't chirrup. Oh, dear, no, bless you, they leave the Christians to chirrup--they hold conversations and giggle and laugh and play a thing like a fiddle--it is Australia! where everything is inside-out and topsy-turvy. The animals have four legs, so they jump on two. Ten-foot square of rock lets for a pound a month; ten acres of grass for a shilling a year. Roasted at Christmas, shiver o' cold on midsummer-day. The lakes are grass, and the rivers turn their backs on the sea and run into the heart of the land; and the men would stand on their heads, but I have taken a thought, and I've found out why they don't."

"Why?"

"Because if they did their heads would point the same way a man's head points in England."

Robinson laughed, and told George he admired the country for these very traits. "Novelty for me against the world. Who'd come twelve thousand miles to see nothing we couldn't see at home? Hang the same old story always; where are we going, George?"

"Oh, not much farther, only about twelve miles from the camp?"

"Where to?"

"To a farmer I know. I am going to show you a lark, Tom," said George. His eyes beamed benevolence on his comrade.

Robinson stopped dead short. "George," said he, "no! don't let us. I would rather stay at home and read my book. You can go into temptation and come out pure; I can't. I am one of those that, if I go into a puddle up to my shoe, I must splash up to my middle."

"What has that to do with it?"

"Your proposing to me to go in for a lark on the Sabbath day.

"Why, Tom, am I the man to tempt you to do evil?" asked George, hurt.

"Why, no! but, for all that, you proposed a lark."

"Ay, but an innocent one, one more likely to lift your heart on high than to give you ill thoughts."

"Well, this is a riddle;" and Robinson was intensely puzzled.

"Carlo," cried George, suddenly, "come here. I will not have you hunting and tormenting those kangaroo rats to-day. Let us all be at peace, if you please. Come to heel."

The friends strode briskly on, and a little after eleven o'clock they came upon a small squatter's house and premises. "Here we are," cried George, and his eyes glittered with innocent delight.

The house was thatched and whitewashed, and English was written on it and on every foot of ground round it. A furzebush had been planted by the door. Vertical oak palings were the fence, with a five-barred gate in the middle of them. From the little plantation all the magnificent trees and shrubs of Australia had been excluded with amazing resolution and consistency, and oak and ash reigned safe from overtowering rivals. They passed to the back of the house, and there George's countenance fell a little, for on the oval grass-plot and gravel walk he found from thirty to forty rough fellows, most of them diggers.

"Ah, well," said he, on reflection, "we could not expect to have it all to ourselves, and indeed it would be a sin to wish it, you know. Now, Tom, come this way; here it is, here it is--there." Tom looked up, and in a gigantic cage was a light brown bird.

He was utterly confounded. "What, is it this we came twelve miles to see?"

"Ay! and twice twelve wouldn't have been much to me."

"Well, but what is the lark you talked of?"

"This is it."

"This? This is a bird."

"Well, and isn't a lark a bird?"

"Oh, ay! I see! ha! ha! ha! ha!"

Robinson's merriment was interrupted by a harsh remonstrance from several of the diggers, who were all from the other end of the camp.

"Hold your ---- cackle," cried one, "he is going to sing;" and the whole party had their eyes turned with expectation toward the bird.

Like most singers, he kept them waiting a bit. But at last, just at noon, when the mistress of the house had warranted him to sing, the little feathered exile began as it were to tune his pipes. The savage men gathered round the cage that moment, and amid a dead stillness the bird uttered some very uncertain chirps, but after a while he seemed to revive his memories, and call his ancient cadences back him to one by one, and string them sotto voce.

And then the same sun that had warmed his little heart at home came glowing down on him here, and he gave music back for it more and more, till at last--amid breathless silence and glistening eyes of the rough diggers hanging on his voice--out burst in that distant land his English song.

It swelled his little throat and gushed from him with thrilling force and plenty, and every time he checked his song to think of its theme, the green meadows, the quiet stealing streams, the clover he first soared from, and the spring he sang so well, a loud sigh from many a rough bosom, many a wild and wicked heart, told how tight the listeners had held their breath to hear him; and when he swelled with song again, and poured with all his soul the green meadows, the quiet brooks, the honey clover and the English spring, the rugged mouths opened and so stayed, and the shaggy lips trembled, and more than one drop trickled from fierce unbridled hearts down bronzed and rugged cheeks.

Dulce dornurn!

And these shaggy men, full of oaths and strife and cupidity, had once been white-headed boys, and had strolled about the English fields with little sisters and little brothers, and seen the lark rise, and heard him sing this very song. The little playmates lay in the churchyard, and they were full of oaths and drink and lusts and remorses--but no note was changed in this immortal song. And so for a moment or two years of vice rolled away like a dark cloud from the memory, and the past shone out in the song-shine. They came back, bright as the immortal notes that lighted them, those faded pictures and those fleeted days; the cottage, the old mother's tears when he left her without one grain of sorrow; the village-church and its simple chimes; the clover-field hard by in which he lay and gamboled, while the lark praised God overhead; the chubby playmates that never grew to be wicked, the sweet hours of youth--and innocence--and home.

"WHAT will you take for him, mistress? I will give you five pounds for him."

"No! no! I won't take five pounds for my bird!"

"Of course she won't," cried another, "she wouldn't be such a flat. Here, missus," cried he, "I'll give you that for him;" and he extended a brown hand with at least thirty new sovereigns glittering in it.

The woman trembled; she and her husband were just emerging from poverty after a hard fight. "Oh!" she cried, "it is a shame to tempt a poor woman with so much gold. We had six brought over, and all died on the way but this one!" and she threw her white apron over her head, not to see the glittering bribe.

"---- you, put the blunt up and don't tempt the woman," was the cry. Another added: "Why, you fool, it wouldn't live a week if you had it," and they all abused the merchant. But the woman turned to him kindly and said:

"You come to me every Sunday, and he shall sing to you. You will get more pleasure from him so," said she, sweetly, "than if he was always by you."

"So I will, old girl," replied the rough, in a friendly tone.

George stayed till the lark gave up singing altogether, and then he said: "Now I am off. I don't want to hear bad language after that; let us take the lark's chirp home to bed with us;" and they made off; and true it was the pure strains dwelt upon their spirits, and refreshed and purified these sojourners in a godless place. Meeting these two figures on Sunday afternoon, armed each with a double-barreled gun and a revolver, you would never have guessed what gentle thoughts possessed them wholly. They talked less than they did coming, but they felt so quiet and happy.

"The pretty bird," purred George (seeing him by the ear), "I feel after him--there--as if I had just come out o' church."

"So do I, George, and I think his song must be a psalm, if we knew all."

"That it is, for Heaven taught it him. We must try and keep all this in our hearts when we get among the broken bottles, and foul language, and gold," says George. "How sweet it all smells, sweeter than before."

"That is because it is afternoon."

"Yes! or along of the music; that tune was a breath from home that makes everything please me. Now this is the first Sunday that has looked, and smelled, and sounded Sunday."

"George, it is hard to believe the world is wicked. Everything seems good, and gentle, and at peace with heaven and earth."

A jet of smoke issued from the bush, followed by the report of a gun, and Carlo, who had taken advantage of George's revery to slip on ahead, gave a sharp howl, and spun round upon all fours.

"The scoundrels!" shrieked Robinson. And in a moment his gun was at his shoulder, and he fired both barrels slap into the spot whence the smoke had issued.

Both the men dashed up and sprang into the bush revolver in hand, but ere they could reach it the dastard had run for it; and the scrub was so thick pursuit was hopeless. The men returned full of anxiety for Carlo.

The dog met them, his tail between his legs, but at sight of George he wagged his tail, and came to him and licked George's hand, and walked on with them, licking George's hand every now and then.

"Look, Tom, he is as sensible as a Christian. He knows the shot was meant for him, though they didn't hit him."

By this time the men had got out of the wood, and pursued their road, but not with tranquil hearts. Sunday ended with the noise of that coward's gun. They walked on hastily, guns ready, fingers on trigger--at war. Suddenly Robinson looked back, and stopped and drew George's attention to Carlo. He was standing with all his four legs wide apart, like a statue.

George called him; he came directly, and was for licking George's hand, but George pulled him about and examined him all over.

"I wish they may not have hurt him after all, the butchers; they have, too. See here, Tom, here is one streak of blood on his belly, nothing to hurt, though, I do hope. Never mind, Carlo," cried George, "it is only a single shot by what I can see, 'tisn't like when Will put the whole charge into you, rabbit-shooting, is it, Carlo? No, says he; we don't care for this, do we, Carlo?" cried George, rather boisterously.

"Make him go into that pool, there," said Robinson; "then he won't have fever."

"I will; here--cess! cess!" He threw a stone into the pool of water that lay a little off the road, and Carlo went in after it without hesitation, though not with his usual alacrity. After an unsuccessful attempt to recover the stone he swam out lower down, and came back to the men and wagged his tail slowly, and walked behind George.

They went on.

"Tom," said George, after a pause, "I don't like it."

"Don't like what?"

"He never so much as shook himself."

"What of that? He did shake himself, I should say."

"Not as should be. Who ever saw a dog come out of the water and not shake himself? Carlo, hie, Carlo!" and George threw a stone along the ground, after which Carlo trotted; but his limbs seemed to work stiffly; the stone spun round a sharp corner in the road, the dog followed it.

"He will do now," said Robinson.

They walked briskly on. On turning the corner they found Carlo sitting up and shivering, with the stone between his paws.

"We must not let him sit," said Tom; "keep his blood warm. I don't think we ought to have sent him into the water."

"I don't know," muttered George, gloomily. "Carlo," cried he, cheerfully, "don't you be down-hearted; there is nothing so bad as faint-heartedness for man or beast. Come, up and away ye go, and shake it off like a man."

Carlo got up and wagged his tail in answer, but he evidently was in no mood for running; he followed languidly behind.

"Let us get home," said Robinson; "there is an old pal of mine that is clever about dogs, he will cut the shot out if there is one in him, and give him some physic."

The men strode on, and each, to hide his own uneasiness, chatted about other matters; but all of a sudden Robinson cried out, "Why, where is the dog?" They looked back, and there was Carlo some sixty yards in the rear, but he was not sitting this time, he was lying on his belly.

"Oh! this is a bad job," cried George. The men ran up in real alarm; Carlo wagged his tail as soon as they came near him, but he did not get up.

"Carlo," cried George, despairingly, "you wouldn't do it, you couldn't think to do it. Oh, my dear Carlo, it is only making up your mind to live; keep up your heart, old fellow; don't go to leave us alone among these villains. My poor, dear, darling dog! Oh, no! he won't live, he can't live; see how dull his poor, dear eye is getting. Oh, Carlo! Carlo!"

At the sound of his master's voice in such distress, Carlo whimpered, and then he began to stretch his limbs out. At the sight of this Robinson cried hastily:

"Rub him, George; we did wrong to send him into the water."

George rubbed him all over. After rubbing him a while, he said:

"Tom, I seem to feel him turning to dead under my hand."

George's hand in rubbing Carlo came round to the dog's shoulder, then Carlo turned his head and for the third time began to lick George's hand. George let him lick his hand and gave up rubbing him, for where was the use? Carlo never left off licking his hand, but feebly, very feebly, more and more feebly.

Presently, even while he was licking his hand, the poor thing's teeth closed slowly on his loving tongue, and then he could lick the beloved hand no more. Breath fluttered about his body a little while longer; but in truth he had ceased to live when he could no longer kiss his master's hand.

And so the poor single-hearted soul was gone.

George took it up tenderly in his arms. Robinson made an effort to console him. "Don't speak to me, if you please," said George, gently but quickly. He carried it home silently, and laid it silently down in a corner of the tent.

Robinson made a fire and put some steaks on, and made George slice some potatoes to keep him from looking always at what so little while since was Carlo. Then they sat down silently and gloomily to dinner, it was long past their usual hour and they were workingmen. Until we die we dine, come what may. The first part of the meal passed in deep silence. Then Robinson said sadly:

"We will go home, George. I fall into your wishes now. Gold can't pay for what we go through in this hellish place."

"Not it," replied George, quietly.

"We are surrounded by enemies."

"Seems so," was the reply, in a very languid tone.

"Labor by day and danger by night."

"Ay," but in a most indifferent tone.

"And no Sabbath for us two."

"No!"

"I'll do my best for you, and when we have five hundred pounds more you shall go home to Susan."

"Thank you. He was a good friend to us that lies there under my coat; he used to lie over it, and then who dare touch it?"

"No! but don't give way to that, George--do eat a bit, it will do you good."

"I will, Tom, I will. Thank you kindly. Ah! now I see why he came to me and kept licking my hand so the moment he got the hurt. He had more sense than we had; he knew he and I were to part that hour. And I tormented his last minutes sending him into the water and after stones, when the poor thing wanted to be bidding me good-by all the while. Oh, dear! oh, dear!" and George pushed his scarce-tasted dinner from him, and left the tent hurriedly, his eyes thick with tears.

Thus ended this human day so happily begun; and thus the poor dog paid the price of fidelity this Sunday afternoon.

Siste viator iter--and part with poor Carlo--for whom there are now no more little passing troubles--no more little simple joys. His duty is performed, his race is run. Peace be to him, and to all simple and devoted hearts. Ah me! how rare they are among men!

"What are you doing, Tom, if you please?"

"Laying down a gut line to trip them up when they get into our tent."

"When--who?"

"Those that shot Carlo."

"They won't venture near me.

"Won't they? What was the dog shot for? They will come--and come to their death; to-night, I hope. Let them come! you will hear me cry 'Carlo' in their ears as I put my revolver to their skulls and pull the trigger."

George said nothing, but he clinched his teeth. After a pause he muttered, "We should pray against such thoughts."

Robinson was disappointed, no attack was made; in fact, even if such a thing was meditated, the captain's friends watched his tent night and day, and made such a feat a foolhardy enterprise, full of danger from without and within.

In the course of the next week a good deal of rain fell and filled many of the claims, and caused much inaction and distress among the diggers, and Robinson guarded the tent, and wrote letters and studied Australian politics, with a view to being shortly a member of Congress in these parts. George had his wish at last and cruised about looking for the home of the gold. George recollected to have seen what he described as a river of quartz sixty feet broad, and running between two black rocks. It ran in his head that gold in masses was there locked up, for, argued he, all the nuggets of any size I have seen were more than half quartz. Robinson had given up debating the point.

George was uneasy and out of spirits at not hearing from Susan for several months, and Robinson was for indulging him in everything.

Poor George! he could not even find his river of quartz. And when he used to come home day after day empty-handed and with this confession, the other's lips used to twitch with the hard struggle not to laugh at him; and he used to see the struggle and be secretly more annoyed than if he had been laughed out at.

One afternoon Tom Robinson, internally despising the whole thing, and perfectly sure in his own mind that there was no river of quartz, but paternal and indulgent to his friend's one weakness, said to him:

"I'll tell you how to find this river of quartz, if it is anywhere except in your own head."

"I shall be much obliged to you. How?"

"Jem has come back to camp and he tells me that Jacky is encamped with a lot more close to the gully he is working--it was on the other side the bush there-and Jacky inquired very kind after you."

"The little viper."

"He grinned from ear to ear, Jem tells me; and says he, 'Me come and see George a good deal soon,' says he."

"If he does, George will tan his black hide for him."

"What makes you hold spite so long against poor Jacky?"

"He is a little sneaking varmint."

"He knows every part of this country, and he would show you 'the home of the gold,'" observed Robinson, restraining his merriment with great difficulty.

This cock would not fight, as vulgar wretches say. Jacky had rather mortified George by deserting him upon the first discovery of gold. "Dis a good deal stupid," was that worthy's remark on the second day. "When I hunt tings run, and I run behind and catch dem. You hunt--it not run--yet you not catch it always. Dat a good deal stupid. Before we hunt gold you do many tings, now do one; dat a good deal stupid. Before, you go so (erecting a forefinger); now you always so (crooking it). Dat too stupid." And with this--whir! my lord was off to the woods.

On the head of this came Abner limping in, and told how a savage had been seen creeping after him with a battle-ax, and how he had lain insensible for days, and now was lame for life. George managed to forgive Jacky's unkind desertion, but for creeping after Abner and "spoiling him for life," to use Abner's phrase, he vowed vengeance on that black hide and heart.

Now if the truth must be told, Jacky had come back to the camp with Jem, and would have marched before this into George's tent. But Robinson, knowing how angry George was with him, and not wishing either Jacky to be licked or George to be tomahawked, insisted on his staying with Jem till he had smoothed down his friend's indignation. Soon after this dialogue Robinson slipped out, and told Jacky to stay with Jem and keep out of George's way for a day or two.

And now the sun began to set red as blood, and the place to sparkle far and wide with the fiery rays emitted from a hundred thousand bottles that lay sown broadcast over the land; and the thunder of the cradles ceased, and the accordions came out all over five miles of gold mine. Their gentler strains lasted till the sun left the sky; then, just at dusk, came a tremendous discharge of musketry roaring, rattling, and re-echoing among the rocks. This was tens of thousands of diggers discharging their muskets and revolvers previous to reloading them for the night; for, calm as the sun had set to the music of accordions, many a deadly weapon they knew would be wanted to defend life and gold ere that same tranquil sun should rise again.

Thus the tired army slept not at their ease, like other armies, guarded by sentinels and pickets, but every man in danger every night and every hour of it. Each man lay in his clothes with a weapon of death in his hand; Robinson with two, a revolver and a cutlass ground like a razor. Outside it was all calm and peaceful. No boisterous revelry--all seemed to sleep innocent and calm in the moonlight after the day of herculean toil.

Perhaps if any one eye could have visited the whole enormous camp, the children of theft and of the night might have been seen prowling and crawling from one bit of shade to another. But in the part where our friends lay the moon revealed no human figures but Robinson's patrol, three men, who, with a dark-lantern and armed to the teeth, went their rounds and guarded forty tents, above all the captain's. It was at his tent that guard was relieved every two hours. So all was watched the livelong night.

Two pointed rocks connected at the base faced the captain's tent. The silver rays struck upon their foreheads wet with the vapors of night, and made them like frost seen through phosphorus. It was startling. The soul of silver seemed to be sentinel and eye the secret gold below.

And now a sad, a miserable sound grated on the ear of night. A lugubrious quail doled forth a grating, dismal note at long but measured intervals, offending the ear and depressing the heart. This was the only sound Nature afforded for hours. The neighboring bush, though crammed with the merriest souls that ever made feathers vibrate and dance with song, was like a tomb of black marble; not a sound--only this little raven of a quail tolled her harsh, lugubrious crake.

Those whose musical creed is Time before Sentiment might have put up with this night-bird; for to do her justice she was a perfect timist--one crake in a bar the livelong night; but her tune--ugh! She was the mother of all files that play on iron throughout the globe. Crake! -- crake! -- crake! untuning the night.

An eye of red light suddenly opened in the silver stream shows three men standing by a snowy tent. It is the patrol waiting to be relieved. Three more figures emerge from the distant shade and join them. The first three melt into the shade.

Crake!

The other three remain and mutter. Now they start on their rounds. "What is that?" mutters one.

"I'll go and see." Click.

"Well!"

"Oh, it is only that brown donkey that cruises about here. She will break her neck in one of the pits some day."

"Not she. She is not such an ass."

These three melted into the night, going their rounds; and now nothing is left in sight but a thousand cones of snow, and the donkey paddling carefully among the pits.

Craake!

Now the donkey stands a moment still in the moonlight--now he paddles slowly away and disappears on the dark side the captain's tent. What is he doing? He stoops--he lies down--he takes off his head and skin and lays them down.

It is a man! He draws his knife and puts it between his teeth. A pistol is in his hand--he crawls on his stomach--the tent is between him and the patrol. His hand is inside the tent--he finds the opening and winds like a serpent into the tent.

Craake!

BLACK WILL no sooner found himself inside the tent than he took out a dark lantern and opened the slide cautiously. There lay in one corner the two men fast asleep side by side. Casting the glare around he saw at his feet a dog with a chain round him. It startled him for a moment--but only for a moment. He knew that dog was dead. mephistopheles had told him within an hour after the feat was performed. Close to his very hand was a pair of miner's boots. He detached them from the canvas and passed them out of the tent; and now looking closely at the ground he observed a place where the soil seemed loose. His eye flashed with triumph at this. He turned up the openings of the tent behind him to make his retreat clear if necessary. He made at once for the loose soil, and the moment he moved forward Robinson's gut-lines twisted his feet from under him. He fell headlong in the middle, and half a dozen little bells rang furiously at the sleepers' heads.

Up jumped Tom and George, weapons in hand, but not before Black Will had wrenched himself clear and bounded back to the door. At the door, in his rage at being balked, he turned like lightning and leveled his pistol at Robinson, who was coming at him cutlass in hand. The ex-thief dropped on his knees and made a furious upward cut at his arm. At one and the same moment the pistol exploded and the cutlass struck it and knocked it against the other side of the tent. The bullet passed over Robinson's head. Black Will gave a yell so frightful that for a moment it paralyzed the men, and even with this yell he burst backward through the opening, and with a violent wrench of his left hand brought the whole tent down and fled, leaving George and Robinson struggling in the canvas like cats in an empty flour-sack.

The baffled burglar had fled but a few yards, when, casting his eye back, he saw their helplessness. Losing danger in hatred he came back, not now to rob, but murder, his left hand lifted high and gleaming like his cruel eye. As he prepared to plunge his knife through the canvas, flash bang! flash bang! bang! came three pistol-shots in his face from the patrol, who were running right slap at him not thirty yards off, and now it was life or death. He turned and ran for his life, the patrol blazing and banging at him. Eighteen shots they fired at him, one after another; more than one cut his clothes, and one went clean through his hat, but he was too fleet, he distanced them; but at the reports diggers peeped out of distant tents, and at sight of him running, flash bang went a pistol at him from every tent he passed, and George and Robinson, who had struggled out into the night, saw the red flashes issue, and then heard the loud reports bellow and re-echo as he dodged about down the line, and then all was still and calm as death under the cold, pure stars.

Craake!

They put up their tent again. The patrol came panting back. "He has got off--but he carried some of our lead in him. Go to bed, captain, we won't leave your tent all night."

Robinson and George lay down again thus guarded. The patrol sat by the tent. Two slept, one loaded the arms again and watched. In a few minutes the friends were actually fast asleep again, lying silent as the vast camp lay beneath the silver stars.

Craake!

And now it was cold, much colder than before, darker, too, no moon now, only the silver stars; it makes one shiver. Nature seemed to lie stark and stiff and dead, and that accursed craake her dirge. All tended to shivering and gloom. Yet a great event approached.

Craake!

A single event, a thousand times weightier to the world, each time it comes, than if with one fell stroke all the kingdoms of the globe became republics and all the republics empires, so to remain a thousand years. An event a hundred times more beautiful than any other thing the eye can hope to see while in the flesh, yet it regaled the other senses, too, and blessed the universal heart.

Before this prodigious event came its little heralds sweeping across the face of night. First came a little motion of cold air--it was dead-still before; then an undefinable freshness; then a very slight but rather grateful smell from the soil of the conscious earth. Next twittered from the bush one little hesitating chirp.

Craake! went the lugubrious quail, pooh-poohing the suggestion. Then somehow rocks and forest and tents seemed less indistinct in shape; outlines peeped where masses had been.

Jug! jug! went a bird with a sweet jurgle in his deep throat. Craake! went the ill-omened one directly, disputing the last inch of nature. But a gray thrush took up the brighter view; otock otock tock! o tuee o o! o tuee oo! o chio chee! o chio chee! sang the thrush, with a decision as well as a melody that seemed to say: "Ah! but I am sure of it; I am sure, I am sure, wake up, joy! joy!"

From that moment there was no more craake. The lugubrious quail shut up in despair, perhaps in disdain,* and out gurgled another jug! jug! jug! as sweet a chuckle as Nature's sweet voice ever uttered in any land; and with that a mist like a white sheet came to light, but only for a moment, for it dared not stay to be inspected, "I know who is coming, I'm off," and away it crept off close to the ground--and little drops of dew peeped sparkling in the frost-powdered grass.

* Like anonymous detraction before vox populi.

Yock! yock! O chio faliera po! Otock otock tock! o chio chee! o chio chee!

Jug! jug! jug! jug!

Off we go! off we go!

And now a thin red streak came into the sky, and perfume burst from the bushes, and the woods rang, not only with songs some shrill, some as sweet as honey, but with a grotesque yet beautiful electric merriment of birds that can only be heard in this land of wonders. The pen can give but a shadow of the drollery and devilry of the sweet, merry rogues that hailed the smiling morn. Ten thousand of them, each with half a dozen songs, besides chattering and talking and imitating the fiddle, the fife and the trombone. Niel gow! niel gow! niel gow! whined a leather-head. Take care o' my hat! cries a thrush, in a soft, melancholy voice; then with frightful harshness and severity, where is your bacca-box! your box! your box! then before any one could answer, in a tone that said devil may care where the box is or anything else, gyroc de doc! gyroc de doc! roc de doc! cheboc cheboc! Then came a tremendous cackle ending with an obstreperous hoo! hoo! ha! from the laughing jackass, who had caught sight of the red streak in the sky--harbinger, like himself, of morn; and the piping crows or whistling magpies modulating and humming and chanting, not like birds, but like practiced musicians with rich baritone voices, and the next moment creaking just for all the world like Punch, or barking like a pug dog. And the delicious thrush with its sweet and mellow tune. Nothing in an English wood so honey-sweet as his otock otock tock! o tuee o o! o tuee o o! o chio chee! o chio chee!

But the leather-heads beat all. Niel gow! niel gow! niel gow! off we go! off we go! off we go! followed by rapid conversations, the words unintelligible but perfectly articulate, and interspersed with the oddest chuckles, plans of pleasure for the day, no doubt. Then ri tiddle tiddle tiddle tiddle tiddle tiddle! playing a thing like a fiddle with wires; then "off we go" again, and bow! wow! wow! jug! jug! jug! jug! jug! and the whole lot in exuberant spirits, such extravagance of drollery, such rollicking jollity, evidently splitting their sides with fun, and not able to contain themselves for it.

Oh! it was twelve thousand miles above the monotonous and scanty strains of a European wood; and when the roving and laughing, and harshly demanding bacca-boxes and then as good as telling you they didn't care a feather for bacca-boxes or anything else, gyroc de doc! cheboc cheboc cheboc! and loudly announcing their immediate departure, and perching in the same place all the more and sweet, low modulations ending in putting on the steam and creaking like Punch, and then almost tumbling off the branches with laughing at the general accumulation of nonsense--when all this drollery and devilry and joy and absurdity were at their maddest, and a thousand feathered fountains bubbling song were at their highest, then came the cause of all the merry hubbub--the pinnacles of rock glowed burnished gold, Nature, that had crept from gloom to pallor, burst from pallor to light and life and burning color--the great sun's forehead came with one gallant stride into the sky--and it was day!

Out shone ten thousand tents of every size and hue and shape, from Isaac Levi's rood of white canvas down to sugar-loaves, and even to miserable roofs built on the bare ground with slips of bark, under which unlucky diggers crept at night like badgers--roofed beds--no more--the stars twinkling through chinks in the tester. The myriad tents were clustered for full five miles on each side of the river, and it wound and sparkled in and out at various distances, and shone like a mirror in the distant background.

At the first ray the tents disgorged their inmates, and the human hive began to hum; then came the fight, the maneuvering, the desperate wrestle with Nature, and the keen fencing with their fellows--in short, the battle--to which, that nothing might be wanting, out burst the tremendous artillery of ten thousand cradles louder than thunder, and roaring and crashing without a pause.

The base of the two-peaked rock that looked so silvery in the moon is now seen to be covered with manuscript advertisements posted on it; we can only read two or three as we run to our work:

"Immense reduction in eggs only one shilling each!!! Bevan's store."

"Go-ahead library and registration office for new chums. Tom Long in the dead-horse gully."

"If this meets the i of Tom Bowles he will ear of is pal in the iron-bark gully."

"This is to give notice that whereas my wife Elizabeth Sutton has taken to drink and gone off with my mate Bob, I will not be answerable for your debts nor hold any communication with you in future.

"JAMES SUTTON."

A young Jew, Nathan, issued from Levi's tent with a rough table and two or three pair of scales and other paraphernalia of a gold assayer and merchant. This was not the first mine by many the old Jew had traded in.

His first customers this morning were George and Robinson.

"Our tent was attacked last night, Mr. Levi."

"Again? humph!"

"Tom thinks he has got enemies in the camp."

"Humph! the young man puts himself too forward not to have enemies."

"Well," said George, quickly, "if he makes bitter enemies he makes warm friends."

George then explained that his nerve and Robinson's were giving way under the repeated attacks.

"We have had a talk and we will sell the best part of our dust to you, sir. Give him the best price you can afford for Susan's sake."

And away went George to look for his quartz river, leaving the ex-thief to make the bargain and receive the money.

In the transaction that followed Mr. Levi did not appear to great advantage. He made a little advance on the three pounds per ounce on account of the quantity, but he would not give a penny above three guineas. No! business was business; he could and would have given George a couple of hundred pounds in day of need, but in buying and selling the habits of a life could not be shaken off. Wherefore Robinson kept back eight pounds of gold-dust and sold him the rest for notes of the Sydney Bank.

"Well, sir," said Tom, cheerfully, "now my heart is light; what we have got we can carry round our waists now by night or day. Well, friend, what do you want, poking your nose into the tent?"

Coming out suddenly he had run against a man who was in a suspicious attitude at the entrance.

"No offense," muttered the man, "I wanted to sell a little gold-dust."

Levi heard what Robinson said, and came quickly out.

He seated himself behind the scales.

"Where is your gold?"

The man fumbled and brought out about an ounce. All the time he weighed it, the Jew's keen eye kept glancing into his face he lowered his eyes and could not conceal a certain uneasiness. When he was gone, Levi asked Robinson whether he knew that face.

"No," said Robinson, "I don't."

Levi called Nathan out.

"Nathan, look at that man, follow him cautiously, and tell me where we have seen him; above all, know him again. Surely that is the face of an enemy."

Then the old man asked himself where he had seen such an eye and brow and shambling walk as that; and he fell into a brown study and groped among many years for the clew.

"What! is Erin-go-bragh up with the sun for once?" cried Robinson to Mary McDogherty, who passed him spade on shoulder.

"Sure if she warn't she'd never keep up with Newgut," was the instant rejoinder.

"Hem! how is your husband, Mary?"

"Och, captain, it is a true friend ye are for inquiring. Then it's tied in a knot he is.

"Mercy on us, tied in a knot?"

"Tied in a knot intirely--wid the rheumatism--and it's tin days I'm working for him and the childhre, and my heart's broke against gravel and stone intirely. I wish it was pratees we are digging, I'd maybe dig up a dinner any way."

"There is no difficulty, the secret is to look in the right place."

"Ay! ay! take your divairsion, ye sly rogue!--I wish ye had my five childhre."

"Oh! you spiteful cat!"

"Well, Ede, come to sell?"

"A little."

"What is to do out there? seems a bit of a crowd."

"What, haven't you heard? it is your friend Jem! he has got a slice of luck, bought a hole of a stranger, saw the stuff glitter, so offered him thirty pounds; he was green and snapped at it; and if Jem didn't wash four ounces out the first cradleful I'm a Dutchman."

"Well, I am right glad of that."

A young digger now approached respectfully. "Police report, captain."

"Hand it here. May I sit at your table a minute, Mr. Levi?" Mr. Levi bowed assent.

"No clew to the parties that attacked our tent last night?"

"None at present, captain, but we are all on the lookout. Some of us will be sure to hear of something, course of the day, and then I'll come and tell you. Will you read the report? There is the week's summary as well."

"Of course I will. Mum! mum! 'Less violence on the whole this week; more petty larceny.' That is bad. I'll put it down, Mr. Levi. I am determined to put it down. What an infernal row the cradles make. What is this? 'A great flow of strangers into the camp, most thought to be honest, but some great roughs; also a good many Yankees and Germans come in at the south side.' What is this? 'A thief lynched yesterday. Flung headforemost into a hole and stuck in the clay. Not expected to live after it.' Go it, my boys! Didn't I say law is the best for all parties, thieves included? Leave it, Andrew, I will examine it with the utmost minuteness."

The dog used fine words on these occasions, that he might pass for a pundit with his clique, and being now alone he pored over his police-sheet as solemn and stern as if the nation depended on his investigations.

A short explosion of laughter from Andrew interrupted this grave occupation. The beak looked up with offended dignity, and, in spite of a mighty effort, fell a sniggering. For following Andrew's eyes he saw two gig umbrellas gliding erect and peaceful side by side among the pits.

"What on earth are they?"

"Chinamen, captain. They are too lazy to dig. They go about all day looking at the heaps and poking all over the camp. They have got eyes like hawks. It is wonderful, I am told, what they contrive to pick up first and last. What hats! Why, one of 'm would roof a tent."

"Hurroo!"

"What is up now?"

"Hurroo!" And up came Mary McDogherty dancing and jumping as only Irish ever jumped. She had a lump of dim metal in one hand and a glittering mass in the other. She came up to the table with a fantastic spring and spanked down the sparkling mass on it, bounding back one step like india-rubber even as she struck the table.

"There, ould gintleman, what will ye be after giving me for that? Sure the luck is come to the right colleen at last."

"I deal but in the precious metals and stones," replied Isaac, quietly.

"Sure, and isn't gould a precious metal?"

"Do you offer me this for gold? This is not even a metal. It is mica--yellow mica.

"Mikee?" cried Mary, ruefully, with an inquiring look.

At this juncture in ran George, hot as fire. "There!" cried he, triumphantly to Robinson, "was I right or wrong? What becomes of your gold-dust?" And he laid a nugget as big as his fist on the table.

"Ochone!" cried the Irishwoman, "they all have the luck barrin' poor Molly McDogherty."

The mica was handled, and George said to her compassionately, "You see, my poor girl, the first thing you should do is to heft it in your hand. Now see, your lump is not heavy like--"

"Pyrites!" said Isaac, dryly, handing George back his lump. "No! pyrites is heavier than mica--and gold than pyrites."

"Mr. Levi, don't go to tell me this is not a metal," remonstrated George, rather sulkily, "for I won't have it."

"Nay, it is a metal," replied Levi, calmly, "and a very useful metal, but not of the precious metals. It is iron."

"How can it be iron when it is yellow? And how is one to know iron from gold, at any rate?"

"Be patient, my son." said the old Jew calmly, "and learn. Take this needle. Here is a scale of gold; take it up on the needle-point. You have done it. Why? Because gold is a soft metal. Now take up this scale from your pyrites?"

"I can't."

"No, because iron is a hard metal. Here is another childish test--a bloodstone, called by some the touchstone. Rub the pyrites on it. It colors it not--a hard metal. Now rub this little nugget of pure gold I have just bought."

"Ay! this stains the stone yellow."

"A soft metal. Here in this little phial is muriatic acid. Pour a drop on my nugget. The metal defies it. Now pour on your pyrites. See how it smokes and perishes. It cannot resist the acid. There are many other tests, but little needed. No metal, no earthly substance, resembles gold in the least."

"Not to a Jew's eye," whispered Robinson.

"And much I marvel that any man or even any woman who has been in a gold mine and seen and handled virgin gold should take mica" (here he knocked the mica clean off the table) "or pyrites" (here he spanged that in another direction) "for the royal metal."

"I'll tell you what to do, Mary," began Robinson, cheerfully. "Hallo! she is crying. Here is a faint heart."

"Och! captain dear, Pat an' me we are kilt right out for want of luck. Oh! oh! We niver found but one gould--and that was mikee. We can't fall upon luck of any sort--good, bad or indifferent--that is where I'm broke and spiled and kilt hintirely. Oh! oh! oh!"

"Don't cry. You have chosen a bad spot."

"Captain, avick, they do be turning it up like carrots on both sides of huz. And I dig right down as if I'd go through the 'orld back to dear old Ireland again. He! he! he! oh! oh! An' I do be praying to the Virgin at every stroke of the spade, I do, and she sends us no gould at all at all, barrin' mikee, bad cess to 't. Oh!"

"That is it. You are on two wrong tacks. You dig perpendicular and pray horizontal. Now you should dig horizontal and pray perpendicular."

"Och! captain, thim's hard words for poor Molly McDogherty to quarry through."

"What is that in your hand?"

"Sure it is an illigant lump of lead I found," replied poor Mary; the base metal rising in estimation since her gold turned out dross. "Ye are great with the revolver, captain," said she, coaxingly, "ye'll be afther giving me the laste pinch of the rale stuff for it?"

Robinson took the lump. "Good heavens! what a weight!" cried he. He eyed it keenly. "Come, Mr. Levi," cried he, "here is a find; be generous. She is unlucky."

"I shall be just," said the old man gravely. He weighed the lump and made a calculation on paper, then handed her forty sovereigns.

She looked at them. "Oh, now, it is mocking me ye are, old man;" and she would not take the money. On this he put it coolly down on the table.

"What is it at all?" asked she, faintly.

"Platinum," replied Isaac, coldly.

"And a magnificent lump of it!" cried Robinson, warmly.

"Och, captain! och, captain, dear! and what is plateenum at all--if ye plaze?"

"It is not like your mica," said Isaac. "See, it is heavier than gold, and far more precious than silver. It has noble qualities. It resists even the simple acid that dissolves gold. Fear not to take the money. I give you but your metal's value, minus the merchant's just profit. Platinum is the queen of the metals."

"Och, captain, avick! och! och! come here till I eat you!" And she flung her arm round Robinson's neck, and bestowed a little furious kiss on him. Then she pranced away; then she pranced back. "Platinum, you are the boy; y'are the queen of the mitals. May the Lord bless you, ould gentleman, and the SAINTS BLESS YOU! and the VIRGIN MARY BLESS YOU!"* And she made at Isaac with the tears in her eyes, to kiss him; but he waved her off with calm, repulsive dignity. "Hurroo!" And the child of Nature bounded into the air like an antelope, and frisked three times; then she made another set at them. "May you live till the skirts of your coat knock your brains out, the pair of ye! hurroo!" Then with sudden demureness, "An' here's wishing you all sorts of luck, good, bad an' indifferent, my darlin's. Plateenum foriver, and gould to the Divil," cried she, suddenly, with a sort of musical war-shout, the last words being uttered three feet high in air, and accompanied with a vague kick, utterly impossible in that position except to Irish, and intended, it is supposed, to send the obnoxious metal off the surface of the globe forever. And away she danced.

* These imprecations are printed on the ascending scale by way of endeavor to show how the speaker delivered them.

Breakfast now! and all the cradles stopped at once.

"What a delightful calm," said Robinson, "now I can study my police-sheet at my ease."

This morning, as he happened to be making no noise, the noise of others worried him.

"Mr. Levi, how still and peaceful they are when their time comes to grub. 'The still sow sups the kail,' as we used to say in the north; the English turn the proverb differently, they say 'The silent hog--'"

"Jabber! jabber! jabber!--aie! aie!"

"Hallo! there's a scrimmage! and there go all the fools rushing to see it. I'll go, too!"

Alas! poor human nature; the row was this. The peaceful children of the moon, whom last we saw gliding side by side, vertical and seemingly imperturbable, had yielded to the genius loci, and were engaged in bitter combat, after the manner of their nation. The gig umbrellas were resolved into their constituent parts; the umbrellas proper, or hats, lay on the ground--the sticks or men rolled over one another scratching and biting. Europe wrenched them asunder with much pain, and held them back by their tails, grinning horribly at each other, and their long claws working unamiably.

The diggers were remonstrating; their morality was shocked.

"Is that the way to fight? What are fists given us for, ye varmint?"

Robinson put himself at the head of the general sentiment. "I must do a bit of beak here!!!" cried he; "bring those two tom-cats up before me!!"

The proposal was received with acclamation. A high seat was made for the self-constituted beak, and Mr. Stevens was directed to make the Orientals think that he was the lawful magistrate of the mine. Mr. Stevens, entering into the fun, persuaded the Orientals, who were now gig umbrellas again, that Robinson was the mandarin who settled property, and possessed, among other trifles, the power of life and death. On this they took off their slippers before him, and were awestruck, and secretly wished they had not kicked up a row, still more that they had stayed quiet by the banks of the Hoang-ho.

Robinson settled himself, demanded a pipe, and smoked calm and terrible, while his myrmidons kept their countenances as well as they could. After smoking in silence a while, he demanded of the Chinese, "What was the row?"

1st Chinaman. "Jabber! jabber! jabber!"

2d Chinaman. "Jabber! jabber! jabber!"

Both. "Jabber! jabber! jabber!"

"What is that? Can't they speak any English at all?"

"No!"

"No wonder they can't conduct themselves, then," remarked a digger.

The judge looked him into the earth for the interruption.

"You get the story from them, and tell it."

After a conference, Mr. Stevens came forward.

"It is about a nugget of gold, which is claimed by both parties."

Robinson. "Stop! bring that nugget into court; that is the regular course."

Great interest began to be excited, and all their necks craned forward--when Mr. Stevens took from one of the Chinese the cause of so sanguinary a disturbance, and placed it on the judge's table. A roar of laughter followed--it was between a pea and a pin's head in magnitude.

Robinson. "You know this is shocking. Asia, I am ashamed of you. Silence in the court! Proceed with the evidence."

Mr. Stevens. "This one saw the gold shining, and he said to the other, 'Ah!'"

Robinson (writing his notes). "Said--to--the-other--'Ah!'--Stop! what was the Chinese for 'ah'?"

Stevens. "'Ah!"

Robinson. "Oh!"

Andrew. "Come! the beggars have got hold of some of our words!"

Robinson. "Silence in the court!"

Andrew. "I ask pardon, captain."

Stevens. "But the other pounced on it first, so they both claim it."

Robinson. "Well! I call it a plain case."

Stevens. "So I told them."

Robinson. "Exactly! Which do you think ought to have it?"

Stevens. "Why, I told them we have a proverb--'Losers, seekers--finders, keepers.'"

Robinson. "Of course; and which was the finder?"

Stevens. "Oh! of course this one that--hum! Well, to be sure he only said 'ah!' he did not point. Then perhaps--but on the other hand--hum!"

Robinson. "Why, don't you see? but no!--yes! why it must be the one that--ugh! Drat you both! why couldn't one of you find it, and the other another?"

Robinson was puzzled. At last he determined that this his first judgment should satisfy both parties.

"Remove the prisoners," said he; "are they the prisoners or the witnesses? remove them anyway, and keep them apart."

Robinson then searched his pockets, and produced a little gold swan-shot scarce distinguishable from the Chinese. He put this on the table, and took up the other.

"Fetch in number one!"

The Chinaman came in with obeisances and misgivings; but when the judge signed to him to take up the gold, which he mistook for the cause of quarrel, his face lightened with a sacred joy--he receded, and with a polite gesture cleared a space; then, advancing one foot with large and lofty grace, he addressed the judge, whose mouth began to open with astonishment, in slow, balanced and musical sentences. This done, he retired with three flowing salaams, to which the judge replied with three little nods.

"What on earth did the beggar say? What makes you grin, Mr. Stevens?"

Stevens. "He said--click!"

Robinson. "Come! tell me first, laugh after."

Stevens. "He said, 'May your highness flourish like a tree by the side of a stream that never overflows, yet is never dry, but glides--(click!)--even and tranquil as the tide of your prosperity--'"

Robinson. "Well, I consent!"

Stevens. "'May dogs defile the graves of your enemies! '"

Robinson. "With all my heart! provided I am not dancing over them at the time."

Stevens. "When satiated with earthly felicity, may you be received in paradise by seventy dark-eyed houris--'"

Robinson. "Oh! my eye!"

Stevens. "Click! 'Each bearing in her hand the wine of the faithful; and may the applause of the good at your departure resemble the waves of the ocean beating musically upon rocky caverns. Thy servant, inexperienced in oratory, retires abashed at the greatness of his subject, and the insignificance of his expressions.' So then he cut his stick!"

Robinson. "A very sensible speech! Well, boys, I'm not greedy; I take the half of that offer, and give you the rest--bring in the other gentleman!"

No. 2 advanced with reverences and misgivings. Robinson placed the gold on the table and assigned it to him. A sacred joy illumined him, and he was about to retire with deep obeisances.

"Where is his speech?" cried the judge ruefuly.

Stevens explained to him that the other had returned thanks. On this No. 2 smiled assentingly, and advancing delivered the following sentences:

"Your slave lay writhing in adversity, despoiled by the unprincipled. He was a gourd withered by the noonday sun, until your virtues descended like the dew, and refreshed him with your justice and benignity.

"Wherefore hear now the benediction of him whom your clemency has raised from despair.

"May your shadow increase and cover many lands. May your offspring be a nation dwelling in palaces with golden roofs and walls of ivory, and on the terraces may peacocks be as plentiful as sparrows are to the undeserving. May you live many centuries shining as you now shine; and at your setting may rivulets of ink dug by the pens of poets flow through meadows of paper in praise of the virtues that embellish you here on earth. Sing-tu-Che, a person of small note but devoted to your service, wishes these frivolous advantages to the Pearl of the West, on whom be honor."

Chorus of diggers. "My eye!"

Robinson rose with much gravity and delivered himself thus:

"Sing-tu-Che, you are a trump, an orator, and a humbug. All the better for you. May felicity attend you. Heichster guchster--honi soit qui mal y pense--donner und blitzen--tempora mutantur--O mia cara and pax vobiscum. The court is dissolved."

It was, and I regret to add that Judge Robinson's concluding sentences raised him greatly in the opinion of the miners.

"Captain knows a thing or two."

"If ever we send one to parliament that is the man."

"Halo! you fellows, come here! come here!"

A rush was made toward Jem, who was roaring and gesticulating at Mr. Levi's table. When they came up they found Jem black and white with rage, and Mr. Levi seated in calm indifference.

"What is it?" asked Robinson.

"The merchant refuses my gold."

"I refuse no man's gold," objected Levi coolly, "but this stuff is not gold."

"Not gold-dust," cried a miner; and they all looked with wonder at the rejected merchandise.

Mr. Levi took the dust and poured it out from one hand to the other; he separated the particles and named them by some mighty instinct.

"Brass--or-molu--gilt platinum to give it weight; this is from Birmingham, not from Australia, nor nature."

"Such as it is it cost me thirty pounds," cried Jem. "Keep it. I shall find him. My spade shall never go into the earth again till I'm quits with this one."

"That is right," roared the men, "bring him to us, and the captain shall sit in judgment again;" and the men's countenances were gloomy, for this was a new roguery and struck at the very root of gold digging.

"I'll put it down, Mr. Levi," said Robinson, after the others had gone to their work; "here is a new dodge, Brummagem planted on us so far from home. I will pull it down with a tenpenny cord but I'll end it."

Crash! went ten thousand cradles; the mine had breakfasted. I wish I could give the European reader an idea of the magnitude of this sound whose cause was so humble. I must draw on nature for a comparison.

Did you ever stand upon a rocky shore at evening when a great storm has suddenly gone down, leaving the waves about as high as they were while it raged? Then there is no roaring wind to dull the clamor of the tremendous sea as it lashes the long re-bellowing shore. Such was the sound of ten thousand cradles; yet the sound of each one was insignificant. Hence an observation and a reflection--the latter I dedicate to the lovers of antiquity--that multiplying sound, magnifies it in a way science has not yet accounted for; and that, though men are all dwarfs, Napoleon included, man is a giant.

The works of man are so prodigious they contradict all we see of any individual's powers; and even so when you had seen and heard one man rock one cradle, it was all the harder to believe that a few thousand of them could rival thunder, avalanches, and the angry sea lashing the long reechoing shore at night. These miserable wooden cradles lost their real character when combined in one mighty human effort; it seemed as if giant labor had stretched forth an arm huge as an arm of the sea and rocked one enormous engine, whose sides where these great primeval rocks, and its mouth a thundering sea.

Crash! from meal to meal!

The more was Robinson surprised when, full an hour before dinner-time, this mighty noise all of a sudden became feebler and feebler, and presently human cries of a strange character made their way to his ear through the wooden thunder.

"What on earth is up now?" thought he--"an earthquake?"

Presently he saw at about half a mile off a vast crowd of miners making toward him in tremendous excitement. They came on, swelled every moment by fresh faces, and cries of vengeance and excitement were now heard, which the wild and savage aspect of the men rendered truly terrible. At last he saw and comprehended all at a glance.

There were Jem and two others dragging a man along whose white face and knocking knees betrayed his guilt and his terror. Robinson knew him directly; it was Walker, who had been the decoy-duck the night his tent was robbed.

"Here is the captain! Hurrah! I've got him, captain. This is the beggar that peppered the hole for me, and now we will pepper him!"

A fierce burst of exultation from the crowd. They thirsted for revenge. Jem had caught the man at the other end of the camp, and his offense was known by this time to half the mine.

"Proceed regularly, Jem," said Robinson. "Don't condemn the man unheard."

"Oh, no! He shall be tried, and you shall be the judge."

"I consent," said Robinson, somewhat pompously.

Then arose a cry that made him reflect.

"Lynch! Lynch! a seat for Judge Lynch!" and in a moment a judgment-seat was built with cradles, and he was set on high, with six strange faces scowling round him for one of his own clique. He determined to back out of the whole thing.

"No, no!" cried he; "that is impossible. I cannot be a judge in such a serious matter."

"Why not?" roared several voices.

"Why not? Because I am not a regular beak; because I have not got authority from the Crown."

There was a howl of derision.

"We give you authority!"

"We order you to be judge!"

"We are King, Lords, and Commons!"

"Do what we bid you, or," added a stranger, "we will hang you and the prisoner with one rope!"

Grim assent of the surrounding faces; Robinson sat down on the judgment-seat not a little discomposed.

"Now then," remonstrated one; "what are you waiting for? Name the jury."

"Me!" "Me!" "Me!" "I!" "I!" "I!" and there was a rush for the office.

"Keep cool," replied another. "Lynch law goes quick, but it goes by rule. Judge, name the jury."

Robinson, a man whose wits seldom deserted him, at once determined to lead, since he could not resist. He said with dignity: "I shall choose one juryman from each of the different countries that are working in this mine, that no nation may seem to be slighted, for this gold belongs to all the world."

"Hurrah! Well done, judge. Three cheers for Judge Lynch!"

"When I call a country, give me a name, which I will inscribe on my report of the proceedings. I want a currency lad first."

"Here is one. William Parker."

"Pass over. France."

"Present. Pierre Chanot."

"Germany."

"Here. Hans Müller."

"Holland."

"Here. Jan Van der Stegen."

Spain and Italy were called, but no reply. Asleep, I take it.

"United States."

"Here. Nathan Tucker."

Here Robinson, casting his eyes round, spied McLaughlan, and, being minded to dilute the severity of his jury, he cried out, "Scotland. McLaughlan, you shall represent her."

No answer.

"McLaughlan," cried several voices, "where are ye? Don't you hear Judge Lynch speak to you?"

"Come, McLaughlan, come over; you are a respectable man."

Mr. McLaughlan intimated briefly in his native dialect that he was, and intended to remain so; by way of comment on which he made a bolt from the judgment-hall, but was rudely seized and dragged before the judge.

"For Heaven's sake, don't be a fool, McLaughlan. No man must refuse to be a juryman in a trial by lynch. I saw a Quaker stoned to death for it in California."

"I guess I was thyar," said a voice behind the judge, who shifted uneasily.

McLaughlan went into the jury-box with a meaning look at Robinson, but without another audible word.

"Mercy! mercy!" cried Walker.

"You must not interrupt the proceedings," said Judge Lynch.

"Haud your whist, ye gowk. Ye are no fand guilty yet," remonstrated a juror.

The jury being formed, the judge called the plaintiff.

"The man sold me a claim for thirty pound. I gave him the blunt because I saw the stuff was glittery. Well, I worked it, and I found it work rather easy, that is a fact."

"Haw! haw! haw!" roared the crowd, but with a horrible laughter, no placability in it.

"Well, I found lots of dust, and I took it to the merchant, and he says it is none of it gold. That is my tale."

"Have you any witnesses?"

"I don't know. Yes, the nigger; he saw it. Here, Jacky, come and tell them."

Jacky was thrust forward, but was interrupted by McLaughlan as soon as he opened his mouth. The Scottish juror declined to receive evidence but upon oath. The judge allowed the objection.

"Swear him in, then," cried a hundred voices.

"Swear?" inquired Jacky, innocently.

Another brutal roar of laughter followed.

Jacky was offended.

"What for you laugh, you stupid fellows? I not a common black fellow. I been to Sydney and learn all the white man knows. Jacky will swear," added he.

"Left your hond," cried McLaughlan. "It is no swearing if you dinna left your hond."

"Dat so stupid," said Jacky, lifting his hand peevishly. This done, he delivered his evidence thus: "Damme I saw dis fellow sell dirt to dis fellow, and damme I saw dis fellow find a good deal gold, and damme I heard him say dis is a dam good job, and den damme he put down his spade and go to sell, and directly he come back and say damme I am done!"

"Aweel," said McLaughlan; "we jaast refuse yon lad's evidence, the deevelich heathen."

A threatening murmur.

"Silence! Hear the defendant."

Walker, trembling like an aspen, owned to having sold the claim, but denied that the dust was false. "This is what I dug out of it," said he; and he produced a small pinch of dust.

"Hand it to me," said the judge. "It seems genuine."

"Put it to the test. Call the merchant for a witness," cried another.

A party ran instantly for Levi. He refused to come. They dragged him with fearful menaces.

"A test, old man; a test of gold!"

The old Jew cast his eyes around, took in the whole scene, and with a courage few of the younger ones would have shown, defied that wild mob.

"I will give you no test. I wash my hands of your mad passions, and your mockeries of justice, men of Belial!"

A moment's silence and wonder, a yell of rage, and a dozen knives in the air.

The judge rose hastily, and in a terrible voice that governed the tumult for an instant said: "Down knives! I hang the first man that uses one in my court." And during the momentary pause that followed this he cried out: "He has given me a test. Run and fetch me the bottle of acid on his table."

"Hurrah! Judge Lynch forever!" was now the cry, and in a minute the bottle was thrust into the judge's hand.

"Young man," said Isaac solemnly, "do not pour, lest Heaven bring your soul to as keen a test one day. Who are you that judge your brother?"

Judge Lynch trembled visibly as the reverend man rebuked him thus, but, fearing Isaac would go farther and pay the forfeit of his boldness, he said calmly: "Friends, remove the old man from the court, but use respect. He is an aged man."

Isaac was removed. The judge took the bottle and poured a drop on that small pinch of dust the man had last given him.

No effect followed.

"I pronounce this to be gold."

"There," put in McLaughlan, "ye see the lad was no deceiving ye; is it his fault if a' the gowd is no the same?"

"No!" whimpered Walker, eagerly, and the crowd began to whisper and allow he might be innocent.

The man standing behind the judge said, with a cold sneer: "That is the stuff he did not sell--now pour on the stuff he sold."

These words brought back the prejudice against the prisoner, and a hundred voices shouted, "Pour!" while their eyes gleamed with a terrible curiosity.

Judge Lynch, awestruck by this terrible roar, now felt what it is to be a judge; he trembled and hesitated.

"Pour!" roared the crowd, still louder and more fiercely.

McLaughlan read the judge's feeling, and whimpered out, "Let it fa', lad--let it fa'!"

"If he does our knives fall on him and you. Pour!"

Robinson poured. All their fierce eyes were fixed on the experiment. He meant to pour a drop or two, but the man behind him jogged his arm, and half the acid in the bottle fell upon Walker's dust.

A quantity of smoke rose from it, and the particles fizzed and bubbled under the terrible test.

"Trash! a rope--no! dig a hole and bury him--no! fling him off the rock into the water."

"Silence!" roared Robinson, "I am the judge, and it is for me to pronounce the verdict."

"Silence! hear Judge Lynch!" Silence was not obtained for five minutes, during which the court was like a forest of wild beasts howling.

"I condemn him to be exposed all day, with his dust tied round his neck, and then drummed out of the camp."

This verdict was received first with a yell of derisive laughter, then with a roar of rage.

"Down with the judge!"

"We are the judges!"

"To the rock with him!"

"Ay, to the rock with him."

With this, an all-overpowering rush was made, and Walker was carried off up the rock in the middle of five hundred infuriated men.

The poor wretch cried, "Mercy! mercy!"

"Justice! dog," was the roar in reply. The raging crowd went bellowing up the rock like a wave, and gained a natural platform forty feet above the great deep pool that lay dark and calm below. At the sight of it, the poor wretch screamed to wake the dead, but the roars and yells of vengeance drowned his voice.

"Put his dust in his pocket," cried one, crueler than the rest.

Their thirst of vengeance was too hot to wait for this diabolical proposal; in a moment four of them had him by the shoulders and heels; another moment and the man was flung from the rock, uttering a terrible death-cry in the very air; then down his body fell like lead, and struck with a tremendous plunge the deep water that splashed up a moment, then closed and bubbled over it.

From that moment the crowd roared no longer, but buzzed and murmured, and looked down upon their work half stupidly.

"Hush!"

"What is that?"

"It is his head!"

"He is up again!"

"Can he swim?"

"Fling stones on him."

"No! Let him alone, or we'll fling you atop of him."

"He is up, but he can't swim. He is only struggling! he is down again!"

He was down, but only for a moment; then he appeared again choking and gurgling.

"Mercy! mercy!"

"Justice, thieving dog!" was the appalling answer.

"Save me! save me! Oh, save me! save me!"

"Save yourself! if you are worth it!" was the savage reply.

The drowning, despairing man's head was sinking again, his strength exhausted by his idle struggles, when suddenly on his left hand he saw a round piece of rock scarce a yard from him. He made a desperate effort and got his hand on it. Alas! it was so slimy he could not hold by it; he fell off it into the water; he struggled up again, tried to dig his feet into the rock, but, after a convulsive fling of a few seconds, fell back--the slimy rock mocked his grasp. He came up again and clung, and cried piteously for help and mercy. There was none!--but a grim silence and looks of horrible curiosity at his idle struggles. His crime had struck at the very root of their hearts and lives. Then this poor, cowardly wretch made up his mind that he must die. He gave up praying to the pitiless, who could look down and laugh at his death-agony, and he cried upon the absent only. "My children! my wife! my poor Jenny!" and with this he shut his eyes, and, struggling no more, sank quietly down! down! down. First his shoulders disappeared, then his chin, then his eyes, and then his hair. Who can fathom human nature? that sad, despairing cry, which was not addressed to them, knocked at the bosoms that all his prayers to them for pity had never touched. A hasty, low and uneasy murmur followed it almost as a report follows a flash.

"His wife and children!" cried several voices with surprise; but there were two men this cry not only touched, but pierced--the plaintiff and the judge.

"The man has got a wife and children," cried Jem in dismay, as he tried to descend the rock by means of some diminutive steps. "They never offended me--he is gone down, ---- me if I see the man drowned like a rat--Hallo!--Splash!"

Jem's foot had slipped, and, as he felt he must go, he jumped right out, and fell twenty feet into the water.

At this the crowd roared with laughter, and now was the first shade of good-nature mixed with the guffaw. Jem fell so near Walker that on coming up he clutched the drowning man's head and dragged him up once more from death. At the sight of Walker's face above water again, what did the crowd, think you?

They burst into a loud hurrah! and cheered Jem till the echoes rang again.

"Hurrah! Bravo! Hurrah!" pealed the fickle crowd.

Now Walker no sooner felt himself clutched than he clutched in return with the deadly grasp of a drowning man. Jem struggled to get free in vain. Walker could not hear or see, he was past all that; but he could cling, and he got Jem round the arms and pinned them. After a few convulsive efforts Jem gave a loud groan. He then said quietly to the spectators, "He will drown me in another half minute." But at this critical moment out came from the other extremity of the pool Judge Lynch, swimming with a long rope in his hand; one end of this rope he had made into a bight ere he took the water. He swam behind Walker and Jem, whipped the noose over their heads and tightened it under their shoulders. "Haul!" cried he to Ede, who held the other end of the rope. Ede hauled, and down went the two heads.

A groan of terror and pity from the mob--their feelings were reversed.

"Haul quick, Ede," shouted Robinson, "or you will drown them, man alive."

Ede hauled hand over hand, and a train of bubbles was seen making all across the pool toward him. And the next moment two dripping heads came up to hand close together, like cherries on a stalk; and now a dozen hands were at the rope, and the plaintiff and defendant were lifted bodily up on to the flat rock, which came nearly to the water's edge on this side the pool.

"Augh! augh! augh! augh!" gasped Jem.

Walker said nothing. He lay white and motionless, water trickling from his mouth, nose and ears.

Robinson swam quietly ashore. The rocks thundered with cheers over his head.

The next moment, "the many-headed beast" remembered that all this was a waste of time, and bolted underground like a rabbit, and dug and pecked for the bare life with but one thought left, and that was GOLD.

"How are you, Jem?"

"Oh, captain, oh!" gasped poor Jem, "I am choked--I am dead--I am poisoned--why, I'm full of water; bring this other beggar to my tent, and we will take a nanny-goat together."

So Jem was taken off hanging his head, and deadly sick, supported by two friends, and Walker was carried to the same tent, and stripped and rubbed and rolled up in a blanket; and lots of brandy poured down him and Jem, to counteract the poison they had swallowed.

Robinson went to Mr. Levi, to see if he would lend him a suit, while he got his own dried. The old Jew received my lord judge with a low, ironical bow, and sent Nathan to borrow the suit from another Israelite. He then lectured my lord Lynch.

"Learn from this, young man, how easy it is to set a stone rolling down hill, how hard to stop it half-way down. Law must always be above the mob, or it cannot be law. If it fall into their hands it goes down to their own level and becomes revenge, passion, cruelty, anything but law. The madmen! they have lost two thousand ounces of gold--to themselves and to the world, while they have been wasting their time and risking their souls over a pound of brass, and aspiring to play the judge and the executioner, and playing nothing but the brute and the fool--as in the days of old."

Mr. Levi concluded by intimating that there was very little common sense left upon earth, and that little it would be lost time to search for among the Gentiles. Finally his discourse galled Judge Lynch, who thereupon resolved to turn the laugh against him.

"Mr. Levi," said he, "I see you know a thing or two. Will you be so good as to answer me a question?"

"If it come within my knowledge," replied the senior, with grave politeness.

"Which weighs the heaviest, sir, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers?" and he winked at Nathan, but looked in Isaac's face as demure as a Quakeress.

"A pound of feathers," replied Isaac.

Robinson looked half puzzled, half satirical.

"A childish question," said Isaac sternly. "What boy knows not that feathers are weighed by Avoirdupois, and gold by Troy weight, and consequently that a pound of feathers weighs sixteen ounces, and a pound of gold but twelve?"

"Well, that is a new answer," cried Robinson. "Good-by, sir, you are too hard for me;" and he made off to his own tent. It was a day of defeats.

The moment he was out of hearing, Isaac laughed. The only time he had done it during six years. And what a laugh! How, sublimely devoid of merriment! a sudden loud cackle of three distinct cachinni not declining into a chuckle, as we do, but ending sharp in abrupt and severe gravity.

"I discomfited the young man, Nathan--I mightily discomfited him. Ha! ha! ho! Nathan, did you as I bade you?"

"Yes, master, I found the man, and I sent Samuel, who went hastily to him and cried out, 'Mr. Meadows is in the camp and wishes to speak to you.' Master, he started up in wonder, and his whole face changed; without doubt he is the man you suspected."

"Yes," said Isaac, reflecting deeply. "The man is Peter Crawley; and what does he here? Some deep villainy lies at the bottom of this; but I will fathom it, ay, and thwart it, I swear by the God of Abraham. Let me think awhile in my tent. Sit you at the receipt of gold."

The old man sat upon a divan in his tent, and pondered on all that had happened in the mine; above all, on the repeated attacks that had been made on that one tent.

He remembered, too, that George had said sorrowfully to him more than once: "No letters for me, Mr. Levi, no letter again this month!" The shrewd old man tied these two threads together directly.

"All these things are one," said Isaac Levi.

Thus pondering, and patiently following out his threads, the old man paced a mile down the camp to the post-office, for he had heard the postman's horn, and he expected important letters from England, from his friend and agent at Farnborough, Old Cohen.

There were letters from England, but none in old Cohen's hand. He put them in his bosom with a disappointed look, and paced slowly, and deeply pondering, back toward his tent. He was about half way, when, much to his surprise, a stone fell close to him. He took, however, no notice, did not even accelerate his pace or look round; but the next moment a lump of clay struck him on the arm. He turned round, quivering with rage at the insult, and then he saw a whole band of diggers behind him, who the moment he turned his face began to hoot and pelt him.

"Who got poor Walker drowned? Ah! ah! ah!"

"Who refused to give evidence before Judge Lynch?" cried another, "Ah! ah! ah!"

There were clearly two parties in the mob.

"Down with the Jew--the blood-sucker. We do all the work, and he gets all the profit. Ah! ah! ah!"

And a lump of clay struck that reverend head and almost stunned the poor old man. He sunk upon his knees, and in a moment his coat was torn to shreds, but with unexpected activity he wriggled himself free and drew a dagger long, bright, and sharp as a needle. His assailants recoiled a moment. The next a voice was heard from behind, "Get on both sides of him at once!"

Isaac looked and saw Peter Crawley. Then the old man trembled for his life, and cried, "Help! help!" and they hemmed him in and knocked his dagger out of his hand, and hustled and pommeled him, and would have torn him in pieces, but he slipped down, and two of them got in front and dragged him along the ground.

"To Walker's pool," cried brutus, putting himself at the head of those who followed.

All of a sudden Isaac, though half insensible, heard a roar of rage that seemed to come from a lion--a whiz, a blow like a thunder-clap--saw one of his assassins driven into the air and falling like a dead clod three yards off, found himself dropped and a man striding over him. It was George Fielding, who stood a single moment snorting and blowing out his cheeks with rage, then went slap at the mob as a lion goes at sheep; seized one of the small ruffians by the knees, and, by a tremendous effect of strength and rage, actually used him as a flail, and struck brutus with the man's head, and knocked that ruffian down stunned, and his nose leveled with his cheeks. The mob recoiled a moment from this one hero. George knew it could be but for a moment, so he had no sooner felled brutus, and hurled the other's carcass in their faces, than he pounced on Isaac, whipped him on his back and ran off with him.

He had got thirty yards with him ere the staggered mob could realize it all.

The mob recovered their surprise, and with a yell like a pack of hounds bursting covert dashed after the pair. The young Hercules made a wonderful effort, but no mortal man could run very fast so weighted. In spite of his start they caught him in about a hundred yards. He heard them close upon him--put the Jew down--and whispered hastily, "Run to your tent," and instantly wheeled round and flung himself at thirty men. He struck two blows and disabled a couple; the rest came upon him like one battering-ram and bore him to the ground; but even as he went down he caught the nearest assailant by the throat and they rolled over one another, the rest kicking savagely at George's head and loins. The poor fellow defended his head with one arm and his assailant's body for a little while, but he received some terrible kicks on the back and legs.

"Give it him on the head!"

"Kick his life out!"

"Settle his hash!"

They were so fiercely intent on finishing George that they did not observe a danger that menaced themselves.

As a round shot cuts a lane through a column of infantry, so clean came two files of special constables with their short staves severing the mob in two--crick, crack, crick, crick, crick, crick, crack, crack. In three seconds ten heads were broken, with a sound just like glass bottles, under the short, deadly truncheon, and there lay half a dozen ruffians writhing on the ground and beating the Devil's tattoo with their heels.

"Charge back!" cried the head-policeman as soon as he had cut clean through.

But at the very word the cowardly crew fled on all sides yelling. The police followed in different directions a little way, and through this error three of the felled got up and ran staggering off. When the head-policeman saw that he cried out:

"Back, and secure prisoners."

They caught three who were too stupefied to run, and rescued brutus from George, who had got him by the throat and was hammering the ground with his head.

"Let go, George," cried Policeman Robinson, in some anxiety, "you are killing the man."

"Oh, I don't want to kill him neither," said George.

And he slowly withdrew his grasp, and left off hammering with the rascal's head, but looked at him as if he would have preferred to have gone on a little longer. They captured the three others.

"Now secure them," cried Ede. "Out with your wipes."

"There is no need of wipes," said Robinson.

He then, with a slight blush, and rather avoiding George's eye, put his hand in his pockets and produced four beautiful sets of handcuffs, bran new, polished to the fine. With a magical turn of the hand he handcuffed the three men, still avoiding George's eye. Unnecessary. George's sense of humor was very faint, and so was his sweetheart's--a sad defect.

Perhaps I may as well explain here how Robinson came so opportunely to the rescue. The fact is, that a week ago he had ordered a lot of constables' staves and four sets of handcuffs. The staves were nicely painted, lettered "Captain Robinson's Police, A, B, C," etc. They had just come home, and Robinson was showing them to Ede and his gang, when a hullabaloo was heard, and Levi was seen full half a mile off being hunted. Such an opportunity of trying the new staves was not to be neglected. Ede and his men jumped out of their claim and ran with Robinson to the rescue. But they would have been too late if George, who had just come into the camp at that very part, had not made his noble and desperate assault and retreat, which baffled the assailants for two precious minutes.

Robinson. "What shall we do with them now we have got them?"

George. "Give them a kick apiece on their behinds, and let them go--the rubbish."

Robinson. "Not if I know it."

Ede. "I say blackguard 'em."

Robinson. "No, that would be letting ourselves down to their level. No, we will expose them as we did my old pal here before."

Ede. "Why that is what I mean. Ticket them--put a black card on them with their offense wrote out large."

No sooner said than done. All four were tied to posts in the sun, and black-carded, or, as some spell it, placarded, thus:

"Let us go and see after Mr. Levi, George."

"Well, Tom, I had rather not."

"Why not? he ought to be very much obliged to you."

"That is it, Tom. The old man is of rather a grateful turn of mind--and it is ten to one if he doesn't go and begin praising me to my face--and then that makes me--I don't know which way to look. Wait till he has cooled upon it a bit."

"You are a rum one. Well, George, I have got one proposal you won't say no to. First, I must tell you there is really a river of quartz in the country."

"Didn't I tell you?"

"Yes, and I didn't believe it. But I have spoken to Jacky about it, and he has seen it; it is on the other side of the bush. I am ready to start for it to-morrow, for there is little good to be done here now the weather has broken."

George assented with joy; but, when Robinson suggested that Jacky would be very useful to pilot them through the bush, his countenance fell.

"Don't think of it," said he. "I know he is here, Tom, and I shan't go after him. But don't let him come near me, the nasty little, creeping, murdering varmint. Poor Abner will never get over his tomahawk--not if he lives fifty years."

In short, it was agreed they should go alone at peep of day.

"I have talked it over with Jem already, and he will take charge of our tent till we come back."

"So be it."

"We must take some provisions with us, George."

"I'll go and get some cold meat and bread, Tom."

"Do. I'm going to the tent."

Robinson, it is to be observed, had not been in his tent since George and he left it and took their gold out of it just before sunrise. As he now carried their joint wealth about his person, his anxiety was transferred.

Now at the door of the tent he was intercepted by Jem, very red in the face, partly with brandy, partly with rage. Walker, whose life he had saved, whom he had taken to his own tent, and whom Robinson had seen lying asleep in the best blanket, this Walker had absconded with his boots and half a pound of tobacco.

"Well, but you knew he was a rogue. Why did you leave him alone in your tent?"

"I only left him for a minute to go a few steps with you if you remember, and you said yourself he was asleep. Well, the moment our backs were turned he must have got up and done the trick."

"I don't, like it," said Robinson.

"No more don't I," said Jem.

"If he was not asleep, be must have heard me say I was going to cross the bush with my mate to-morrow at daybreak."

"Well! and what if he did?"

"He is like enough to have gone and told the whole gang."

"And what if he has?"

Robinson was about to explain to Jem. that he now carried all the joint gold in his pocket, but he forbore. "It is too great a stake for me to trust anybody unless I am forced," thought he. So he only said: "Well, it is best to be prudent. I shall change the hour for starting."

"You are a cunning one, captain, but I really think you are overcareful sometimes."

"Jem," said the other gravely, "there is a mystery in this mine. There is a black gang in it, and that Walker is one of them. I think they have sworn to have my gold or my life, and they shan't have either if I can help it. I shall start two hours before the sun."

He was quite right; Walker had been shamming sleep, and full four hours ago he had told his confederates as a matter of course all that he had heard in the enemy's camp.

Walker, a timid villain, was unprepared for the burst of savage exultation from brutus and Black Will that followed this intelligence. These two, by an instinct quick as lightning, saw the means of gratifying at one blow their cupidity and hate. Crawley had already told them he had seen Robinson come out of Levi's tent after a long stay, and their other spies had told them his own tent had been left unguarded for hours. They put these things together and conjectured at once that the men had now their swag about them in one form or other.

"When do they go?"

"To-morrow at break of day," he said.

"The bush is very thick!"

"And dark, too!"

"It is just the place for a job."

"Will two of you be enough?"

"Plenty, the way we shall work."

"The men are strong and armed."

"Their strength will be no use to them, and they shan't get time to use their arms."

"For Heaven's sake, shed no blood unnecessarily," said Crawley, beginning to tremble at the pool of crime to whose brink he had led these men.

"Do you think they will give up their swag while they are alive?" asked brutus, scornfully.

"Then I wash my hands of it all," cried the little self-deceiving caitiff; and he affected to have nothing to do with it.

Walker was then thanked for his information, and he thought this was a good opportunity for complaining of his wrongs and demanding redress. This fellow was a thorough egotist, saw everything from his own point of view only.

Jem had dragged him before Judge Robinson; Robinson had played the beak and found him guilty; Levi had furnished the test on which he had been convicted. All these had therefore cruelly injured and nearly killed him.

Himself was not the cause. He had not set all these stones rolling by forging upon nature and robbing Jem of thirty pounds. No! he could not see that, nor did he thank Jem one bit for jumping in and saving his life at risk of his own. "Why did he ever get him thrown in, the brute? If he was not quite drowned he was nearly, and Jem the cause."

His confederates soothed him with promises of vengeance on all their three his enemies, and soon after catching sight of one of them, Levi, they kept their word; they roused up some of the other diggers against Isaac on the plea that he had refused to give evidence against Walker, and so they launched a mob and trusted to mob nature for the rest. The recoil of this superfluous villainy was, as often happens, a blow to the head scheme.

brutus, who was wanted at peep of day for the dark scheme already hinted at, got terribly battered by George Fielding, and placarded, and, what was worse, chained to a post, by Robinson and Ede. It became necessary to sound his body and spirit.

One of the gang was sent by Crawley to inquire whether he felt strong enough to go with Black Will on that difficult and dangerous work to-morrow. The question put in a passing whisper was answered in a whisper.

"I am as strong as a lion for revenge. Tell them I would not miss to-morrow's work for all the gold in Australia."

The lowering face spoke loud enough if the mouth whispered.

The message was brought back to Black Will and Crawley.

"What energy!" said Crawley, admiringly.

"Ay!" said Black Will, "that is your sort; give me a pal with his skin smarting and his bones aching for the sort of job that wood shall see to-morrow. Have they marked him?" he inquired, with a strange curiosity.

"I am afraid they have; his nose is smashed frightful."

"I am glad of it; now we are brothers and will have blood for blood."

"Your expressions are dreadfully terse," said Crawley, trying to smile, but looking scared instead; "but I don't understand your remark; you were not in the late unsuccessful attack on Mr. Levi, and you escaped most providentially in the night business--the men have not marked you, my good friend."

"Haven't they?" yelled the man, with a tremendous oath--"haven't they? LOOK HERE!" A glance was enough. Crawley turned wan and shuddered from head to foot.

WE left Robinson and Jem talking at the entrance to the tent.

"Come in," said Robinson. "You will take care of this tent while we are gone."

Jem promised faithfully.

He then asked Robinson to explain to him the dodge of the gut-lines. Robinson showed him, and how the bells were rung at his head by the thief's foot.

Jem complimented him highly.

Robinson smiled, but the next moment sighed. "They will be too clever for us some of these dark nights--see how nearly they have nicked us again and again!"

"Don't be down on your luck, captain!"

"Jem, what frightens me is the villains getting off so; there they are to try again, and next time the luck will be theirs--it can't be always ours--why should it? Jem, there was a man in my tent last night."

"There is no denying that, captain."

"Well, Jem, I can't get it off my heart that I was to kill that man, or he me. Everything was on my side. I had my gut-lines, and I had a revolver and a cutlass--and I took up the cutlass like a fool; if I had taken up the revolver the man would be dead. I took up the wrong, and that man will be my death. The cards never forgive! I had the odd trick, and didn't take it--I shall lose the game."

"No, ye shan't," cried Jem, hastily. "What if the man got clear for the moment, we will hunt him out for you. You give me his description."

"I couldn't," said Robinson, despondingly. "It was so dark! Here is his pistol, but that is no use. If I had but a clew, ay, ever so slight, I'd follow it up; but no, there is none. Hallo, what is the matter! What is it? what on earth is the man looking at like that?"

"What was you asking for?" stammered Jem. "Wasn't it a clew?"

"Yes."

Robinson got up and came to Jem, who was standing with dilated eyes looking at the ground in the very corner of the tent. He followed the direction of Jem's eyes, and was instantly transfixed with curiosity and rising horror.

"Take it up, Jem," he gasped.

"No, you take it up! it was you who--"

"No--yes! there is George's voice. I wouldn't let him see such a thing for the world. Oh, God! here is another."

"Another?"

"Yes, in the long grass! and there is George's voice."

"Come out, Jem. Not a word to George for the world. I want to talk to you. If it hasn't turned me sick! I should make a poor hangman. But it was in self-defense, thank Heaven for that!"

"Where are you going in such a hurry, Tom?" said George.

"Oh, only a little way with Jem."

"Don't be long, it is getting late."

"No, George!"

"Jem, this is an ugly job!"

"An ugly job, no! ---- him, I wish it was his head. Give them me, captain."

"What, will you take charge of them?"

"That I will, captain, and what is more I'll find your enemy out by them, and--when you come back he shall be in custody--waiting your orders. Give them me."

"Yes, take them. Oh, but I am glad to be rid of them. What a ghastly look they have."

"I don't care for their looks. I am right glad to see them--they are a clew and no mistake. Keep dark to-night. Don't tell this to Ede--he is a good fellow but chatters too much--let me work it out. I'll find the late owner double quick," said Jem, with a somewhat brutal laugh.

"Your orders about the prisoners, captain?" cried Ede, coming up.

Robinson reflected.

Turn them all loose--but one."

"And what shall I do with him?"

"Hum! Put a post up in your own tent."

"Yes."

"Tie him to it in his handcuffs. Give him food enough."

"And when shall we loose him?"

"At noon, to-morrow."

"It shall be done! but you must come and show me which of the four it is."

Robinson went with Ede and his men.

"Turn this one loose," said he; it was done on the instant.

"And this."

"And this."

"And" (laying his finger on brutus) "keep this one prisoner in your tent, handcuffed and chained, till noon to-morrow."

At the touch, brutus trembled with hate; at the order, his countenance fell like Cain's.

Full two hours before sunrise the patrol called Robinson by his own order, and the friends made for the bush, with a day's provision and their blankets, their picks, and their revolvers. When they arrived at the edge of the bush, Robinson halted and looked round to see if they were followed. The night was pretty clear; no one was in sight. The men struck rapidly into the bush, which at this part had been cut and cleared in places, lying as it did so near a mine.

"What, are we to run, Tom?"

"Yes! I want to get to the river of quartz as soon as possible," was the dry answer.

"With all my heart."

After running about half a mile, George pulled up, and they walked.

"What do you keep looking behind for, Tom?"

"Oh, nothing."

"You fidget me, Tom!"

"Can't help it. I shall be like that till daylight. They have shaken my nerves among them."

"Don't give way to such nonsense. What are you afraid of?"

"I am not afraid of anything. Come, George, another run."

"Oh, as you like. This beats all."

This run brought them to the end of the broad road, and they found two smaller paths; after some hesitation, Robinson took the left-hand one, and it landed them in such a terribly thick scrub they could hardly move. They forced their way through it, getting some frightful scratches, but after struggling with it for a good half hour, began to fear it was impenetrable and interminable, when the sun rising showed them a clear space some yards ahead. They burst through the remainder of the scrub, and came out upon an old clearing full a mile long and a quarter of a mile broad. They gave a hurrah at the sight of it, but when they came to walk on it the ground was clay and so sticky with a late shower that they were like flies moving upon varnish, and at last were fain to take off their shoes and stockings and run over it on the tips of their toes. At the end of this opening they came to a place like the "Seven Dials"--no end of little paths into the wood, and none very promising. After a natural hesitation, they took the one that seemed to be most on their line of march, and followed it briskly till it brought them plump upon a brook, and there it ended. Robinson groaned.

"Confound the bush," cried he. "You were wrong not to let me bring Jacky. What is to be done?"

"Go back."

"I hate going back. I would rather go thirty miles ahead than one back. I've got an idea; off shoes and paddle up the stream; perhaps we shall find a path that comes to it from the other side."

They paddled up the stream a long way, and at last, sure enough, they found a path that came down to the stream from the opposite side. They now took a hasty breakfast, washing it down with water from the brook, then dived into the wood.

The sun, was high in heaven, yet still they had not got out of the bush.

"I can't make it out, George; there is nothing to steer by, and these paths twist and turn so. I don't think we shall do any good till night. When I see the Southern Cross in the sky I shall be able to steer northeast. That is our line."

"Don't give in," said George; "I think it looks clearer ahead. I believe we are at the end of it."

"No such luck, I am afraid," was the despondent reply.

For all that, in a few yards more they came upon an open place.

They could not help cheering. "At last!" cried they. But this triumph gave way to doubts.

"I am afraid we are not clear yet," said Robinson. "See, there is wood again on the other side. Why, it is that sticky clay again. Why, George, it is the clearing we crossed before breakfast."

"You are talking nonsense, Tom," cried George, angrily.

"No, I am not," said the other, sadly. "Come across. We shall soon know by our footsteps in the clay."

Sure enough, half way across they found a track of footsteps. George was staggered. "It is the place, I really think," said he. "But, Tom, when you talk of the footsteps, look here? You and I never made all these tracks. This is the track of a party."

Robinson examined the ground.

"Tracks of three men; two barefoot, one in nailed boots."

"Well, is that us?"

"Look at the clearing, George, you have got eyes. It is the same."

"So 'tis, but I can't make out the three tracks."

Robinson groaned. "I can. This third track has come since we went by."

"No doubt of that, Tom. Well?"

"Well, don't you see?"

"No. What?"

"You and I are being hunted."

George looked blank a moment. "Can't we be followed without being hunted?"

"No; others might, but not me. We are being hunted," said Robinson, sternly. "George, I am sick of this, let us end it. Let us show these fellows they are hunting lions and not sheep. Is your revolver loaded?"

"Yes."

"Then come on!" And he set off to run, following the old tracks. George ran by his side, his eyes flashing with excitement. They came to the brook. Robinson showed. George that their pursuer had taken some steps down the stream. "No matter," said he, "don't lose time, George, go right up the bank to our path. He will have puzzled it out, you may take your oath."

Sure enough they found another set of footsteps added to their own. Robinson. paused before entering the wood. He put fresh caps on his revolver. "Now, George," said he, in a low voice, "we couldn't sleep in this wood without having our throats cut, but before night I'll be out of danger or in my grave, for life is not worth having in the midst of enemies. Hush! hus-s-sh! You must not speak to me but in a whisper."

"No!" whispered George.

"Nor rustle against the boughs."

"No, I won't," whispered George. "But make me sensible, Tom. Tell me what all this caution is to lead to. What are you doing?"

"I AM HUNTING THE HUNTER!" hissed. Robinson, with concentrated fury. And he glided rapidly down the trodden path, his revolver cocked, his ears pricked, his eye on fire, and his teeth clinched.

George followed, silent and cautious, his revolver ready cocked in his hand. As they glided thus, following their own footsteps, and hunting their hunter with gloomy brows, and nerves quivering, and hearts darkening with anger and bitterness, sudden a gloom fell upon the wood--it darkened and darkened. Meantime a breeze chill as ice disturbed its tepid and close air, forerunner of a great wind which was soon heard, first moaning in the distance, then howling and rushing up, and sweeping over the tall trees and rocking them like so many bulrushes. A great storm was coming.

THIS very afternoon Mr. Levi came to inquire for George Fielding. Unable to find him, he asked of several diggers where the young man was; he could get no information till Jem saw him, and came and told him.

Now when he heard they were gone, and not expected back for some days, Isaac gave quite a start, and showed a degree of regret and vexation that Jem was puzzled to account for.

On reflection he begged Jem to come to his tent; there he sat down and wrote a letter.

"Young man," said he, "I do entreat you to give this to George Fielding the moment he returns to the camp. Why did he go without coming to see me? my old heart is full of misgivings."

"You needn't have any, sir," said Jem, surprised at the depth of feeling in the old Jew's face and voice. "He shall have the letter, you may depend."

Levi thanked him.

He then said to Nathan: "Strike the tents, collect our party, and let us be gone."

"What! going to leave us, sir?"

"Yes! young man, this very hour."

"Well now, I am sorry for that, and so will the captain be, and his pal that you think so much of."

"We shall not be long parted," said the old man, in his sweet musical Eastern accent, "not very long, if you are faithful to your trust and give the good young man my letter. May good angels hover round him, may the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob guard him!"

"Amen!" said rough Jem; for the reverend face glowed with piety, and the voice was the voice of prayer.

Suddenly an unpleasant reflection occurred to Jem.

"Well, but if you go, who is to buy our gold-dust?"

"The Christian merchants," said Isaac, with an indifferent air.

"But they are such Jews," cried Jem, inadvertently. "I mean--I mean----" And rough as he was, he looked as if he could have bitten his tongue off.

"I know what you mean," said Isaac, sadly. He added: "Such as they are, they are all you have now. The old Jew was hunted and hooted and insulted in this place yesterday; here then he trades no more; those who set no value on him can of course supply his place."

"The blackguards," cried Jem, "the ruffians, I wish I had seen them. Come, Mr. Levi, that was not the mine; that was only the riffraff; you might forgive us that."

"I never forgive," was the calm reply.

A TREMENDOUS snow-storm fell upon the mine and drove Jem into his tent, where he was soon after joined by Jacky, a circumstance in itself sufficient to prove the violence of the storm, for Jacky loathed indoors, it choked him a good deal.

The more was Jem surprised when he heard a lamentable howl coming nearer and nearer, and a woman burst into his tent, a mere pillar of snow, for she was covered with a thousand flakes each as big as a lady's hand.

"Ochone! ochone! ochone!" cried Mary McDogherty, and, on being asked what was the matter, she sat down and rocked herself and moaned and cried, "Ochone-- och, captain, avick, what will I do for you? an' who will I find to save you? an' oh, it is the warm heart and the kind heart ye had to poor Molly McDogherty that ud give her life to save yours this day."

"The captain," cried Jem, in great alarm. "What is wrong with the captain?"

"He is lying could and stiff in the dark, bloody wood. Och, the murthering villains! och, what will I do at all! och, captain, avick, warm was your heart to the poor Irish boys, but it is could now. Ochone! ochone!"

"Woman," cried Jem, in great agitation, "leave off blubbering and tell me what is the matter."

Thus blandly interrogated, Mary told him a story (often interrupted with tears and sighs) of what had been heard and seen yester eve by one of the Irish boys--a story that turned him cold, for it left on him the same impression it had left on the warmhearted Irishwoman, that at this moment his good friend was lying dead in the bush hard by.

He rose and loaded Robinson's double-barreled gun; he loaded it with bullets, and, as he rammed them fiercely down, he said angrily: "Leave off crying and wringing your hands; what on earth is the use of that? here goes to save him or to revenge him."

"An' och, James, take the wild Ingine wid ye; they know them bloody, murthering woods better than our boys, glory be to God for taching them that same."

"Of course I shall take him. You hear, Jacky, will you show me how to find the poor dear captain and his mate if they are in life?"

"If they are alive, Jacky will find them a good deal soon--if they are dead, still Jacky will find them."

The Irishwoman's sorrow burst out afresh at these words. The savage then admitted the probability of that she dreaded.

"And their enemies--the cowardly villains--what will you do to them?" asked Jem, black with rage.

Jacky's answer made Mary scream with affright, and startled even Jem's iron nerves for a moment. At the very first word of the Irishwoman's story, the savage had seated himself on the ground with his back turned to the others, and, unnoticed by them, had rapidly painted his face with the war-paint of his tribe. Words cannot describe the ghastly terrors, the fiendish ferocity these traditional lines and colors gave his countenance. This creature, that looked so like a fiend, came erect into the middle of the tent with a single bound, as if that moment vomited forth by hell, and yet with a grander carriage and princelier presence than he had worn in time of peace; and even as he bounded he crossed his tomahawk and narrow wooden shield, to signify that his answer was no vulgar asseveration, but a vow of sacred war.

"KALINGALÙNGA WILL KILL THEM, AND DRINK THEIR BLOOD."

Kalingalùnga glided from the tent. Jem followed him. The snow fell in flakes as large as a lady's hand, and the air was dark; Jem could not see where the hunter was taking him, but he strode after him and trusted to his sagacity.

Five hours' hard walking, and then the snow left off. The air became clear, and to Jem's surprise the bush, instead of being on his right hand, was now on his left; and there on its skirts, about a mile off, was the native camp. They had hardly come in sight of it when it was seen to break from quietude into extraordinary bustle.

"What is up?" asked Jem.

The hunter smiled, and pointed to his own face:

"Kalingalùnga painted war."

"What eyes the beggars must have," said Jem.

The next minute a score of black figures came tearing up in such excitement that their long rows of white teeth and the whites of their eyes flashed like Budelights in their black heads.

Kalingalùnga soon calmed them down by letting them know that he was painted for a private, not a national feud. He gave them no further information. I suspect he was too keen a sportsman to put others on the scent of his game. He went all through the camp, and ascertained from the stragglers that no men answering the description of George and Robinson had passed out of the wood.

"They are in the wood," said he

He then ordered a great fire--bade Jem dry his clothes and eat; he collected two of his wives and committed Jem to their care, and glided like a panther into the wood.

What with the great heat succeeding to the great cold, and the great supper the gins gave him, Jem fell fast asleep. It was near daylight when a hand was laid on his shoulder, and there was Kalingalùnga.

"Not a track on the snow."

"No? then let us hope they are not in the wood."

The hunter hung his head.

"Me tink they are in the wood," said he, gravely.

Jem groaned, "Then they are lying under the soil of it or in some dark pit."

Kalingalùnga reflected. He replied to this effect:

"That there were no more traces of an assassin than of victims, consequently that it was impossible to know anything, and that it was a good deal too stupid to speak a good deal knowing nothing."

All this time Jem's fear and rage and impatience contrasted greatly with the philosophic phlegm of the Pict, who looked so fierce and took it all so cool, ending with an announcement that now Kalingalùnga would sleep a good deal.

The chief was soon asleep, but not till he had ordered his gins to wake him the moment the snow should be melted. This occurred at noon, and, after snatching a hasty meal, he put a tomahawk into Jem's hands and darted into the bush.

All the savage's coldness disappeared now he was at work. He took Jem right across the wood from southeast to northwest. Nothing stopped him. When the scrub was thick above but hollow below he threw himself on his belly and wriggled along like a snake. When it was all thick, he hacked into it with fury and forced a path. When it was impenetrable he went round it, and by some wonderful instinct got into the same line again. Thus they cut clean across the wood but found no tracks.

Then the savage, being out in the open, trotted easily down the woodside to the southwest point; here he entered and took a line straight as an arrow to the northeast.

It was about five in the afternoon. Kalingalùnga was bleeding all over with scratches, and Jem was torn to pieces and done up. He was just about to tell the other that he must give in, when Kalingalùnga suddenly stopped, and pointed to the ground:

"Track!"

"What of?"

"A white man's shoe."

"How many are there?"

"One."

Jem sighed.

"I doubt it is a bad job, Jacky," said he.

"Follow--not too close," was the low reply.

And the panther became a serpent, so smooth and undulating were the motions with which he glided upon the track he had now discovered.

Jem, well aware that he could not move noiselessly like the savage, obeyed him and crept after at some distance.

The savage had followed the man's footsteps about half a mile, and the white man the savage, when suddenly both were diverted from their purpose. Kalingalùnga stood still and beckoned Jem. Jem ran to him, and found him standing snuffing the air with his great broad nostrils, like a stag.

"What is it?"

"White fellow burn wambiloa wood."

"How d'ye know? how d'ye know?"

"Wambiloa wood smell a good way off when him burn."

"And how do you know it is a white man?"

"Black fellow never burn wambiloa wood; not good to burn that. Keep it for milmeridien."

The chief now cut off a few of his long hairs and held them up to ascertain the exact direction of the wind. This done, he barked a tree to mark the spot to which he had followed the trail, and striking out into quite a different direction he hunted by scent.

Jem expected to come on the burning wambiloa very soon, but he underrated either the savage's keen scent or the acrid odor of the sacred wood--perhaps both. They had gone half a mile at least before his companion thought it necessary to show any caution. At last he stopped short, and then Jem smelled a smell as if "cinnamon and ginger, nutmegs and cloves," were all blazing in one bonfire. With some difficulty he was prevailed on to stand still and let the subtle native creep on, nor would he consent to be inactive until the other solemnly vowed to come back for him and give him his full share of the fighting. Then Kalingalùnga went gliding like a shadow and flitted from tree to tree.

Woe be to the enemy the subtle, noiseless, pitiless, remorseless savage surprises; he has not put on his war-paint in sport or for barren show.

A MAN was hunting Robinson and George Fielding, and they were hunting him. Both parties inflamed with rage and bitterness; both master of the other's fate, they thought.

A change of wind brought a fall of snow, and the fall of snow baffled both parties in five minutes. Down came the Australian flakes large as a woman's hand (I am not romancing), and effaced the tracks of the pursuing and pursued and pursuers. So tremendous was the fall that the two friends thought of nothing but shelter. They drew their blankets over their heads and ran hither and thither looking for a friendly tree. At last they found an old tree with a prodigious stem that parted about ten feet up into two forks. With some effort they got up into this cleft, and then they were on a natural platform. Robinson always carried nails in his pocket, and he contrived to nail the two blankets to the forks so as to make a screen. Then they took out their provisions and fortified themselves with a hearty supper.

As they were eating it they were suddenly startled by an explosion so tremendous that their tree seemed to have been struck by lightning. Out went Robinson, with his mouth full, on to a snowdrift four feet high. He looked up and saw the cause of the fracas. A large bough of a neighboring tree had parted from the trunk with the enormous weight of the snow. Robinson climbed back to George and told him. Supper recommenced, but all over the wood at intervals they now heard huge forks and boughs parting from their parent stems with a report like a thirty-two-pounder ringing and echoing through the wood. Others so distant that they were like crackers.

These sounds were very appalling in the ghostly wood. The men instinctively drew closer to each other; but they were no chickens; use soon hardened them even to this. They settled it that the forks they were sitting on would not give way, because there were no leaves on them to hold a great burden of snow; and soon they yielded to nature and fell fast asleep in spite of all the dangers that hemmed them.

At his regular hour, just before sunrise, Robinson awoke and peeped from below the blanket. He shook George.

"Getup directly, George. We are wasting time when time is gold."

"What is it?"

"'What is it?' There is a pilot in the sky that will take us out of this cursed trap, if the day does not come and spoil all."

George's eye followed Robinson's finger, and in the center of the dark vault of heaven this glittered.

"I KNOW it, Tom. When I was sailing to this country we came to a part where the north star went down and down to the water's edge, and this was all we got in exchange for it."

"George," said Tom, rather sternly, "how do you know they don't hear us, and here we are surrounded by enemies, and would you run down our only friend? That silver star will save our lives if they are to be saved at all. Come on; and, George, if you were to take your revolver and blow out my brains, it is no more than I deserve for sleeping away the precious hours of night, when I ought to have been steering out of this cursed timber-net by that blessed star."

With these words Robinson dived into the wood, steering due east by the Southern Cross. It was like going through a frozen river. The scrub was loaded with snow, which it discharged in masses on the travelers at every step.

"Keep your revolver dry in your hat and your lucifers, too," cried Robinson. "We shall have to use them both, ten to one. As to our skins, that is hopeless."

Then the men found how hard it is to take a line and keep it in the Australian bush. When the Southern Cross was lost in a cloud, though but for a minute, they were sure to go all wrong, as they found upon its reappearance; and sometimes the scrub was impenetrable and they were forced to go round it and walk four hundred yards, advancing eastward but twenty or thirty.

Thus they battled on till the sun rose.

"Now we shall be all in the dark again," said poor Robinson, "here comes a fog."

"Stop, Tom," said George; "oughtn't we to make this good before we go on?"

"What do you mean?"

"We have come right by the star so far, have we not?"

"Yes."

"Then let us bark fifty of these trees for a mark. I have seen that varmint Jacky do that."

"A capital idea, George; out with our knives--here goes."

"No breakfast to-day, Tom."

"No, George, nor dinner, either, till we are out of the wood."

These two poor fellows walked and ran and crept and struggled all day, sometimes hoping, sometimes desponding. At last, at five o'clock in the afternoon, their bellies gnawed with hunger, their clothes torn to rags, their skin bleeding, they came out upon some trees with the bark stripped. They gave one another a look that words can hardly paint. They were the trees they had barked twelve hours ago!

The men stood silent--neither cared to tell the other all he felt--for now there crept over these two stout bosoms a terrible chill, the sense of a danger new to them in experience, but not new in report. They had heard of settlers and others who had been lost in the fatal labyrinth of the Australian bush, and now they saw how easily it might be true.

"We may as well sit down here and rest; we shall do no good till night. What, are you in pain, George?"

"Yes, Tom, a little."

"Where?"

"Something gnaws my stomach like an adder."

"Oh, that is the soldier's gripes," said Tom, with a ghastly attempt at a jest. "Poor George!" said he, kindly, "I dare say you never knew what it was to go twenty-four hours without food before."

"Never in my life, Tom."

"Well, I have, and I'll tell you the only thing to do--when you can't fill the breadbasket, shut it. Go to sleep till the Southern Cross comes out again."

"What, sleep in our dripping clothes?"

"No, we will make a roaring fire with these strips of bark; they are dry as tinder by now."

A pyre four feet high was raised, the strips being laid from north to south and east to west alternately, and they dried their blankets and warmed their smoking bodies.

"George, I have got two cigars; they must last us two days."

"Oh, I'm no great smoker--keep them for your own comfort."

Robinson wore a sad smile.

"We can't afford to smoke them; this is to chew; it is not food, George, but it keeps the stomach from eating itself. We must do the best for our lives we can for Susan's sake."

"Give it me, Tom; I'll chew it, and thank you kindly. You are a wise companion in adversity, Tom; it is a great grief to me that I have brought you into this trouble, looking for what I know you think is a mare's nest, as the saying is."

"Don't talk so, George. True pals like you and me never reproach one another. They stand and fall together like men. The fire is warm, George--that is one comfort."

"The fire is well enough, but there's nothing down at it. I'd give a hundred pounds for a mutton chop."

The friends sat like sacrifices by the fire, and chewed their cigars in silence, with foreboding hearts. After a while, as the heat laid hold of him, George began to dose. Robinson felt inclined to do the same, but the sense that perhaps a human enemy might be near caused him to fight against sleep in this exposed locality; so, whenever his head bobbed down, he lifted it sharply and forced his eyes open. It was on one of these occasions that, looking up, he saw, set as it were in a frame of leaves, a hideous countenance glaring at him; it was painted in circular lines, red, blue and white.

"Get up, George," roared Robinson; "they are upon us!"

And both men were on their feet, revolvers pointed. The leaves parted, and out came this diabolical face which they had never seen before, but with it a figure they seemed to know, and a harsh cackle they instantly recognized, and it sounded like music to them.

"Oh, my dear Jacky," cried George, "who'd have thought it was you! Well, you are a godsend! Good afternoon. Oh, Jacky!--how d'ye do?"

"Jacky not Jacky now, cos um a good deal angry, and paint war. Kalingalùnga berywelltanku" (he always took these four words for one). "Now I go fetch white fellow;" and he disappeared.

"Who is he going to fetch? is it the one that was following us?"

"No doubt. Then, Tom, it was not an enemy, after all!"

Jacky came back with Jem, who, at sight of them alive and well, burst into extravagances. He waved his hat round his head several times and then flung it into a tree; then danced a pas seul consisting of steps not one of them known at the opera house, and chanted a song of triumph the words of which were, Ri tol de riddy iddydol, and the ditty naught; finally he shook hands with both.

"Never say die!"

"Well, that is hearty! and how thoughtful of him to come after us, and above all to bring Jacky!"

"That it was," replied George. "Jem," said he, with feeling, "I don't know but what you have saved two men's lives."

"If I don't it shan't be my fault, farmer."

George. "Oh, Jacky, I am so hungry! I have been twenty-four hours without food."

Kalingalùnga. "You stupid fellow to go widout food, always a good deal food in bush."

George. "Is there? then for Heaven's sake go and get us some of it."

Kalingalùnga. "No need go, food here." He stepped up to the very tree against which George was standing, showed him an excrescence on the bark, made two clean cuts with his tomahawk, pulled out a huge white worm and offered it George. George turned from it in disgust; the wild chief grinned superior and ate it himself, and smacked his lips with infinite gusto.

Meantime his quick eye had caught sight of something else. "A good deal dinner in dis tree," said he, and he made the white men observe some slight scratches on the bark. "Possum claws go up tree." Then he showed them that there were no marks with the claw reversed, a clear proof the animal had not come down. "Possum in tree."

The white men looked up into the bare tree with a mixture of wonder and incredulity. Jacky cut steps with his tomahawk and went up the main stem, which was short, and then up a fork, one out of about twelve; among all these he jumped about like a monkey till he found one that was hollow at the top.

"Throw Kalingalùnga a stone, den he find possum a good deal quick."

They could not find a stone for their lives, so, being hungry, Robinson threw a small nugget of gold he had in his pocket. Jacky caught it, placed it at the top of the hollow fork and let it drop. Listening keenly, his fine ear heard the nugget go down the fork, striking the wood first one side then another, and then at a certain part sound no more. Down he slips to that silent part, makes a deep cut with his tomahawk just above the spot, thrusts in his hand and pulls out a large opossum, yelling and scratching and emitting a delicious scent in an agony of fear. The tomahawk soon silenced him, and the carcass fell among the applauding whites. Now it was Robinson's turn. He carved the raw animal for greater expedition, and George helped him to wrap each limb and carcass in a thin covering of clay. Thus prepared, it was thrust into the great pile of burning ashes.

"Look yonder, do! look at that Jem! Why, Jem, what are you up to, patroling like a sentinel out there?"

"Never you heed Jem," was the dry reply; "you mind the roast, captain, and I'll mind--my business;" and Jem continued to parade up and down with his gun cocked and his eye piercing the wood.

To Robinson's repeated and uneasy inquiries what meant this pantomime, Jem persisted in returning no answer but this: "You want your dinner, captain; eat your dinner, and then I'll hoffer a hobservation; meantime, as these woods are queer places, a little hextra caution is no sin."

The pie dishes were now drawn out of the ashes and broken, and the meat baked with all its juices was greedily devoured. "It tastes like a rabbit stuffed with peppermint," said George, "and uncommon nice it is. Now I am another man."

"So am I; Jacky forever!"

"Now, Jem, I have dined. Your story, if you please. Why are you here? for you are a good fellow, but you haven't got gumption enough to say to yourself, 'These two will get lost in the bush, I'll take Jacky and pull them out.'"

"You are right, captain, that wasn't the way at all; and, since your belly is full and your courage up, you will be able to enjoy my story better than you could afore."

"Yes, so let us have it;" and Robinson leaned back luxuriously, being filled and warmed.

"First and foremost," commenced this artful narrator, "there is a chap prowling in this wood at the present time with a double-barreled gun to blow out your brains, captain."

"The devil," cried Robinson, starting to his feet.

"And yours, farmer."

"How do you know?" asked George, without moving.

"That is what I am going to tell you. That Mary McDogherty came crying to my tent all through the snow. 'What is up?' says I; says she, 'Murder is up.' Then she told me her cousin, an Irish boy, was at Bevan's store and he heard some queer talk, and he looked through a chink in the wall and saw two rascals putting their heads together, and he soon made out they were driving a bargain to rob you two. One was to do it, the other was a-egging him on. 'I must have fifty pounds first,' says this one. 'Why?' says the other. 'Because he has been and locked my pal up that was to be in it with me.'"

"Ah!" cried Robinson. "Go on, Jem--there is a clew anyway."

"I have got a thicker one behind. Says the other, 'Agreed! when will you have it?' 'Why, now,' says t'other. Then this one gave him a note. Pat couldn't see that it was a fifty, but no doubt it was, but he saw the man take it and put it in a little tin box and shove it in his bosom."

"That note was the price of blood," said Robinson. "Oh, the black-hearted villains. Tell me who they were, that is all; tell me but who they were!"

"The boy didn't know."

"There! it is always so. The fools! they never know."

"Stop a bit, captain, there is a clew (your own word)."

"Ay, and what is the clew?"

"As soon as ever the note was safe in his bosom he says: 'I sold you, blind mate; I'd have given fifty sooner than not done this job. Look here!' says he, 'I have sworn to have a life for each of these;' and, captain," said Jem, suddenly lowering his voice, "with that it seems he held up his right hand."

"Well, yes! yes! eh!"

"And there were two fingers a-missing on it!"

"Ah!"

"Now those two fingers are the ones you chopped off with your cutlass the night when the tent was attacked."

"Why, Tom, what is this? you never told me of this," cried George.

"And which are in my pocket."

"In your pocket?" said George, drawing away from him.

"Ay, farmer! wrapped up in silver paper, and they shall never leave my pocket till I have fitted them on the man, and seen him hung or shot with them two pickers and stealers tied round his bloodthirsty, mercenairy, aass-aassinating neck, say that I said it."

George. "Jacky, show us the way out of this wood."

Kalingalùnga bowed assent, but he expressed a wish to take with him some of the ashes of the wambiloa. George helped him.

Robinson drew Jem aside. "You shouldn't have mentioned that before George; you have disgusted him properly."

"Oh, hang him! he needn't be so squeamish; why, I've had 'em salt--"

"There, there! drop it, Jem, do!"

"Captain! are you going to let them take us out of the wood before we have hunted it for that scoundrel?"

"Yes, I am. Look here, Jem, we are four, and he is one, but a double-barreled gun is an awkward enemy in a dark wood. No, Jem, we will outwit him to the last. We will clear the wood and get back to the camp. He doesn't know we have got a clew to him. He will come back without fear, and we will nail him with the fifty-pound note upon him. And then--Jack Ketch."

The whole party was now on the move, led by Kalingalùnga, bearing the sacred ashes.

"What on earth is he going to do with them?"

The chief heard this query, and looking back said gravely, "He take them to 'Milmeridien';" and the party followed Jacky, who twisted and zigzagged about the bush till, at last, he brought them to a fairy spot, whose existence in that rugged wood none of them had dreamed possible. It was a long, open glade, meandering like a river between two deep, irregular fringes of the drooping acacia, and another lovely tree which I only know by its uncouth, unmelodious, scientiuncular name--the eucalyptus. This tree, as well as the drooping acacia, leaned over the ground with long leaves like disheveled hair.

Kalingalùnga paused at the brink and said to his companions in a low, awestruck voice, "Milmeridien."

The glade was full of graves, some of them fresh, glittering with bright red earth under the cool, green acacias, others richly veiled with golden moss more or less according to their age; and in the recesses of the grove peeped smoother traces of mortality, mossy mounds a thousand years old, and others far more ancient still, now mere excrescences of green, known to be graves only by the light of that immense gradation of times and dates and epochs.

The floor of the open glade was laid out as a vast parterre--each grave a little flower-bed, round, square, oval, or rhomboid; and all round each bed flowed in fine and graceful curves little paths too narrow for a human foot. Primeval tradition had placed them there that spirits might have free passage to visit all the mighty dead. For here reposed no vulgar corpses. Here, their heads near the surface, but their feet deep in earth, sat the great hunters and warriors of every age of the race of Kalingalùnga, once a great nation, though now a failing tribe. They sat there this many a day, their weapons in their hands, ready to start up whenever the great signal should come, and hunt once more, but without fatigue, in woods boundless as the sea, and with bodily frames no longer mortal, to knock and be knocked on the head, ad infinitum.

Simple and benign creed!

A cry of delight burst from the white men, and they were going to spread themselves over the garden of the dead.

The savage checked them with horror.

"Nobody walk there while him alive," said he. "Now you follow me and not speak any words at all, or Kalingalùnga will leave you in the bush.--Hush!"

The savage paused, that even the echo of his remonstrance might die well away before he traversed the garden. He then bowed his head down upon his breast in a set manner, and so remained quiet a few seconds. In that same attitude he started and walked slowly by the verge of the glade, keeping carefully clear of the graves, and never raising his head. About half way he stopped and reverently scattered the ashes of the wambiloa upon three graves that lay near the edge, then forward--silent, downcast, reverential.

"Mors omnibus est communis!" The white men, even down to Jem, understood and sympathized with Kalingalùnga. In this garden of the dead of all ages they felt their common humanity, and followed their black brother silent and awestruck. Melted, too, by the sweet and sacred sorrow of this calm scene; for here Death seemed to relax his frown, and the dead but to rest from trouble and toil, mourned by gentle, tender trees; and in truth it was a beautiful thought of these savage men to have given their dead for companions those rare and drooping acacias, that bowed themselves and loosed their hair so like fair women abandoned to sorrow over the beloved and dead, and night and morning swept with their dewy eyelashes the pillows of the brave. Requiescant in pace!--resurgant in pacem! For I wish them better than they wished themselves.

After Milmeridien came a thick scrub, through which Kalingalùnga tracked his way; and then a loud hurrah burst from all, for they were free--the net was broken. There were the mountains before them and the gaunt wood behind them at last. The native camp was visible two miles distant, and thither the party ran and found food and fires in abundance. Black sentinels were set at such distances as to render a surprise impossible, and the travelers were invited to sleep and forget all their troubles. Robinson and Jem did sleep, and George would have been glad to, and tried, but was prevented by an unfortunate incident--les enfans terribles found out his infirmity, viz., that nothing they could do would make him hit them. So half a dozen little rascals, potter bellied than you can conceive, climbed up and down George, sticking in their twenty claws like squirrels, and feeling like cold, slippery slugs. Thus was sleep averted, until a merciful gin, hearing the man's groans, came and cracked two or three of these little black pots with a waddie or club, so then George got leave to sleep, and just as he was dozing off, ting, tong, ti tong, tong, tong, came a fearful drumming of parchment. A corroboree or native dance was beginning. No more sleep till that was over--so all hands turned out. A space was cleared in the wood, women stood on both sides with flaming boughs and threw a bright red light upon a particular portion of that space; the rest was dark as pitch. Time, midnight. When the white men came up the dancing had not begun. Kalingalùnga was singing a preliminary war song.

George had picked up some of the native language, and he explained to the other that Jacky was singing about some great battle, near the Wurra-Gurra River.

"The Wurra-Gurra! why, that is where we first found gold."

"Why of course it is! and--yes! I thought so."

"Thought what?"

"It is our battle he is describing."

"Which of 'em?--we live in hot water."

"The one before Jem was our friend. What is he singing? Oh, come! that is overdoing it, Jacky! Why, Jem! he is telling them he killed you on the spot."

"I'll punch his head!"

"No! take it easy," said Robinson; "he is a poet; this is what they call poetical license."

"Lie without sense, I call it--when here is the man."

"Ting tong! ting tong tong!--
I slew him -- he fell -- by the Wurra-Gurra River.
I slew him! -- ting tong! he fell --ting tong!
By the Wurra-Gurra River--ting ting tong!"

This line Jacky repeated at least forty times; but he evaded monotony by the following simple contrivance:

"I slew him; he fell by the Wurra-Gurra River--ting tong!
I slew him; he fell, by the Wurra-Gurra River,
I slew him; he fell, by the Wurra-Gurra River,"

with similar changes, and then back again.

One of our own savages saved a great poet from monotony by similar means;* very good of him.

* The elder Sheridan, who used to teach his pupils to tresh dead Dryden out thus: None but the brave,/None but the brave,/None but the brave, deserve the fair.

And now the gins took up the tune without the words and the dance began to it. First, two figures ghastly with white paint came bounding like Jacks-in-the-box out of the gloom into the red light, and danced gracefully--then one more popped out--then another, at set intervals of time-- then another, all painted differently--and swelled the dance by degrees; and still, as the dance grew in numbers, the musicians sang and drummed louder and faster by well-planned gradations, and the motion rose in intensity, till they all warmed into the terrible savage corroboree jump, legs striding wide, head turned over one shoulder, the eyes glaring with fiendish intensity in one direction, the arms both raised and grasping waddies and boomerangs--till at last they worked up to such a gallop of fierce, buck-like leaps that there was a jump for each beat of the music. Now they were in four lines, and as the figures in the front line jumped to the right, each keeping his distance to a hair, the second line jumped to the left, the third to the right, and the fourth to the left.

The twinkle and beauty and symmetry of this was admirable, and, strange as it may appear, not only were the savages now wrought up to frenzy at this climax of the dance, but the wonderful magnetic influence these children of Nature have learned to create and launch in the corroboree so stirred the white men's blood, that they went half mad too, and laughed and shouted and danced, and could hardly help flinging themselves among the mad fiends and jumping and yelling with them; and when the jump was at its fiercest and quickest, and the great frenzy boiling over, these cunning artists brought it to a dead stop sharp upon the climax--and all was still.

In another minute they were all snoring; but George and Robinson often started in their slumbers, dreaming they saw the horrid figures--the skeletons, lizards, snakes, tartan shawls, and whitened fiends, the whole lot blazing at the eyes and mouth like white budelights, come bounding one after another out of the black night into the red torchlight, and then go striding and jumping and glaring and raging and bucking and prancing, and scattering battle and song and joy and rage and inspiration and stark-staring frenzy all around.

They awoke at daylight rather cold, and found piles of snow upon their blankets, and the lizards and skeletons and imps and tartan shawls deteriorated. The snow had melted on their bodies, and the colors had all run--some of them away. Quid multa? we all know how beauties look when the sun breaks on them after a ball.

They asked for Jacky. To their great chagrin he was not to be found. They waited, getting crosser and crosser, till nine o'clock, and then out comes my lord from the wood, walking toward them with his head down on his bosom, the picture of woe--the milmeridien movement over again.

"There! don't let us scold him," said George, "I am sure he has lost a relation, or maybe a dear friend; anyway I hope it is not his sweetheart--poor Jacky. Well, Jacky! I am glad you have washed your face, now I know you again. You can't think how much better you look in your own face than painted up in that unreasonable way, like-like-like-I dono-what-all."

"Like something between a devil and a rainbow," suggested Robinson.

"But what is wrong?" asked George, kindly. "I am almost afraid to ask, though!"

Encouraged by the tone of sympathy, the afflicted chief pointed to his face, sighed, and said:

"Kalingalùnga paint war, and now Kalingalùnga wash um face and not kill anybody first. Kalingalùnga Jacky again, and show your white place in um hill a good deal soon."

And the amiable heathen cleared up a little at the prospect of serving George, whom he loved--aboriginally.

Jem remained with the natives upon some frivolous pretense. His real hope was to catch the ruffian whom he secretly believed to be still in the wood. "He is like enough to creep out this way," thought Jem, "and then--won't I nail him!"

In half an hour they were standing under the spot whose existence Robinson had so often doubted.

"Well, George, you painted it true. It really is a river of quartz running between those two black rocks. And that you think is the home of the gold, eh?"

"Well, I do. Look here, Tom! look at this great large heap of quartz bowlders, all of different sizes; they have all rolled down here out of that river of quartz."

"Why, of course they have! who doubts that?"

"Many is the time I have sat on that green mound where Jacky is sitting now, and eaten my bread and cheese."

"I dare say! but what has that to do with it? what are we to do? Are we to go up the rock and peck into that mass of quartz?"

"Well, I think it is worth while."

"Why, it would be like biting a piece out of the world! Look here, Master George, we can put your notion about the home of the gold to the test without all that trouble."

"As how?"

"You own all these quartz stones rolled out of yon river; if so, they are samples of it. Ten thousand quartz stones is quite sample enough, so begin and turn them all over, examine them--break them if you like. If we find but a speck of gold in one of them I'll believe that quartz river is gold's home--if not, it is all humbug!"

George pulled a wry face; he found himself pinned to his own theory.

"Well," said he, "I own the sample tells us what is in the barn; so now I am vexed for bringing you here."

"Now we are here, give it a fair trial; let us set to and break every bowlder in the thundering heap."

They went to work and picked the quartz bowlders; full two hours they worked, and by this time they had made a considerable heap of broken quartz; it glittered in the sun, but it glittered white, not a speck of yellow came to light.

George was vexed. Robinson grinned; expecting nothing, he was not disappointed. Besides, he was winning an argument, and we all like to turn out prophets. Presently a little cackle from Jacky.

"I find um!"

"Find what?" asked Robinson, without looking up.

"A good deal yellow stone," replied Jacky, with at least equal composure.

"Let me see that," said George, with considerable curiosity; and they both went to Jacky.

Now the fact is that this heap of quartz stones was in reality much larger than they thought, only the greater part of it had been overgrown with moss and patches of grass a few centuries of centuries ago.

Jacky, seated on what seemed a grassy mound, was in reality perched upon a part of the antique heap; his keen eye saw a little bit of yellow protruding through the moss, and he was amusing himself clipping it with his tomahawk, cutting away the moss and chipping the stone, which made the latter glitter more and yellower.

"Hallo!" cried George, "this looks better."

Robinson went on his knees without a word.

"It is all right," said he, in a great flutter, "it is a nugget--and a good-sized one--a pound weight, I think. Now then, my lad, out you come;" and he dug his fingers under it to jerk it out.

But the next moment he gave a screech and looked up amazed.

"Why, this is the point of the nugget; it lies the other way, not flat. George! I can't move it! The pick! Oh, Lord! oh, Lord! The pick! the pick!"

"Stand clear," shouted George, and he drove the point of the pick down close by the prize, then he pressed on the handle. "Why, Tom, it is jammed somehow."

"No, it is not jammed--it is its own weight. Why, George!"

"Then, Tom! it is a hundred-weight if it is an ounce!"

"Don't be a fool," cried the other, trembling all over; "there is no such thing in nature."

The nugget now yielded slowly to the pressure and began to come up into the world again inch by inch after so many thousand years. Of course, before it could come all out, the soil must open first, and when Robinson, glaring down, saw a square foot of earth part and gape as the nugget came majestically up, he gave another cry,

and with trembling hands laid hold of the prize, and pulled and tugged and rolled it on the clean moss--to lift it was not so easy. They fell down on their knees by the side of it like men in a dream. Such a thing had never been seen or heard of--a hundred-weight of quartz and gold, and beautiful as it was great. It was like honeycomb, the cells of which had been sliced by a knife; the shining metal brimmed over in the delicate quartz cells.

They lifted it. Yes, full a hundredweight; half the mass was quartz, but four-fifths of the weight they knew must be gold. Then they jumped up and each put a foot on it, and shook hands over it.

"Oh, you beauty!" cried George, and he went on his knees and kissed it; "that is not because you are gold, but because you take me to Susan. Now, Tom, let us thank Heaven for its goodness to us, and back to camp this very day."

"Ay! but stop, we must wrap it in our wipes or we shall never get back alive. The very honest ones would turn villains at sight of it. It is the wonder of the world."

"I see my Susan's eyes in it," cried George, in rapture. "Oh, Tom, good, kind, honest Tom, shake hands over it once more!"

In the midst of all this rapture a horrible thought occurred.

"Why, it's Jacky's," said George, faintly, "he found it."

"Nonsense! nonsense!" cried Tom, uneasily; he added, however, "but I am afraid one third of it is--pals share, white or black."

All their eyes now turned uneasily to the Aboriginal, who lay yawning on the grass.

"Jacky give him you, George," said this worthy savage, with superb indifference. He added with a yawn: "What for you dance corroboree when um not dark?--den you bite yellow stone," continued this original, "den you red, den you white, den you red again, all because we pull up yellow stone-all dis a good deal dam ridiculous."

"So 'tis, Jacky," replied Robinson, hastily; "don't you have anything to do with yellow stone, it would make you as great a fool as we are. Now show us the shortest cut back home through the bush."

At the native camp they fell in with Jem. The monstrous nugget was too heavy to conceal from his shrewd eye, so they showed it him. The sight of it almost knocked him down. Robinson told him where they found it, and advised Jem to go and look for another. Alas! the great nugget already made him wish one friend away. But Jem said:

"No, I will see you safe through the bush first."

ALL this time two persons in the gold mine were upon thorns of expectation and doubt--brutus and Peter Crawley. George and Robinson did not return, but no more did Black Will. What had happened? Had the parties come into collision? and, if so, with what result? If the friends had escaped, why had they never been heard of since? If, on the other hand, Will had come off conqueror, why had he never reappeared? At last brutus arrived at a positive conviction that Black Will had robbed and probably murdered the men, and was skulking somewhere with their gold, thereby defrauding him, his pal; however, he kept this to himself, and told Crawley that he feared Will had come to grief, so he would go well armed, and see what was the matter, and whether he could help him. So he started for the bush, well armed. Now his real object, I blush to say, was to murder Black Will, and rob him of the spoils of George and Robinson.

Wicked as these men of violence had been six months ago, gold and Crawley had made them worse, ay, much worse. Crawley, indeed, had never openly urged any of them to so deep a crime as murder, and it is worthy of note, as a psychological fact, that this reptile contrived to deceive itself into thinking that it had stopped short of crime's utmost limits; to be sure it had tempted and bribed and urged men to robbery under circumstances that were almost sure to lead to murder, but still murder might not occur; meantime it had openly discountenanced that crime, and checked the natural proclivity of brutus and Black Will toward deeds of blood.

Self-deception will probably cease at the first blast of the archangel's trumpet. But what human heart will part with it till then? The circumstances under which a human being could not excuse or delude or justify himself have never yet occurred in the huge annals of crime. Prejudice apart, Crawley's moral position behind brutus and Black Will seems to bear a strong family likeness to that which Holy Writ assigns to the great enemy of man. That personage knocks out nobody's brains, cuts nobody's throat, never was guilty of such brutality since the world was, but he finds some thorough egotist, and whispers how the egotism of his passions or his interest may be gratified by the death of a fellow-creature. The egotist listens, and blood flows.

brutus and Black Will had both suffered for their crimes. brutus had been nailed by Carlo, twice gibbeted, and the bridge of his nose broken once. Black Will had been mutilated, and Walker nearly drowned, but "the close contriver of all harms" had kept out of harm's way. Violence had never recoiled on him who set it moving. For all that, Crawley, I must inform the reader, was not entirely prosperous. He had his little troubles, too, whether warnings that he was on the wrong path, or punishments of his vices, or both, I can't say.

Thus it was. Mr. Crawley had a natural love of spirits, without a stomach strong enough to deal with them. When he got away from Mr. Meadows he indulged more and more, and for some months past he had been subject to an unpleasant phenomenon that arises now and then out of the fumes of liquor. At the festive board, even as he raised the glass to his lips, the face of Crawley would often be seen to writhe with a sort of horror, and his eyes to become fixed on unseen objects, and perspiration to gather on his brow. Then such as were not in the secret would jump up and say, "What on earth is the matter?" and look fearfully round, expecting to see some horrid sight to justify that look of horror and anguish; but Crawley, his glassy eyes still fixed, would whimper out, his teeth chattering, and clipping the words: "Oh, ne-ne-never mind, it's o-o-only a trifling ap-parition!" He had got to try and make light of it, because at first he used to cry out and point, and then the miners ran out and left him alone with his phantoms, and this was terrible. He dreaded solitude; he schemed against it, and provided against it, and paid fellows to bear him company night and day, and at the festive board it was one thing to drink his phantoms neat and another to dilute them with figures of flesh and blood. He much preferred the latter.

At first, his supernatural visitors were of a unfavorable but not a ghastly character.

No. 1 was a judge who used to rise through the floor, and sit half in and half out of the wall, with a tremendous flow of horse-hair, a furrowed face, a vertical chasm between the temples, and a strike-me-off-the-rolls eye gleaming with diabolical fire from under a gray, shaggy eyebrow.

No. 2 was a policeman, who came in through the window, and stood imperturbable, all in blue, with a pair of handcuffs, and a calm eye, and a disagreeable absence of effort or emotion--an inevitable-looking policeman.

But as Crawley went deeper in crime and brandy, blood-boltered figures, erect corpses, with the sickening signs of violence in every conceivable form, used to come and blast his sight and arrest the glass on its way to his lips, and make his songs and the boisterous attempts at mirth of his withered heart die in a quaver and a shiver of fear and despair. And at this period of our tale these horrors had made room for a phantom more horrible still to such a creature as Crawley. The air would seem to thicken into sulfurous smoke, and then to clear, and then would come out clearer and clearer, more and more awful, a black figure with hoof and horns and tail, eyes like red-hot carbuncles, teeth a chevaux-de-frise of white-hot iron, and an appalling grin.*

* The god Pan colored black by the early Christians.

THE party, consisting of Jacky, Jem, Robinson and George, had traversed about one half the bush, when a great heavy crow came wheeling and cackling over their heads, and then joined a number more who were now seen circling over a gum-tree some hundred yards distant.

"Let us go and see what that is," said Jem.

Jacky grinned, and led the way. They had not gone very far when another great black bird rose so near their feet as to make them jump, and peering through the bushes they saw a man lying on his back. His arm was thrown in an easy, natural way round his gun, but at a second glance it was plain the man was dead. The crows had ripped his clothes to ribbons with their tremendous beaks, and lacerated the flesh and picked out the eyes.

They stepped a few paces from this sight. There was no sign of violence on the body.

"Poor fellow!" said Jem. "How did he come by his end, I wonder?" And he stretched forward and peered with pity and curiosity mingled.

"Lost in the bush!" said Robinson, very solemnly. And he and George exchanged a meaning look.

"What is that for?" said George, angrily, to Jacky--"grinning in sight of a dead body?"

"White fellow stupid fellow," was all Jacky's reply.

The men now stepped up to the body to examine it; not that they had much hope of discovering who it was, but still they knew it was their duty for the sake of his kindred to try and find out.

George, overcoming a natural repugnance, examined the pockets. He found no papers. He found a knife, but no name was cut in the handle. In the man's bosom he found a small metal box, but just as he was taking it out Jem gave a halo!

"I think I know him," cried Jem. "There is no mistaking that crop of black hair; it is my old captain, Black Will."

"You don't say so! What could he be doing here without his party?"

"Anything in the box, George?" asked Robinson.

"Nothing but a little money. Here is a sovereign--look. And here is a bank-note."

"A five-pound note?"

"Yes--no; it is more than that a good deal. It is for fifty pounds, Tom."

"What?"

"A fifty-pound note, I tell you."

"Jem!"

"Captain!"

A most expressive look was exchanged between these two, and by one impulse they both seized the stock of the gun that was in the dead man's hand. They lifted it, and yes--two fingers were wanting on the right hand.

"Come away from that fellow," cried Robinson to George. "Let him lie."

George looked up in some wonder. Robinson pointed sternly to the dead hand in silence. George, by the light of the other men's faces, saw it all, and recoiled with a natural movement of repugnance as from a dead snake. There was a breathless silence--and every eye bent upon this terrible enemy lying terrible no longer at their feet.

"How did he die?" asked Robinson, in a whisper.

"In the great snow-storm," replied George, in a whisper.

"No," said Jem, in the same tone, "he was alive yesterday. I saw his footprint after the snow was melted."

"There was snow again last night, Tom. Perhaps he went to sleep in that with his belly empty."

"Starvation and fatigue would do it without the snow, George. We brought a day's provisions out with us, George. He never thought of that, I will be bound."

"Not he," said Jem. "I'll answer for him he only thought of robbing and killing--never thought about dying himself."

"I can't believe he is dead so easy as this," said Robinson.

The feeling was natural. This man had come into the wood and had followed them burning to work them ill, and they to work him ill. Both were utterly baffled. He had never prevailed to hurt them, nor they him. He was dead, but by no mortal hand. The immediate cause of his death was unknown, and will never be known for certain while the world lasts.

L'homme propose, mais Dieu dispose!

"DON'T keep staring at it so, farmer, it is an ugly sight. You will see him in your sleep if you do that. Here is something better to look at--a letter. And there I carried it and never once thought of it till the sight of his hand made me feel in my pocket, and then my hand ran against it. 'Tis from Mr. Levi."

"Thank you, Jem. Tom, will you be so kind as read it me while I work?"

"Yes, give it me. Work? Why, what are we going to work at in the bush?"

"I should think you might guess," replied George quietly, while putting down his pickax and taking off his coat. "Well, I am astonished at both of you. You ought to know what I am going to do. Humph! Under this tree will be as good a place as any."

"Jem, as I am a sinner, he is going to bury him."

"Bury what? The nugget?"

"No, Jem, the Christian."*

* In Berkshire, among a certain class, this word means "a human being."

"A pretty Christian," sneered Robinson.

"You know what I mean, Tom?"

"I know it is very kind of you to take all this trouble to bury my enemy," said Robinson, hurt.

"Don't ye say that," replied George, hurt in his turn. "He was as much my enemy as yours."

"No such thing. He was here after me, and has been tormenting me this twelve months. You have no enemy, a great soft spoon like you."

"Keep your temper, Tom," answered George, in a mollifying tone. "Let each man act according to his lights. I couldn't leave a corpse to the fowls of the air.

"Gibbet a murderer, I say--don't bury him; especially when he has just been hunting our very lives."

"Tom," replied George doggedly, "death settles all accounts. I liked the man as little as you could; and it is not to say I am in love with a man because I sprinkle a little earth over his dead bones. Ugh! This is the unkindest soil to work. It is full of roots, enough to break a fellow's heart."

While George was picking and grubbing out roots, and fighting with the difficult soil, Robinson opened Levi's letter viciously and read out:

"George Fielding, you have an enemy in the mine--a secret, cowardly, unscrupulous enemy, who lies in wait for your return. I have seen his face, and tremble for you. Therefore listen to my words. The old Jew, whom twice you have saved from harm and insult, is rich, his children are dead, the wife of his bosom is dead. He loves no creature now but you and Susannah; therefore run no more risks for gold, since much gold awaits you without risk. Come home. Respect the words of age and experience--come home. Delay not an hour. Oh, say not, 'I will sleep yet one more night in my tent, and then I will depart,' but ride speedily after me on the very instant. Two horses have I purchased for you and the young man your friend--two swift horses with their saddles. The voucher is inclosed. Ride speedily after me this very hour, lest evil befall you and yet more sorrow fall upon Susannah and upon--Isaac Levi."

The reading of this letter was followed by a thoughtful silence broken only by the sound of George's pickax and the bursting roots.

"This is a very extraordinary letter. Mr. Levi knows more than he tells you, George."

"I am of your opinion."

"Why, captain," said Jem, "to go by that letter, Fielding is the marked man, and not you after all. So it is his own enemy he is digging that grave for."

"Do you think you will stop him by saying that?" asked Robinson, with a shrug.

"He was my enemy, Tom, and yours too; but now he is nobody's enemy; he is dead. Will you help me lay him in the earth, or shall I do it by myself?"

"We will help," said the others, a little sullenly.

They brought the body to its grave under the tall gum-tree.

"Not quite so rough, Tom, if you please."

"I didn't mean to be rough that I know of--there."

They laid the dead villain gently and reverently in his grave. George took a handful of soil and scattered it over him.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," said he, solemnly.

The other two looked down and sprinkled soil, too, and their anger and bitterness began to soften by the side of George and over the grave.

Then Jem felt in his pocket and produced something wrapped in silver paper.

"This belongs!" said he, with a horrible simplicity. "The farmer is too good for this world, but it is a good fault. There, farmer," said he, looking to George for approbation as he dropped the little parcel into the grave. "After all," continued Jem, good-naturedly, "it would have been very hard upon a poor fellow to wake up in the next world and not have what does belong to him to make an honest living with."

The grave was filled in, and a little mound made at the foot of the tree. Then George took out his knife and began to cut the smooth bark.

"What now? Oh, I see. That is a good idea, George. Read them a lesson. Say in a few words how he came here to do a deed of violence and died himself--by the hand of Heaven."

"Tom," replied George, cutting away at the bark, "he is gone where he is sure to be judged; so we have no call to judge him. God Almighty can do that, I do suppose, without us putting in our word."

"Well, have it your own way. I never saw the toad so obstinate before, Jem. What is he cutting, I wonder?"

The inscription, when finished, ran thus:

"Now, Tom, for England!"

They set out again with alacrity, and battled with the bush about two hours more. George and Robinson carried the great nugget on a handkerchief stretched double across two sticks, Jem carried the picks. They were all in high spirits, and made light of scratches and difficulties. At last, somewhat suddenly, they burst out of the thick part into the mere outskirts frequented by the miners, and there they came plump upon brutus, with a gun in his hand and pistols peeping out of his pockets, come to murder Black Will and rob him of his spoils.

They were startled, and brutus astounded, for he was fully persuaded George and Robinson had ceased to exist. He was so dumfounded that Robinson walked up to him and took the gun out of his hands without any resistance on his part. The others came round him, and Robinson demanded his pistols.

"What for?" said he.

Now at this very moment his eye fell upon that fabulous mass of gold they carried, and both his eyes opened, and a sort of shiver passed over him. With ready cunning he looked another way, but it was too late. Robinson had caught that furtive glance, and a chill came over him that this villain should have seen the prize, a thing to excite cupidity to frenzy. Nothing now would have induced Robinson to leave him armed.

He replied, sternly: "Because we are four to one, and we will hang you on the nearest tree if you don't give them up. And, now, what are you doing here?"

"I was only looking for my pal," said brutus.

"Well, you won't want a gun and pistols to look for your pal. Which way are you going?"

"Into the bush."

"Then mizzle! That is the road."

brutus moved gloomily away into the bush.

"There," said Robinson, "he has turned bushranger. I've disarmed him, and saved some poor fellow's life and property. Cover up the nugget, George."

They went on, but presently Robinson had a thought.

"Jacky," said he, "you saw that man; should you know him again?"

"Yes."

"Jacky, that man is our enemy. Could you track him by his footsteps without ever letting him see you?"

Jacky smiled superior.

"Then follow him and see where he goes, and whom he joins--and come to the mine directly and tell me."

Jacky's eyes gleamed at this intelligence. He sat down, and in a few turns of the hand painted his face war, and glided like a serpent on brutus's trail.

The rest cleared the wood, and brought the nugget, safe hidden in their pocket-handkerchief, to camp. They begged Jem to accept the fifty pounds, if he did not mind handling the price of blood.

Jem assured them he had no such scruples, and took it with a burst of thanks.

Then they made him promise faithfully not to mention to a soul about the monster nugget. No more he did while he was sober, but, alas! some hours later, having a drop in his head, he betrayed the secret to one or two--say forty.

Robinson pitched their tent and mounted guard over the nugget. George was observed to be in a strange flutter. He ran hither and thither. Ran to the post-office--ran to the stationer--got paper--drew up a paper--found McLaughlan--made him sign it--went to Mr. Moore--showed him Isaac's voucher; on which Moore produced the horses, a large black horse with both bone and blood, and a good cob.

George was very much pleased with them, and asked what Levi had given for them.

"Two hundred and fifty pounds for the pair."

"Good Heavens," cried George, "what a price! Mr. Levi was in earnest." Then he ran out and went to the tent and gave Robinson his letters. "But there were none for me, Tom," sighed George. "Never mind, I shall soon--"

Now these letters brought joy and triumph to Robinson; one contained a free pardon, the other was a polite missive from the Colonial Government, in answer to the miners' petition he had sent up.

"Secretary had the honor to inform Mr. Robinson that police were on the road to the mine, and that soldiers would arrive by to-morrow to form an escort, so that the miners' gold might travel in safety down to Sydney."

"Hurrah! this is good news," cried Robinson, "and what a compliment to me. Do you hear, George? an escort of soldiers coming to the camp to-morrow; they will take the nugget safe to Sydney."

"Not if we are robbed of it to-night," replied George.

At this moment in came Jacky with news of brutus. That wily man had gone but a little way in the bush when he had made a circuit, and had slipped back into another part of the mine, and Jacky had followed him first by trail, afterward by sight, and had marked him down into a certain tent, on which he had straightway put a little red mark.

"Come back after our nugget, George. Fools we were to carry it blazing in folks' eyes."

"I dare say we can beat him."

"I am game to try. Jacky, I want to put a question to you."

While Jacky and Tom were conferring in animated whispers, George was fixing an old spur he had picked up into the heel of his boot.

"That is capital, Jacky. Well, George, we have hit upon a plan."

"And so have I."

"You?"

"Yes! me! but tell me yours first, Tom."

Robinson detailed him his scheme with all its ramifications, and a very ingenious stratagem it was.

For all that, when George propounded his plan in less than six words, Robinson stared with surprise and then gave way to ludicrous admiration.

"Well," cried he, "simplicity before cunning; look at that now. Where was my head?--George, this is your day--carried nem. con."

"And, Tom, you can do yours all the same."

"Can I? Why, yes, to be sure I can. There, he saw that, too, before. Why, George, if you don't mind, you will be No. 1 and I No. 2. What makes you so sharp all of a sudden?"

"I have to think for Susan as well as us," said the poor fellow, tenderly, "that is why I am sharp--for once in a way. And now, Jacky--you are a great anxiety to me, and the time is so short--come sit by me, dear Jacky, and let me try and make you understand what I have been doing for you, that you may be good and happy, and comfortable in your old age, when your poor old limbs turn stiff, and you can hunt no longer. In grateful return for the nugget, and more than that for all your goodness and kindness to me in times of bitter trouble."

Then George showed Jacky how he had given Abner one-third of all his sheep and cattle, and Jacky two-thirds, and how McLaughlan, a just man, would see the division made. "And do leave the woods, except for a hunt now and then, Jacky; you are too good for them."

Above all, George explained with homely earnestness the nature of the sheep, her time of lambing, etc., and showed Jacky how the sheep and cattle would always keep him fed and clothed, if he would but use them reasonably, and not kill the breeders for dinner.

And Jacky listened with glistening eyes, for George's glistened, and the sweet tones of affection and gratitude pierced through this family talk, and it is sad that we must drop the curtain on this green spot in the great camp and go among our villains.

ROBINSON did not overrate the fatal power of the fabulous mass of gold, a glimpse of which he had incautiously given to greedy eyes. It drew brutus like a magnet after it. He came all in a flutter to mephistopheles, and told him he had met the two men carrying a lump of solid gold between them so heavy that the sticks bent under it. "The sweat ran down me at the sight of it, but I managed to look another way directly."

What with the blows and kicks and bruises and defeats he had received, and with the gold mass his lawless eye had rested on, brutus was now in a state of mind terrible to think of.

Lust and hate, terrible twins, stung that dark heart to frenzy. Could he have had his will he would have dispensed with cunning, would have gone out and fired bullets from his gun into the tent, and, if his enemies came out alive, have met them hand to hand to slay or be slain. But the watchful foe had disarmed him, and he was compelled to listen to the more reynard-like ferocity of his accomplice.

"Bill," said the assassin of Carlo, "keep cool, and you shall have the swag; and yet not lose your revenge neither."

"---- you, tell me how."

"Let the bottle alone, then; you are hot enough without that. Come nearer me. What I have got to say is not the sort of thing for me to bawl about. We should not be alive half an hour if it was heard to come from our lips."

The two heads came close together, and Crawley leaned over the other side of the table and listened with senses keen as a razor.

"Suppose I show you how to make those two run out of their tent like two frightened women, and never once think about their swag?"

"Ah!"

"And fall blinded for life or dead or dying while we walk off with the swag."

"Blind, dead, dying! give me your hand. How? how? how?"

"Hush! don't shout like that; come closer, and you, Smith."

Then a diabolical scheme hissed into the listeners' ears--a scheme at once cowardly and savage--a scheme of that terrible kind that robs courage, strength and even skill of their natural advantages, and reduces their owners to the level of the weak and the timid--a scheme worthy of the assassin of Carlo, and the name I have given this wretch, whose brain was so fertile and his heart so fiendish. Its effect on the hearers was great, but very different. Crawley recoiled, not violently, but like a serpent on which water had been poured; but brutus broke into a rapture of admiration, exultation, gratified hate.

"Bless you, bless you!" cried he, with a violence more horrible than his curses, "you warm my heart, you are a pal. What a head-piece you have got! ---- you, Smith, have you nothing to say? Isn't this a dodge out of the common?"

Now for the last minute or two Crawley's eyes had been fixed with a haggard expression on a distant corner of the room. He did not move them; he appeared hardly to have the power, but he answered, dropping the words down on the table anywhere.

"Ye-yes! it is very inge-nious, ah!"

mephisto. "We must buy the turpentine directly; there is only one store sells it, and that shuts at nine."

brutus. "Do you hear, Smith? hand us out the blunt."

Crawley. "Oh, ugh!" and his eyes seemed fascinated to that spot.

brutus (following Crawley's eye uneasily). "What is the matter?"

Crawley. "Lo-o-o-k th-e-r-e! No! on your right. Oh, his tail is in the fire!"

brutus. "Whose tail? don't be a fool!"

Crawley. "And it doesn't burn!! Oh, it burns blacker in the fire!--Ah, ah! now the eyes have caught fire--diamonds full of hell. They blast! Ah, now the teeth have caught light--red-hot nails. The mouth is as big as the table, gaping wider, wider, wider. Ah! ah! ah!"

brutus. "---- him; I won't stay in the room with such a fellow, he makes my blood run cold. Has he cut his father's throat in a church, or what?"

Crawley (shrieking). "Oh, don't go; oh, my dear friends, don't leave me alone with IT. My dear friends, you sit down right upon it--that sends it away." And Crawley hid his face, and pointed wildly to whereabouts they were to sit upon the phantom.

brutus. "Come, it is gone now; was forced nearly to squash it first, though, haw! haw! haw!"

Crawley. "Yes, it is gone. Thank Heaven--I'll give up drinking."

brutus. "So now fork out the blunt for the turps."

Crawley. "No! I will give no money toward murder--robbery is bad enough. Where shall we go to?" And he rose and went out, muttering something about "a little brandy."

brutus. "The sneak--to fail us at the pinch. I'll wring his neck round. What is this? five pounds."

mephisto. "Don't you see the move? he won't give it us, conscience forbids; but, if we are such rogues as take it, no questions asked."

"The tarnation hypocrite," roared brutus, with disgust--hypocrisy was the one vice he was innocent of--out of jail. mephistopheles stole Crawley's money, left for that purpose, and went and bought a four-gallon cask of turpentine.

brutus remained and sharpened an old cutlass, the only weapon he had got left. Crawley and mephistopheles returned almost together. Crawley produced a bottle of brandy.

"Now," said he to mephistopheles, "I don't dispute your ingenuity, my friend, but suppose while we have been talking the men have struck their tent and gone away, nugget and all?"

The pair looked terribly blank--what fools we were not to think of that.

Crawley kept them in pain a moment or two.

"Well, they have not," said he, "I have been to look."

"Well done," cried mephistopheles.

"Well done," cried brutus, gasping for breath.

"There is their tent all right."

"How near did you go to it?"

"Near enough to hear their voices muttering."

"When does the moon rise, to-night?"

"She is rising now."

"When does she go down?"

"Soon after two o'clock."

"Will you take a share of the work, Smith?"

"Heaven forbid!"

IT was a gusty night. The moon had gone down. The tents gleamed indistinct in form, but white as snow. Robinson's tent stood a little apart, among a number of deserted claims, some of them dry, but most of them with three or four feet of water in them.

There was, however, one large tent about twenty yards from Robinson's.

A man crept on his stomach up to this tent and listened. He then joined another man who stood at some distance, and whose form seemed gigantic in the dim starlight. "All right," said the spy, "they are all fast as dormice, snoring like hogs; no fear from them."

"Go to work, then," whispered brutus. "Do your part."

mephistopheles laid a deep iron dish upon the ground, and removed the bung from the turpentine cask, and poured. "Confound the wind, how it wastes the stuff," cried he.

He now walked on tiptoe past Robinson's tent and scattered the turpentine with a bold sweep, so that it fell light as rain over a considerable surface. A moment of anxiety succeeded; would their keen antagonists hear even that slight noise? No! no one stirred in the tent.

mephistopheles returned to the cask, and, emboldened by success, brought it nearer the doomed tent. Six times he walked past the windward side of the tent, and scattered the turpentine over it. It was at the other side his difficulties began.

The first time he launched the liquid, the wind took it and returned it nearly all in his face, and over his clothes. Scarce a drop reached the tent.

The next time he went up closer with a beating heart, and flung it sharper. This time full two-thirds went upon the tent, and only a small quantity came back like spray.

By the time the cask was emptied, the tent was saturated. Then this wretch passed the tent yet once more, and scattered a small quantity of oil to make the flame more durable and deadly.

"Now it is my turn," whispered brutus. "I thought it would never come."

What is that figure crouching and crawling about a hundred yards to windward? It is the caitiff, Crawley, who, after peremptorily declining to have anything to do with this hellish act, has crept furtively after them, partly to play the spy on them, for he suspects they will lie to him about the gold, partly urged by curiosity. He could see nothing at that distance but the dark body of mephistopheles passing at intervals between him and the white tent.

He shivered with cold and terror at the crime about to be done, and quivered with impatience that it was so long a-doing.

The assassins now divided their force. mephistopheles took his station to leeward of the tent; brutus to windward.

Crawley saw a sudden spark upon the ground; it was brutus striking a lucifer match against his heel. With this he lighted a piece of tow, and running along the tent he left a line of fire behind him, and awaited the result, his cutlass griped in his hand and his teeth clinched.

Crawley saw that line of fire come and then creep and then rise and then roar, and shoot up into a great column of fire thirty feet high, roaring and blazing, and turning night into day all round. Simultaneously with this tremendous burst of fire and light, which startled Crawley by bringing him in a moment into broad daylight, he saw rise from the earth a black figure with a fiendish face.

At this awful sight the conscience-stricken wretch fell flat and tried to work into the soil like a worm. Nor did he recover any portion of his presence of mind till he heard a shrill whoop, savage and soul-chilling, but mortal, and, looking up, saw Kalingalùnga go bounding down upon brutus with gigantic leaps, his tomahawk whirling.

Crawley cowered like a hare and watched. brutus, surprised but not dismayed, wheeled round and faced the savage, cutlass in hand. He parried a fierce blow of the tomahawk, and with his left fist struck Kalingalùnga on the temple, and knocked him backward half a dozen yards. The elastic savage recovered himself and danced like a fiend round brutus in the red light of the blazing tent.

Warned by that strange blow, straight from the armpit, a blow entirely new to him, he came on with more deadly caution, eyes and teeth budelights, and brutus felt a chill for a moment, but it speedily turned to rage. Now as the combatants each prepared to strike again, screams suddenly issued from the other side the tent, so wild, despairing, and unnatural as to suspend their arms for a moment. They heard but saw nothing, only the savage heart of brutus found time to exult--his enemies were perishing. But Crawley saw as well as heard. A pillar of flame eight feet high burst out from behind the tent and ran along the ground. From that conical flame issued those appalling shrieks--it was a man on fire. The living flame ran but a few steps, then disappeared from the earth, and the screams ceased. Apparently the fire had not only killed, but annihilated its prey and so itself. Crawley sickened with horror, and for a moment with remorse.

But already brutus and Kalingalùnga were fighting again by the light of the burning tent. They closed, and this time blood flowed on both sides. The savage, by a skillful feint, cut brutus on the flesh of the left shoulder, but not deep, and brutus once more surprised the savage by delivering point with his cutlass, and inflicted a severe graze on the ribs.

At the sight of his enemy's blood, brutus followed up and aimed a fierce blow at Kalingalùnga's head; he could not have made a more useless attack. The savage bore on his left arm a shield, so called; it was but three inches broad and two feet long, but skill and practice had made it an impenetrable defense. He received the cutlass on this shield as a matter of course, and simultaneously delivered his tomahawk on brutus's unguarded head. brutus went down under the blow and rolled over on his face.

The crouching spectator of this terrible combat by the decaying light of the tent heard the hard blow and saw the white man roll upon the ground. Then he saw the tomahawk twice lifted and twice descend upon the man's back as he lay. The next moment the savage came running from the tent at his utmost speed.

Crawley's first thought was that assistance had come to brutus; his next was a terrible one. The savage had first risen from the earth at a spot between the tent and him. Perhaps he had been watching both him and the tent. A moment of horrible uncertainty, and then Crawley yielded to his instinct and ran. A terrible whoop behind told him he was indeed to be the next victim. He ran for the dear life; no one would have believed he could shamble along at the rate he did. His tent was half a mile off; he would be a dead man long ere he could reach it. He turned his yelling head as he ran, to see. The fleet savage had already diminished the distance between them by half. Crawley now filled the air with despairing cries for help. A large tent was before him; he knew not whose, but certain death was behind him. He made for the tent. If he could but reach it before the death-stroke was given him! Yes, it is near! No, it is white and looks closer than it is. A whoop sounded in his ears; it seemed to ring inside his head it was so near. He flung himself yelling with terror at the wall of the tent. An aperture gave way. A sharp cut as with a whip seemed to sting him, and he was on his knees in the middle of the tent howling for mercy, first to the savage, who he made sure was standing over him with his tomahawk; then to a man who got him by the throat and pressed a pistol barrel cold as an icicle to his cheek.

"Mercy! mercy! the savage! he is killing me! murder! murder! help!"

"Who are you?" roared the man, shaking him.

"Oh, stop him! he will kill me! Shoot him! Don't shoot me! I am a respectable man. It is the savage! kill him! He is at the door--please kill him! I'll give you a hundred pounds!"

"What is to do? The critter is mad!"

"There! there! you will see a savage! Shoot him! kill him! For pity's sake kill him, and I'll tell you all! I am respectable. I'll give you a hundred pounds to kill him!"

"Why, it is Smith, that gives us all a treat at times."

"Don't I! Oh, my dear, good friend, he has killed me! He came after me with his tomahawk. Have pity on a respectable man--and kill him!"

The man went to the door of the tent and sure enough there was Jacky, who had retired to some distance. The man fired at him with as little ceremony as he would at a glass bottle, and, as was to be expected, missed him; but Jacky, who had a wholesome horror of the make-thunders, ran off directly, and went to hack the last vestiges of life out of brutus.

Crawley remained on his knees, howling and whimpering so piteously that the man took pity on this abject personage.

"Have a drop, Mr. Smith; you have often given me one--there. I'll strike a light."

The man struck a light and fixed a candle in a socket. He fumbled in a corner for the bottle, and was about to offer it to Crawley, when he was arrested by a look of silent horror on his visitor's face.

"Why, what is wrong now?"

"Look! look! look!" cried Crawley, trembling from head to foot. "Here it comes! there is its tail! Soon its eyes and teeth will catch light! It knows the work we have been at. Ah! ah! ah!"

The man looked round very uneasily. Crawley's way of pointing and glaring over one's head at some object behind one was anything but encouraging.

"What? where?"

"There! there! coming through the side of the tent. It can come through a wall!" and Crawley shook from head to foot.

"Why, that is your own shadow," said the man. "Why, what a faint-hearted one to shake at your own shadow."

"My shadow!" cried Crawley; "Heaven forbid! Have I got a tail?" screeched Crawley, reproachfully.

"That you have," said the man, "now I look at you full."

Crawley clapped his hand behind him, and to his horror he had a tail

CRAWLEY, who, what with the habit of cerebral hallucination due to brandy and the present flutter of his spirits and his conscience, had for a moment or two lost all the landmarks of probability, no sooner felt his hand encounter a tail--slight in size, but stiff as a pug's, and straight as a pointer's--than he uttered a dismal howl, and it is said that for a single moment he really suspected premature caudation had been inflicted on him for his crimes. But such delusions are short-lived. He slewed himself round after this tail in his efforts to see it, and squinting over his shoulder he did see it; and a warm liquid which he now felt stealing down his legs and turning cold as it went, opened his eyes still farther. It was a red spear sticking in his person--sticking tight. Jacky, who had never got so near him as he fancied, saw him about to get into a tent, and, unable to tomahawk him, did the best he could--flung a light javelin with such force and address that it pierced his coat and trousers and buried half its head in his flesh.

This spear-head, made of jagged fishbones, had to be cut out by the simple and agreeable process of making all round it a hole larger than itself. The operation served to occupy Crawley for the remaining part of the night, and exercised his vocal powers. This was the first time he had smarted in his penetrable part--the skin--and it made him very spiteful. Away went his compunction, and at peep of day he shambled out very stiff, no longer dreading, but longing to hear which of his enemies it was he had seen wrapped in flame, shrieking, and annihilated like the snuff of a candle. He came to the scene of action just as the sun rose.

But others were there before him. A knot of men stood round a black patch of scorched soil, round which were scattered little fragments of canvas burned to tinder, talking over a most mysterious affair of the night past.

It came out that the patrol, some of whom were present, had been ordered by Captain Robinson not to go their rounds as usual, but to watch in a tent near his own, since he expected an attack. Accustomed to keep awake on the move, but not in a recumbent posture, they had slept the sleep of infancy, till suddenly awakened by the sound of a pistol. Then they had run out, and had found the captain's tent in ashes, and a man lying near it sore hacked and insensible, but still breathing. They had taken him to their tent, but he had never spoken, and the affair was incomprehensible. While each was giving some wild opinion or another, a faint voice issued from the bowels of the earth, invoking aid.

Several ran to the spot, and at the bottom of an old claim full thirty feet deep they discovered on looking intently down the face of a man rising out of the clayey water. They lowered ropes and hauled him up.

"How did you come there, mate?"

"He had come into the camp in the dark, and, not knowing the ground, and having (to tell the truth) had a drop, he had fallen into the claim."

He was asked with an air of suspicion how long ago this had happened.

"More than an hour," replied the wily one.

Crawley looked at him, and being, unlike the others, acquainted with the man's features, saw, spite of the clay-cake he was enveloped in, that his whiskers were frizzled to nothing and his fiendish eyebrows gone. Then a sickening suspicion crept over him; he communicated it by a look to mephistopheles.

Acting on it he asked, with an artful appearance of friendly interest:

"But the men? the poor men that were in the tent?"

"What! the captain and his mate?"

"Yes!"

"Why, ye fool! they are half way to Sydney by now."

"Half way to Sydney?" and a ghastly look passed between the speaker and mephistopheles.

"Ay, lad! they rode off on Moore's two best nags at midnight."

"The captain had a belt round his waist crammed with dust and bank-notes," cried another, "and the farmer a nugget as big as a pumpkin on the pommel of his saddle."

Four hours had not elapsed ere Crawley and mephistopheles were on the road to Sydney, but not on horseback. Crawley had no longer funds to buy two horses, and, even if he had, he could not have borne the saddle after the barbarous surgery of last night---the lance-head was cut out with a cheese-knife. But he and mephistopheles joined a company of successful diggers going down with their swag. On the road they constantly passed smaller parties of unfortunate diggers, who had left the mine in despair when the weather broke and the claims filled with water; and the farther they went the more wretched was the condition of those they overtook. Ragged, shoeless, hungry, foot-sore, heart-sore, poor, broken pilgrims from the shrine of Mammon.

Now it befell that, forty miles on this side Sydney, they fell in with seven such ragged specters; and, while they were giving these a little food, up came from the city a large, joyful party--the eagerness of hope and cupidity on their faces.

"Hallo! are they mad, going up to the diggings in the wet weather!"

They were questioned.

A hundred-weight of gold had been found at the diggings, and all the town was turning out to find some more such prizes; and, in fact, every mile after this they met a party, great or small, ardent, sanguine, on an almost hopeless errand.

Such is the strange and fatal no-logic of speculation. For us the rare is to turn common, and, when we have got it, be rare as ever.

mephistopheles and Crawley parted at the suburb; the former was to go to certain haunts and form a gang to seize the rich prize. Meantime Crawley would enter the town and discover where the men were lodging. If in an inn, one of the gang must go there as a well-dressed traveler, and watch his opportunity. If in a lodging, other means.

Crawley found the whole city ringing with the great nugget. Crawley put eager questions, and received ready answers. He was shown the bank up to which the men had ridden in broad daylight; the one on the big horse had the nugget on his saddle; they had taken it, and broken it, and weighed it, and sold it in the bank parlor for three thousand eight hundred pounds. Crawley did not like this, he had rather they had not converted it into paper. His next question was, whether it was known where the men lodged.

"Known! I believe you; why, they are more thought of than the governor. Everybody runs to get a word with them, gentle or simple. You will find them at the 'Ship' inn."

To the "Ship" went Crawley. He dared not be too direct in his queries, so he put them in form of a statement.

"You have got some lucky ones here, that found the great nugget?"

"Well, we had! But they are gone--been gone this two hours. Do you know them?"

"Yes," said Crawley, without fear, as they were gone. "Where are they gone, do you know?"

"Why, home, I suppose; you chaps make your money out of us, but you all run home to spend it."

"What, gone to England!" gasped Crawley.

"Ay, look! there is the ship just being towed out of the harbor."

Crawley shambled, and tore, and ran, and was just in time to see the two friends standing with beaming faces on the vessel's deck as she glided out on her voyage home.

He sat down half stupid; mephistopheles went on collecting his gang in the suburbs.

The steamer cast off and came wheeling back; the ship spread her huge white plumage, and went proudly off to sea, the blue waves breaking white under her bows.

Crawley sat glaring at all this in a state of mental collapse.

THUS have I told in long and tedious strains how George Fielding went to Australia to make a thousand pounds, and how by industry, sobriety, and cattle, he did not make a thousand pounds, and how, aided with the help of a converted thief, this honest fellow did by gold digging, industry and sobriety, make several thousand pounds, and take them safe away home, spite of many wicked devices and wicked men.

Thus have I told how Mr. Meadows flung out his left hand into Australia to keep George from coming back to Susan with a thousand pounds, and how, spite of one stroke of success, his left hand eventually failed, and failed completely.

But his right?

Joyous as the first burst of summer were the months Susan passed after the receipt of George's happy letter. Many warm feelings combined in one stream of happiness in Susan's heart. Perhaps the keenest of all was pride at George's success. Nobody could laugh at George now, and insult her again there where she was most sensitive, by telling her that George was not good enough for her or any woman; and even those who set such store upon money-making would have to confess that George could do even that for love of her, as well as they could do it for love of themselves. Next to this her joy was greatest at the prospect of his speedy return.

And now she became joyfully impatient for further news, but not disappointed at his silence till two months had passed without another letter. Then, indeed, anxiety mingled now and then with her happiness. Then it was that Meadows, slowly and hesitatingly to the last, raised his hand and struck the first direct blow at her heart. He struck in the dark. He winced for her both before and after. Yet he struck.

One market-day a whisper passed through Farnborough that George Fielding had met with wonderful luck. That he had made his fortune by gold, and was going to marry a young lady out in Australia. Farmer Merton brought the whisper home. Meadows was sure he would.

Meadows did not come to the house for some days. He half feared to look upon his work; to see Susan's face agonized under his blow. At last he came. He watched her by stealth. He found he might have spared his qualms. She chatted as usual in very good spirits, and just before he went she told him the report with a smile of ineffable scorn.

She was simple, unsuspicious, and every way without a shield against a Meadows, but the loyal heart by its own virtue had turned the dagger's edge.

A week after this Jefferies brought Meadows a letter; it was from Susan to George. Meadows read it writhing. It breathed kind affection, with one or two demi-maternal cautions about his health, and to be very prudent for her sake. Not a word of doubt; there was, however, a postscript of which the following is the exact wording:

"P. S. It is all over Farnborough that you are going to be married to some one in Australia."

Two months more passed, and no letter from George. These two months told upon Susan; she fretted and became restless and irritable, and cold misgivings crept over her, and the anguish of suspense!

At last one day she unbosomed herself, though with hesitation, to a warm and disinterested friend; blushing all over with tearful eyes she confessed her grief to Mr. Meadows. "Don't tell father, sir; I hide my trouble from him as well as I can, but what does it mean George not writing to me these four months and three days? Do pray tell me what does it mean!" and Susan cried so piteously that Meadows winced at his success.

"Oh, Mr. Meadows! don't flatter me; tell me the truth." While he was exulting in her firmness, who demanded the truth, bitter or not, she continued: "Only don't tell me that I am forgotten!" And she looked so piteously in the oracle's face that he forgot everything in the desire to say something she would like him the better for saying; he muttered, "Perhaps he has sailed for home." He expected her to say, "And if he has he would have written to me before sailing." But instead of this Susan gave a little cry of joy.

"Ah! how foolish I have been. Mr. Meadows, you are a friend out of a thousand; you are as wise as I am foolish. Poor George! you will never let him know I was so wicked as to doubt him." And Susan brightened with joy and hope. The heart believes so readily the thing it longs should be true. She was happy all the rest of the evening.

Meadows went away mad with her for her folly, and with himself for his feebleness of purpose, and next market-day again the whisper went round the market that George Fielding was going to marry out there. This time a detail was sketched in: "It was a lady in the town of Bathurst." Old Merton brought this home and twitted his daughter. She answered haughtily that it was a falsehood. She would stake her life on George's fidelity.

"See, Mr. Meadows, they are all against poor George, all except you. But what does it mean? if he does not write or come soon I think I shall go mad."

"Report is a common liar; I would not believe anything till I saw it in black and white," said Meadows, doggedly.

"No more I will."

Soon after this William Fielding had a talk with Susan.

"Have you heard a report about George?"

"Yes! I have heard a rumor."

"You don't believe it, I hope."

"Why should I believe it?"

"I'm going to trace it up to the liar that forged it, if I can."

Susan suppressed her satisfaction at this resolution of Will Fielding's.

"Is it worth while?" asked she coldly.

"If I didn't think so, I shouldn't take that much trouble, not expecting any thanks."

"Have I said anything to offend you?" asked Susan, with a still more frigid tone.

The other did not trust himself to answer. But two days after he came again, and told her he had written a letter to George, telling him what reports were about, and begging for an answer whether or not there was any truth in them.

A gleam of satisfaction from Susan's eyes, but not a word. This man, who had once been George's rival at heart, was the last to whom she would openly acknowledge her doubts. Then Will went on to tell her that he had traced the rumor from one to another up to a stranger whose name nobody knew; "but I dare say Mr. Meadows has a notion."

"No!"

"Are you sure?"

"Yes! he would have told me if he had."

William gave a snort of incredulity, and hinted that probably Mr. Meadows himself was at the bottom of the scandal.

Now Meadows' artful conduct had fortified Susan against such a suspicion, and, being by nature a warm-hearted friend, she fired up for him, as she would have for Mr. Eden, or even for poor Will in his absence. She did it, too, in the most womanish way. She did not tell the young man that she had consulted Mr. Meadows, and that he had constantly discredited the report, and set her against believing it. Had she done this, she would have staggered the simple-minded Will; but no; she said to herself, "He has attacked a good friend of mine, I won't satisfy him so far as to give him reasons;" so she merely snubbed him.

"Oh, I know you are set against poor Mr. Meadows; he is a good friend of ours, of my father, and me, and of George, too."

"I wish you may not have to alter your mind," sneered Will.

"I will not without a reason."

"I will give you a reason; do you remember that day--"

"When you insulted him in his own house, and me into the bargain, Will?"

"Not you, Susan, leastways I hope not, but him I did, and am just as like to do it again; well, when you were gone, I took a thought, and I said, appearances deceive the wisest; I may be mistaken--"

"He! he!"

"I don't know what you are laughing at; and then, says I, it is his own house, after all, so I said, 'If I am wrong, and you don't mean to undermine my brother, take my hand;' and I gave it him."

"And be refused it?"

"No, Susan!"

"Well, then--"

"But, Susan," said William, solemnly, "his hand lay in mine like a stone."

"Really, now!"

"A lump of ice would be as near the mark."

"Well! is that the reason you promised me?" William nodded.

"William, you are a fool."

"Oh I am a fool now?"

"You go and insult a man, your superior in every respect, and the very next moment he is to give you his hand as warmly as to a friend, and an equal; you really are too foolish to go without a keeper, and if it was in any man's power to set me against poor George altogether you have gone the way to do it this twelve months past;" and Susan closed the conference abruptly.

It was William's fate to rivet Meadows' influence by every blow he aimed at it. For all that the prudent Meadows thought it worth his while to rid himself of this honest and determined foe, and he had already taken steps. He had discovered that this last month William Fielding, returning from market, had been seen more than once to stop and chat at one Mrs. Holiday's, a retired small tradeswoman in Farnborough. Now Mrs. Holiday was an old acquaintance of Meadows' and had given him sugar-plums thirty years ago. It suited his purpose to remember all of a sudden these old sugar-plums, and that Mrs. Holiday had lately told him she wanted to get out of the town and end her days upon turf.

There was a cottage, paddock and garden for sale within a hundred yards of "The Grove." Meadows bought them a good bargain, and offered them to the widow at a very moderate rent.

The widow was charmed. "Why, we can keep a cow, Mr. Meadows."

"Well, there is grass enough."

The widow took the cottage with enthusiasm.

Mrs. Holiday had a daughter, a handsome--a downright handsome girl, and a good girl into the bargain.

Meadows had said to himself: "It is not the old woman Will Fielding goes there for. Well, she will want some one to teach her how to farm that half acre of grass, and buy the cow and milk her. Friendly offices--chat coming and going--come in, Mr. Fielding, and taste your cow's cream!--and, when he has got a lass of his own, his eye won't be forever on mine."

William's letter to George went to the post-office, and from the post-office to a little pile of intercepted letters in Meadows' desk.

NEARLY eight months had now elapsed without a letter from George. Susan could no longer deceive herself with hopes. George was either false to her or dead. She said as much to her false friend. This inspired him with an artifice as subtle as unscrupulous. A letter had been brought to him by Jefferies, which he at once recognized as the planned letter from Crawley to another tool of his in Farnborough. This very day he set about a report that George was dead. It did not reach Susan so soon as he thought it would, for old Merton hesitated to tell her; but on the Sunday evening, with considerable reluctance and misgivings, he tried in a very clumsy way to prepare her for sad news.

But her mind had long been prepared for bitter tidings. Fancy eight weary months spent in passing every possible calamity before her imagination, death as often as any.

She fixed her eyes on the old man. "Father, George is dead!"

Old Merton hung his head, and made no reply.

That was enough. Susan crept from the room pale as ashes. She tottered, but she did not fall. She reached her room and locked herself in.

MR. MEADOWS did not visit Grassmere for some days; the cruel one distrusted his own firmness. When he did come he came with a distinct purpose. He found Merton alone.

"Susan sees no one. You have heard?"

"What?"

"Her sweetheart. He is dead."

"Why, how can that be? And who says so?"

"That is the news."

"Well, it is a falsehood!" said Mr. Meadows, coolly.

"I wish to Heaven it might," whispered old Merton, "for she won't live long after him."

Mr. Meadows then told Merton that he had spoken with a man who had got news of George Fielding not four months old, and he was in very good health.

"Will you tell Susan this?"

"Certainly."

Susan was called down. Meadows started at the sight of her. She was pale and hollow-eyed, and in these few days seemed ten years older. She was dressed all in black. "I am a murderer!" thought he. And remorse without one grain of honest repentance pierced his heart.

"Speak out, John," said the father, "the girl is not a fool. She has borne ill news, she can bear good. Can't you, Susan?"

"Yes, dear father, if it is God's will any good news should come to me." And she never took her eyes off Mr. Meadows, but belied her assumed firmness by quivering like an aspen leaf.

"Do you know Mr. Griffin?" asked Meadows.

"Yes!" replied Susan, still trembling gently, but all over.

"He has got a letter from Sydney from a little roguish attorney called Crawley. I heard him say with my own ears that Crawley tells him he had just seen George Fielding in the streets of Sydney, well and hearty."

"You are deceiving me out of kindness." (Her eyes fixed on his.)

"I am not. I wish I may die if the man is not as well as I am!"

Her eyes were never off his face, and at this moment she read for certain that it was true.

She uttered a cry of joy so keen it was painful to hear, and then she laughed and cried and sank into a chair laughing and crying in strong hysterics, that lasted till the poor girl almost fainted from exhaustion. Her joy was more violent and even terrible than her grief had been.

The female servants were called to assist her, and old Merton and Meadows left her in their hands, feeble, but calm and thankful. She even smiled her adieu to Meadows.

The next day Meadows called upon Griffin. "Let me look at that letter?" said he. "I want to copy a part of it."

"There has been one here before you," said Griffin.

"Who?"

"She did not give her name, but I think it must have been Miss Merton. She begged me hard to let her see the letter. I told her she might take it home with her. Poor thing! she gave me a look as if she could have eaten me."

"What else?" asked Meadows anxiously--his success had run ahead of his plot.

"She put it in her bosom."

"In her bosom?"

"Ay! and pressed her little white hands upon it as if she had got a treasure. I doubt it will be more like the asp in the Bible story, eh! sir?"

"There! I don't want your reflections," said Meadows, fiercely, but his voice quavered. The myrmidon was silenced.

Susan made her escape into a field called the Kynecroft, belonging to the citizens, and there she read the letter. It was a long, tiresome one, all about matters of business which she did not understand; it was only at the last page that she caught sight of the name she longed to see. She hurried down to it, and when she got to it with beating heart it was the fate of this innocent, loving woman to read these words:

"What luck some have. There is George Fielding, of the 'Grove Farm,' has made his fortune at the gold, and married yesterday to one of the prettiest girls in Sydney. I met them walking in the street to-day. She would not have looked at him but for the gold."

Susan uttered a faint moan, and sank down slowly on her knees, like some tender tree felled by a rude stroke; her eyes seemed to swim in a mist, she tried to read the cruel words again but could not; she put her hands before her eyes.

"He is alive," she said, "thank God, he is alive." And at last tears forced their way through her fingers. She took her handkerchief and dried her eyes. "Why do I cry for another woman's husband?" and the hot color of shame and of wounded pride burst even through her tears.

"I will not cry," said she, proudly, "he is alive--I will not cry--he has forgotten me; from this moment I will never shed another tear for one that is alive and unworthy of a tear. I will go home."

She went home, crying all the way. And now a partial success attended the deep Meadows' policy. It was no common stroke of unscrupulous cunning to plunge her into the very depths of woe in order to take her out of them. The effects were manifold, and all tended his way.

First she was less sorrowful than she had been before that deadly blow, for now the heart had realized a greater woe, and had the miserable comfort of the comparison; but, above all, new and strong passions had risen and battled fiercely with grief--anger and wounded pride.

Susan had self-respect and pride, too, perhaps a shade too much though less small vanity than have most persons of her moderate caliber.

What! had she wept and sighed all these months for a man who did not care for her?

What! had she defied sneers, and despised affectionate hints, and gloried openly in her love, to be openly insulted and betrayed!

What! had she shut herself from the world, and put on mourning and been seen in mourning for one who was not dead, but well and happy and married to another!

An agony of shame rushed over the wronged, insulted, humiliated beauty. She longed to fly from the world. She asked her father to leave Grassmere and go to some other farm a hundred miles away. She asked him suddenly, nervously, and so impetuously that the old man looked up in dismay.

"What! leave the farm where your mother lived with me, and where you were born. I should feel strange, girl; but"--and he gave a strange sigh--"mayhap I shall have to leave it whether I will or no."

Susan misunderstood him and colored with self-reproach. She said hastily: "No! no! Father, you shan't leave it for me. Forgive me, I am a wayward girl!"

And the strung nerves gave way, and tears gushed over the hot cheeks, as she clung to her father, and tried to turn the current of her despised love and bestow it all on that selfish old noodle. A great treasure went a-begging in Grassmere farmhouse.

Mr. Meadows called, but much to his chagrin Susan was never visible. "Would he excuse her? she was indisposed."

The next evening he came he found her entertaining four or five other farmers' daughters and a couple of young men. She was playing the piano to them and talking and laughing louder and faster than ever he had heard her in his life. He sat moody a little while and watched her uneasily, but soon took his line, and exerting his excellent social powers became the life of the party. But as he warmed Susan froze, as much as to say, "Somebody must play the fool to amuse these triflers--if you undertake it I need not." For all that the very attempt at society indicated what was passing in Susan's mind, and the deep Meadows invited all present to meet at his house in two days' time.

Meadows was now living in Isaac Levi's old house. He had examined it, found it a much nicer house for him than his new one--it was like himself, full of ins and outs, and it was more in the heart of business and yet quiet; for, though it stood in a row, yet it was as good as detached, because the houses on each side were unoccupied. They belonged to Jews, probably dependents on Isaac, for they had left the town about a twelvemonth after his departure and had never returned, though a large quantity of goods had been deposited in one of the houses.

Meadows contrived that this little party should lead to another. His game was to draw Susan into the world, and moreover have her seen in his company. She made no resistance, for her wounded pride said, "Don't let people know you are breaking your heart for one who does not care for you." She used to come to these parties radiant and playing her part with consummate resolution and success, and go home and spend the night in tears.

Meadows did not see the tears that followed these unusual efforts--perhaps he suspected them. Enough for him that Susan's pride and shame and indignation were set against her love, and, above all, against her grief, and that she was forming habits whose tendency at least was favorable to his views.

Another four months, and Susan, exhausted by conflicting passions, had settled down into a pensive languor, broken by gusts of bitter grief, which became rarer and rarer. Her health recovered itself, all but its elasticity. Her pride would not let her pine away. But her heart scarcely beat at all, and perhaps it was a good thing for her that a trouble of another kind came to gently stir it. Her father, who had for some months been moody and depressed, confessed to her that he had been speculating and was on the verge of ruin. This dreadful disclosure gave little more pain to Susan than if he had told her his head ached; but she put down her work and came and kissed him, and tried to console him.

"I must work harder, that is all, father. I am often asked to give a lesson on the piano-forte; I will do that for your sake, and don't you fret for me. What with the trifle my mother settled on me and my industry, I am above poverty, and you shall never see me repine."

In short, poor Susan took her father for a woman--adopted a line of consolation addressed to his affection, instead of his selfishness. It was not for her he was afflicted, it was for himself.

It was at this conjuncture that Meadows spoke out. There was no longer anything to be gained by delay. In fact, he could not but observe that since the fatal letter he appeared to be rather losing ground in his old character. There was nothing left him but to attack her in a new one. He removed the barrier from his patient impatience.

He found her alone one evening. He begged her to walk in the garden. She complied with an unsuspecting smile. Then he told her all he had suffered for her sake; how he had loved her this three years with all his soul--how he never thought to tell her this--how hard he had struggled against it--how he had run away from it, and after that how he had subdued it, or thought he had subdued it, to esteem--and how he had been rewarded by seeing that his visits and his talk had done her some good. "But now," said he, "that you are free, I have no longer the force to hide my love; now that the man I dared not interfere with has thrown away the jewel, it is not in nature that I should not beg to be allowed to take it up and wear it in my heart."

Susan listened; first with surprise, then with confusion and pain, then with terror at the violence of the man's passion; for, the long restraint removed, it overwhelmed him like a flood. Her bosom heaved with modest agitation, and soon the tears streamed down her cheeks at his picture of what he had gone through for her sake. She made shift to gasp out, "My poor friend!" But she ended almost fiercely: "Let no man ever hope for affection from me, for my heart is in the grave. Oh, that I was there, too!" And she ran sobbing away from him in spite of his entreaties.

Another man and not George had made a confession of love to her. His voice had trembled, his heart quivered, with love for her, and it was not George. So then another link was snapped. Others saw they had a right to love her now, and acted on it.

Meadows was at a loss, but he stayed away a week in silence, and thought and thought, and then he wrote a line begging permission to visit her as usual. "I have been so long used to hide my feelings, because they were unlawful, that I can surely hide them if I see they make you more unhappy than you would be without."

Susan replied that her advice to him was to avoid her as he would a pestilence. He came as usual, and told her he would take her commands, but could not take her advice. He would run all risks to his own heart. He was cheerful, chatty and never said a word of love; and this relieved Susan, so that the evening passed pleasantly. Susan, listless and indifferent to present events, and never accustomed, like Meadows, to act upon a preconceived plan, did not even observe what Meadows had gained by this sacrifice of his topic for a single night, viz., that after declaring himself her lover he was still admitted to the house. The next visit he was not quite so forbearing, yet still forbearing; and so on by sly gradations. It was every way an unequal contest. A great man against an average woman--a man of forty against a woman of twenty-two--a man all love and selfishness against a woman all affection and unselfishness. But I think his chief ally was a firm belief on Susan's part that he was the best of men; that from first to last of this affair his conduct had been perfection; that while George was true all his thought had been to console her grief at his absence; that he never would have spoken but for the unexpected treason of George, and then seeing her insulted and despised he had taken that moment to show her she was loved and honored. Oh, what an ungrateful girl she was that she could not love such a man!

Then her father was on the same side. "John Meadows seems down like, Susan. Do try and cheer him up a bit, I am sure he has often cheered thee."

"That he has, father."

Susan pitied Meadows. Pitying him, she forced herself at times to be gracious, and when she did he was so happy that she was alarmed at her power and drew in.

Old Merton saw now how the land lay, and he clung to a marriage between these two as his only hope. "John Meadows will pull me through, if he marries my Susan."

And so the two selfish ones had got the unselfish one between them, one pulling gently, the other pushing quietly, but both without intermission. Thus days and days rolled on.

Meadows now came four times a week instead of two, and courted her openly, and beamed so with happiness that she had not always the heart to rob him of this satisfaction, and he overwhelmed her with kindness and attention of every sort, and, if any one else was present, she was sure to see how much he was respected; and this man whom others courted was her slave. This soothed the pride another had wounded.

One day he poured out his love to her with such passion that he terrified her, and the next time he came she avoided him.

Her father remonstrated. "Girl, you will break that man's heart if you are so unkind to him; he could not say a word because you shunned him like. Why, your heart must be made of stone." A burst of tears was all the reply.

At last two things presented themselves to this poor girl's understanding; that for her there was no chance of earthly happiness, do what she would, and that, strangely enough, she the wretched one had it in her power to make two other beings happy, her father and good Mr. Meadows.

Now, a true woman lives to make others happy. She rarely takes the self-contained views of life men are apt to do.

It passed through Susan's mind: "If I refuse to make these happy, why do I live, what am I on the earth for at all?"

It seemed cruel to her to refuse happiness when she could bestow it without making herself two shades more miserable than she was.

Despair and unselfishness are evil counselors in a scheming, selfish world. The life-blood had been drained out of her heart by so many cruel blows, by the long waiting, the misgivings, the deep woe when she believed George dead, the bitter grief and mortification and sense of wrong when she found he was married to another.

Many of us, male and female, treated as Susan imagined herself treated, have taken another lover out of pique. Susan did not so. She was bitterly piqued, but she did not make that use of her pique.

Despair of happiness, pity, and pure unselfishness, these stood John Meadows' friends with this unhappy dupe, and perhaps my male readers will be incredulous as well as shocked when I relate the manner in which at last this young creature, lovely as an angel, in the spring of life, loving another still, and deluding herself to think she hated and despised him, was one afternoon surprised into giving her hand to a man for whom she did not really care a button.

It was as if she had said: "Is it really true your happiness depends on me? then take me--quick--before my courage fails--are you happy now, my poor soul?" On the other side there were the passionate pleadings of a lover; the deep, manly voice broken with supplication, the male eyes glistening, the diabolical mixture of fraud and cunning with sincerity.

At the first symptom of yielding the man seized her as the hawk the dove. He did not wait for a second hint. He poured out gratitude and protestations. He thanked her, and blessed her, and in his manly ardor caught her to his bosom.

She shut her eyes, and submitted to the caress as to an executioner.

"Pray let me go to my father," she whispered.

She came to her father and told him what she had done, and kissed him, and when he kissed her in return, that rare embrace seemed to her her reward.

Meadows went home on wings--he was in a whirlwind of joy and triumph.

"Aha! what will not a strong will do?" He had no fears, no misgivings. He saw she did not really like him even, but he would make her love him! Let him once get her into his house and into his arms, by degrees she should love him; ay, she should adore him! He held that a young and virtuous woman cannot resist the husband who remains a lover, unless he is a fool as well as a lover. She could resist a man, but hardly the hearth, the marriage-bed, the sacred domestic ties, and a man whose love should be always present, always ardent, yet his temper always cool, and his determination to be loved unflinching.

With this conviction, Meadows had committed crimes of the deepest dye to possess Susan. Villain as he was, it may be doubted whether he would have committed these felonies had he doubted for an instant her ultimate happiness. The unconquerable dog said to himself: "The day will come that I will tell her how I have risked my soul for her; how I have played the villain for her; and she shall throw her arms round my neck, and bless me for committing all those crimes to make her so happy against her will."

It remained to clinch the nail.

He came to Grassmere every day; and one night that the old man was telling Susan and him how badly things were going with him, he said, with a cheerful laugh: "I wonder at you, father-in-law, taking on that way. Do you think Susan will let you be uncomfortable for want of a thousand pounds or two?"

Now this remark was slyly made while Susan was at the other end of the room, so that she could hear it, but was not supposed to. He did not look at her for some time, and then her face was scarlet.

The next day he said privately to old Merton: "The day Susan and I go to church together, you must let me take your engagements and do the best I can with them."

"Ah, John, you are a friend! but it will take a pretty deal to set me straight again."

"How much? Two thousand?"

"More, I am afraid, and too much--"

"Too much for me to take out of my pocket for a stranger; but not for my wife's father--not if it was ten times that."

From that hour Meadows had an ally at Grassmere, working heart and soul to hasten the wedding-day.

Meadows longed for this day; for he could not hide from himself that as a lover he made no advances. Susan's heart was like a globe of ice; he could get no hold of it anywhere. He burned with rage when the bitter truth was forced on him, that, with the topic of George Fielding, he had lost those bright, animated looks of affection she used to bestow on him, and now could only command her polite attention, not always that. Once he ventured on a remonstrance--only once.

She answered coldly that she could not feign; indifferent she was to everything on earth, indifferent she always should be. But for that indifference she should never have consented to marry him. Let him pause then, and think what he was doing, or, better still, give up this folly, and not tie an icicle like her to an honest and warm heart like his.

The deep Meadows never ventured on that ground again. He feared she wanted to be off the marriage, and he determined to hurry it on. He pressed her to name the day. She would not.

"Would she let him name it?"

"No."

Her father came to Meadows' assistance. "I'll name it," said he.

"Father! no! no!"

Old Merton then made a pretense of selecting a day. Rejected one day for one reason, another for another, and pitched on a day only six weeks distant.

The next day Meadows bought the license. "I thought you would like that better than being cried in church, Susan." Susan thanked him and said, "Oh, yes."

That evening he had a note from her in which "she humbly asked his pardon, but she could not marry him; he must excuse her. She trusted to his generosity to let the matter drop, and forgive a poor brokenhearted girl who had behaved ill from weakness of judgment, not lightness of heart."

Two days after this, which remained unanswered, her father came to her in great agitation and said to her: "Have you a mind to have a man's death upon your conscience?"

"Father!"

"I have seen John Meadows, and he is going to kill himself. What sort of a letter was that to write to the poor man? Says he, 'It has come on me like a thunder-clap.' I saw a pistol on his table, and he told me he wouldn't give a button to live. You ought to be ashamed of yourself trifling with folks' hearts so."

"I trifle with folks' hearts! Oh! what shall I do!" cried Susan.

"Think of others as well as yourself," replied the old man in a rage. "Think of me."

"Of you, dear father? Does not your Susan think of you?"

"No! what will become of me if the man kills himself? He is all I have to look to, to save me from ruin."

"What, then?" cried Susan, coloring scarlet, "it is not his life you care for, it is his means of being useful to us! Poor Mr. Meadows! He has no friend but me. I will give you a line to him." The line contained these words: "Forgive me."

Half an hour after receipt of it Meadows was at the farm. Susan was going to make some faint apology. He stopped her and said: "I know you like to make folk happy. I have got a job for you. A gentleman, a friend of mine in Cheshire, wants a bailiff. He has written to me. A word from me will do the business. Now is there any one you would like to oblige? The place is worth five hundred a year." Susan was grateful to him for waiving disagreeable topics. She reflected and said: "Ah! but he is no friend of yours."

"What does that matter if he is yours?"

"Will Fielding."

"With all my heart. Only my name must not be mentioned. You are right. He can marry on this. They would both have starved in 'The Grove.'"

Thus he made the benevolent girl taste the sweets of power. "You will be asked to do many a kind action like this when you are Mrs. Meadows." So he bribed father and daughter each after their kind.

The offer came in form from the gentleman to Will Fielding. He and Miss Holiday had already been cried in church. They were married, and went off to Cheshire.

So Meadows got rid of Will Fielding at a crisis. When it suited his strategy he made his enemy's fortune with as little compunction as he would have ruined him. A man of iron! Cold iron, hot iron, whatever iron was wanted.

Mr. and Mrs. Fielding gone off to Cheshire, and Mrs. Holiday after them on a visit of domestic instruction, Meadows publicly announced his approaching marriage with Miss Merton. The coast being clear, he clinched the last nail. From this day there were gusts of repugnance, but not a shadow of resistance on Susan's side. It was to be.

The weather was fine, and every evening this man and woman walked together. The woman envied by all the women; the man by all the men. Yet they walked side by side like the ghosts of lovers. And, since he was her betrothed, one or two iron-gray hairs in the man's head had turned white, and lines deepened in his face. The victim had unwittingly revenged herself.

He had stabbed her heart again and again, and drained it. He had battered this poor heart till it had become more like leather than flesh and blood, and now he wanted to nestle in it and be warmed by it. To kill the affections and revive them at will. No!!!!

She tried to give happiness and to avoid giving pain, but her heart of hearts was inaccessible. The town had capitulated, but the citadel was empty yet impregnable. And there were moments when flashes of hate mingled with the steady flame of this unhappy man's love, and he was tempted to kill her and himself.

But these weaknesses passed like air, the iron purpose stood firm. This day week they were to be married. Meadows counted the days and exulted; he had faith in the magic ring. It was on this Monday evening then they walked arm in arm in the field, and it so happened that Meadows was not speaking of love, but of a scheme for making all the poor people in Grassmere comfortable, especially of keeping the rain out of their roofs and the wind out of what they vulgarly, but not unreasonably, called their windys, and Susan's color was rising and her eyes brightening at this the one interesting side marriage offered--to make people happy near her and round about her, and she cast a look of gratitude upon her companion--a look that, coming from so lovely a face, might very well pass for love. While thus pleasantly employed the pair suddenly encountered a form in a long bristling beard, who peered into their faces with a singular expression of strange and wild curiosity and anxiety, but did not stop; he was making toward Farnborough.

Susan was a little startled. "Who is that?"

"I don't know."

"He looked as if he knew us."

"A traveler, I think, dearest. The folk hereabouts have not got to wear those long beards yet."

"Why did you start when he passed us?"

"Did I start, Susan?"

"Your arm twitched me."

"You must have fancied it," replied Meadows, with a sickly smile; "but, come, Susan, the dew is falling, you had better make toward home."

He saw her safe home, then, instead of waiting to supper as usual, got his horse out and rode to the town full gallop.

"Any one been here for me?"

"Yes! a stranger."

"With a long beard?"

"Why, yes, he had."

"He will come again?"

"In half an hour."

"Show him into my room when he comes, and admit no one else."

Meadows was hardly seated in his study and his candles lighted when the servant ushered in his visitor.

"Shut both the doors, and you can go to bed. I will let Mr. Richards out."

"Well?"

"Well, we have done the trick between us, eh?"

"What made you come home without orders?" asked Meadows, somewhat sternly.

"Why, you know as well as me, sir; you have seen them?"

"Who?"

"George Fielding and his mate."

Meadows started. "How should I see them?"

"Sir! Why, they are come home. They gave me the slip, and got away before me. I followed them. They are here. They must be here." Crawley, not noticing Meadows' face, went on. "Sir, when I found they had slipped out of the camp on horseback, and down to Sydney, and saw them with my own eyes go out of the harbor for England, I thought I should have died on the spot. I thought I should never have the courage to face you, but when I met you arm in arm, her eye smiling on you, I knew it was all right then. When did the event come off?"

"What event?"

"The marriage, sir--you and the lady. She is worth all the trouble she has given us."

"You fool," roared Meadows, "we are not married. The wedding is to be this day week!" Crawley started and gasped, "We are ruined, we are undone!"

"Hold your bawling," cried Meadows, fiercely, "and let me think." He buried his face in his hands; when he removed them, he was gloomy but self-possessed. "They are not in England, Crawley, or we should have seen them. They are on the road. You sailed faster than they; passed them at night, perhaps. They will soon be here. My own heart tells me they will be here before Monday. Well, I will beat them still. I will be married Thursday next." The iron man then turned to Crawley, and sternly demanded how he had let the man slip.

Crawley related all, and as he told his tale the tone of Meadows altered. He no longer doubted the zeal of his hireling. He laid his hand on his brow and more than once he groaned and muttered half-articulate expressions of repugnance. At the conclusion he said moodily: "Crawley, you have served me well--too well! All the women upon earth were not worth a murder, and we have been on the brink of several. You went beyond your instructions."

"No, I did not," replied Crawley; "I have got them in my pocket. I will read them to you. See! there is no discretion allowed me. I was to bribe them to rob."

"Where do I countenance the use of deadly weapons?"

"Where is there a word against deadly weapons?" asked Crawley, sharply. "Be just to me, sir," he added in a more whining tone. "You know you are a man that must and will be obeyed. You sent me to Australia to do a certain thing, and you would have flung me to perdition if I had stuck at anything to do it. Well, sir, I tried skill without force--look here," and he placed a small substance like white sugar on the table.

"What is that?"

"Put that in a man's glass he will never taste it, and in half an hour he will sleep you might take the clothes off his back. Three of us watched months and months for a chance, but it was no go; those two were teetotal or next door it."

"I wish I had never sent you out."

"Why," replied Crawley, "there is no harm done, no blood has been spilled except on our own side. George Fielding is coming home all right. Give him up the lady, and he will never know you were his enemy."

"What!" cried Meadows, "wade through all these crimes for nothing? Lie and feign, and intercept letters, and rob and all but assassinate---and fail? Wade in crime up to my middle, and then wade back again without the prize! Do you see this pistol? it has two barrels; if she and I are ever parted it shall be this way--I'll send her to heaven with one barrel, and myself to hell with the other."

There was a dead silence! Crawley returned to their old relation, and was cowed by the natural ascendency of the greater spirit.

"You need not look like a girl at me," said Meadows, "most likely it won't come to that. It is not easy to beat me, and I shall try every move man's wit can devise--this last," said he, in a voice of iron, touching the pistol as it lay on the table.

There was another pause. Then Meadows rose and said calmly: "You look tired, you shall have a bottle of my old port; and my own heart is staggered, but it is only for a moment." He struck his hand upon his breast, and walked slowly from the room. And Crawley heard his step descend to the hall, and then to the cellar; and the indomitable character of the man rang in his solid tread.

Crawley was uneasy. "Mr. Meadows is getting wildish; it frightens me to see such a man as him burst out like that. He is not to be trusted with a loaded pistol. Ah! and I am in his secrets, deep in his secrets; great men sweep away little folk that know too much. I never saw him with a pistol before." All this passing rapidly through his head, Crawley pounced on the pistol, took off the caps, whipped out a little bottle, and poured some strong stuff into the caps that loosened the detonating powder directly; then with a steel pen he picked it all out and replaced the caps, their virtue gone, before Mr. Meadows returned with two bottles; and the confederates sat in close conclave till the gray of morning broke into the room.

The great man gave but few orders to his subordinate, for this simple reason, that the game had fallen into his own hands.

Still there was something for Crawley to do. He was to have an officer watching to arrest Will Fielding on the old judgment should he, which was hardly to be expected, come to kick up a row and interrupt the wedding. And to-morrow he was to take out a writ against his "father-in-law." Mr. Meadows played a close game. He knew that things are not to be got when they are wanted. His plan was to have everything ready that might be wanted long before it was wanted.

But most of the night passed in relation of what had already taken place, and Crawley was the chief speaker, and magnified his services. He related from his own point of view all that I have told, and Meadows listened with all his soul and intelligence.

At the attack on Mr. Levi, Meadows chuckled. "The old heathen," said he, contemptuously, "I have beat him anyway."

"By the way, sir, have you seen anything of him?" asked Crawley.

"No."

"He is not come home, then."

"Not that I know of; have you any reason to think he has?"

"No, only he left the mine directly after they pelted him; but he would not leave the country any the more for that, and money to be made in it by handfuls."

"Now, Crawley, go and get some sleep. A cold bath for me and then on horseback. I must breakfast at Grassmere."

"Great man, sir! great man! You will beat them yet, sir. You have beat Mr. Levi. Here we are in his house; and he driven away to lay his sly old bones at the Antipodes. Ha! ha! ha!"

The sun came in at the window, and the long conference broke up, and, strange to say, it broke into three. Crawley home to sleep. Meadows to Grassmere. Isaac Levi to smoke an Eastern pipe, and so meditate with more tranquil pulse how to strike with deadliest effect these two, his insolent enemies.

Siste viator--and guess that riddle.

ISAAC LEVI, rescued by George Fielding, reached his tent smarting with pain and bitter insult; he sat on the floor pale and dusty, and anathematized his adversaries in the Hebrew tongue. Wrath still boiling in his heart, he drew out his letters and read them. Then grief mingled with his anger. Old Cohen, his friend and agent and coeval, was dead. Another self dead.

Besides the hint that this gave him to set his house in order, a distinct consideration drew Isaac now to England. He had trusted much larger interests to old Cohen than he was at all disposed to leave in the hands of Cohen's successors, men of another generation, "progeniem vitiosiorem," he sincerely believed.

Another letter gave him some information about Meadows that added another uneasiness to those he already felt on George's account. Hence his bitter disappointment when he found George gone from the mine, the date of his return uncertain. Hence, too, the purchase of Moore's horses, and the imploring letter to George--measures that proved invaluable to that young man, whose primitive simplicity and wise humility led him not to question the advice of his elder, but obey it.

And so it was that, although the old Jew sailed home upon his own interests, yet during the voyage George Fielding's assumed a great importance, direct and incidental. Direct, because the old man was warm with gratitude to him; indirect, because he boiled over with hate of George's most dangerous enemy. And, as he neared the English coast, the thought that though he was coming to Farnborough he could not come home, grew bitterer and bitterer, and then that he should find his enemy and his insulter in the very house sacred by the shadows of the beloved and dead!!

Finding in Nathan a youth of no common fidelity and shrewdness, Isaac confided in him; and Nathan, proud beyond description of the confidence bestowed on him by one so honored in his tribe, enlisted in his cause with all the ardor of youth tempered by Jewish address.

Often they sat together on the deck, and the young Jewish brain and the old Jewish brain mingled and digested a course of conduct to meet every imaginable contingency; for the facts they at present possessed were only general and vague.

The first result of all this was that these two crept into the town of Farnborough at three o'clock one morning; that Isaac took out a key and unlocked the house that stood next to Meadows' on the left hand; that Isaac took secret possession of the first floor, and Nathan open but not ostentatious possession of the ground-floor, with a tale skillfully concocted to excite no suspicion whatever that Isaac was in any way connected with his presence in the town. Nathan, it is to be observed, had never been in Farnborough before.

The next morning they worked. Nathan went out, locking the door after him, to execute two commissions. He was to find out what the young Cohens were doing, and how far they were likely to prove worthy of the trust reposed in their father; and what Susan Merton was doing, and whether Meadows was courting her or not. The latter part of Nathan's task was terribly easy.

The young man came home late at night, locked the door, made a concerted signal, and was admitted to the senior presence. He found him smoking his Eastern pipe. Nathan with dejected air told him that he had good news; that the Cohens not only thought themselves wiser than their father, which was permissible, but openly declared it, which he, though young, had observed to be a trait confined to very great fools.

"It is well said, my son," quoth Isaac, smoking calmly, "and the other business?"

"Oh, master!" said Nathan, "I bring still worse tidings of her. She is a true Nazarite, a creature without faith. She is betrothed to the man you hate, and whom I, for your sake, hate even to death."

They spoke in an Eastern dialect, which I am paraphrasing here and translating there, according to the measure of my humble abilities. Isaac sucked his pipe very fast; this news was a double blow to his feelings. "If she be indeed a Nazarite without faith, let her go; but judge not the simple hastily. First, let me know how far woman's frailty is to blame; how far man's guile--for not for nothing was Crawley sent out to the mine by Meadows. Let me consider;" and he smoked calmly again.

After a long silence, which Nathan was too respectful to break, the old man gave him his commission for to-morrow. He was to try and discover why Susan Merton had written no letters for many months to George; and why she had betrothed herself to the foe. "But reveal nothing in return," said Isaac, "neither ask more than three questions of any one person, lest they say, 'Who is this that being a Jew asks many questions about a Nazarite maiden, and why asks he them?'"

At night Nathan returned full of intelligence. She loved the young man Fielding. She wrote letters to him and received letters from him, until gold was found in Australia. But after this he wrote to her no more letters, wherefore her heart was troubled.

"Ah! and did she write to him?"

"Yes! but received no answer, nor any letter for many months."

"Ah!"(puff!) (puff!)

"Then came a rumor that he was dead, and she mourned for him after the manner of her people many days. Verily, master, I am vexed for the Nazarite maiden, for her tale is sad. Then came a letter from Australia, that said he is not dead, but married to a stranger. Then the maiden said: 'Behold now this twelve months he writes not to me, this then is true'; and she bowed her head, and the color left her cheek. Then this Meadows visited her, and consoled her day by day. And there are those who confidently affirm that her father said often to her, 'Behold now I am a man stricken in years, and the man Meadows is rich'; so the maiden gave her hand to the man, but whether to please the old man her father, or out of the folly and weakness of females, thou, O Isaac, son of Shadrach, shalt determine; seeing that I am young, and little versed in the ways of women, knowing this only by universal report, that they are fair to the eye but often bitter to the taste."

"Aha!" cried Isaac, "but I am old, O Nathan, son of Eli, and with the thorns of old age comes one good fruit, 'experience.' No letters came to him, yet she wrote many. None came to her, yet he wrote many. All this is transparent as glass--here has been fraud as well as guile."

Nathan's eye sparkled. "What is the fraud, master?"

"Nay, that I know not, but I will know!"

"But how, master?"

"By help of thine ears, or my own!"

Nathan looked puzzled. So long as Mr. Levi shut himself up a close prisoner on the first floor what could he hear for himself?

Isaac read the look and smiled. He then rose, and, putting his finger to his lips, led the way to his own apartments. At the staircase-door, which even Nathan had not yet passed, he bade the young man take off his shoes; he himself was in slippers. He took Nathan into a room, the floor of which was entirely covered with mattresses. A staircase, the steps of which were covered with horsehair, went by a tolerably easy slope and spiral movement nearly up to the cornice. Of this cornice a portion about a foot square swung back on a well-oiled hinge, and Isaac drew out from the wall with the utmost caution a piece of gutta-percha piping, to this he screwed on another piece open at the end, and applied it to his ear.

Nathan comprehended it all in a moment. His master could overhear every word uttered in Meadows' study. Levi explained to him that ere he left his old house he had put a new cornice in the room he thought Meadows would sit in, a cornice so deeply ornamented that no one could see the ear he left in it, and had taken out bricks in the wall of the adjoining house and made the other arrangements they were inspecting together. Mr. Levi further explained that his object was simply to overhear and counteract every scheme Meadows should form. He added that he never intended to leave Farnborough for long. His intention had been to establish certain relations in that country, buy some land, and return immediately; but the gold discovery had detained him.

"But, master," said Nathan, "suppose the man had taken his business to the other side of his house?"

"Foolish youth," replied Isaac, "am I not on both sides of him!!"

"Ah! What, is there another on the other?" Isaac nodded.

Thus, while Nathan was collecting facts, Isaac had been watching, "patient as a cat, keen as a lynx," at his ear-hole, and heard--nothing.

Now the next day Nathan came in hastily long before the usual hour. "Master, another enemy is come--the man Crawley! I saw him from the window; he saw not me. What shall I do?"

"Keep the house all day. I would not have him see you. He would say, 'Aha! the old Jew is here, too.'" Nathan's countenance fell. He was a prisoner now as well as his master.

The next morning, rising early to prepare their food, he was surprised to find the old man smoking his pipe down below.

"All is well, my son. My turn has come. I have had great patience, and great is the reward." He then told him with natural exultation the long conference he had been secretly present at between Crawley and Meadows--a conference in which the enemy had laid bare, not his guilt only, but the secret crevice in his coat of mail. "She loves him not!" cried Levi, with exultation. "She is his dupe! With a word I can separate them and confound him utterly."

"Oh, master!" cried the youth eagerly, "speak that word to-day, and let me be there and hear it spoken if I have favor in your eyes."

"Speak it to-day!" cried Levi, with a look of intense surprise at Nathan's simplicity. "Go to, foolish youth!" said he; "what, after I have waited months and months for vengeance, would you have me fritter it away for want of waiting a day or two longer? No, I will strike, not the empty cup from his hand, but the full cup from his lips. Aha! you have seen the Jew insulted and despised in many lands; have patience now and you shall see how he can give blow for blow; ay! old, and feeble, and without a weapon, can strike his adversary to the heart."

Nathan's black eye flashed. "You are the master, I the scholar," said he. "All I ask is to be permitted to share the watching for your enemy's words, since I may not go abroad while it is day."

Thus the old and young lynx lay in ambush all day. And at night the young lynx prowled, but warily, lest Crawley should see him; and every night brought home some scrap of intelligence.

To change the metaphor, it was as though while the Western spider wove his artful web round the innocent fly, the Oriental spider wove another web round him, the threads of which were so subtle as to be altogether invisible. Both East and West leaned with sublime faith on their respective gossamers nor remembered that "Dieu dispose."

MEADOWS rode to Grassmere, to try and prevail with Susan to be married on Thursday next, instead of Monday. As he rode he revolved every argument he could think of to gain her compliance. He felt sure she was more inclined to postpone the day than to advance it, but something told him his fate hung on this: "These two men will come home on Monday. I am sure of it. Ay, Monday morning, before we can wed. I will not throw a chance away; the game is too close." Then he remembered with dismay that Susan had been irritable and snappish just before parting yester eve--a trait she had never exhibited to him before. When he arrived, his heart almost failed him, but after some little circumlocution and excuse he revealed the favor, the great favor, he was come to ask. He asked it. She granted it without the shade of a demur. He was no less surprised than delighted, but the truth is that very irritation and snappishness of yesterday was the cause of her consenting; her conscience told her she had been unkind, and he had been too wise to snap in return. So now he benefited by the reaction and little bit of self-reproach. For do but abstain from reproaching a good girl who has been unjust or unkind to you, and ten to one if she does not make you the amemde by word or deed--most likely the latter, for so she can soothe her tender conscience without grazing her equally sensitive pride. Poor Susan little knew the importance of the concession she made so easily.

Meadows galloped home triumphant. But two whole days now between him and his bliss! And that day passed and Tuesday passed. The man lived three days and nights in a state of tension that would have killed some of us or driven us mad; but his intrepid spirit rode the billows of hope and fear like a petrel. And the day before the wedding it did seem as if his adverse fate got suddenly alarmed and made a desperate effort and hurled against him every assailant that could be found. In the morning came his mother, and implored him ere it was too late to give up this marriage. "I have kept silence, yea even from good words," said the aged woman; "but at last I must speak. John, she does not love you. I am a woman and can read a woman's heart; and you fancied her long before George Fielding was false to her, if false he ever was, John."

The old woman said the whole of this last sentence with so much meaning that her son was stung to rage, and interrupted her fiercely: "I looked to find all the world against me, but not my own mother. No matter, so be it; the whole world shan't turn me, and those I don't care to fight I'll fly."

And he turned savagely on his heel and left the old woman there shocked and terrified by his vehemence. She did not stay there long. Soon the scarlet cloak and black bonnet might have been seen wending their way slowly back to the little cottage, the poor old tidy bonnet drooping lower than it was wont. Meadows came back to dinner; he had a mutton-chop in his study, for it was a busy day. While thus employed there came almost bursting into the room a man struck with remorse--Jefferies, the recreant postmaster.

"Mr. Meadows, I can carry on this game no longer, and I won't for any man living!" He then in a wild, loud, and excited way went on to say how the poor girl had come a hundred times for a letter, and looked in his face so wistfully, and once she had said: "Oh, Mr. Jefferies, do have a letter for me!" and how he saw her pale face in his dreams, and little he thought when he became Meadows' tool the length the game was to be carried.

Meadows heard him out; then simply reminded him of his theft, and assured him with an oath that if he dared to confess his villainy--

"My villainy?" shrieked the astonished postmaster.

"Whose else? You have intercepted letters--not I. You have abused the public confidence--not I. So if you are such a fool and sneak as to cut your throat by peaching on yourself, I'll cry louder than you, and I'll show you have emptied letters as well as stopped them. Go home to your wife, and keep quiet, or I'll smash both you and her."

"Oh, I know you are without mercy, and I dare not open my heart while I live; but I will beat you yet, you cruel monster. I will leave a note for Miss Merton, confessing all, and blow out my brains to-night in the office."

The man's manner was wild and despairing. Meadows eyed him sternly. He said with affected coolness: "Jefferies, you are not game to take your own life."

"Ain't I?" was the reply.

"At least I think not."

"To-night will show."

"I must know that before night," cried Meadows, and with the word he sprang on Jefferies and seized him in a grasp of iron, and put a pistol to his head.

"Ah! no! Mr. Meadows. Mercy! mercy!" shrieked the man, in an agony of fear.

"All right," said Meadows, coolly putting up the pistol. "You half imposed on me, and that is something for you to brag of. You won't kill yourself, Jefferies; you are not the stuff. Give over shaking like an aspen, and look and listen. You are in debt. I've bought up two drafts of yours--here they are. Come to me to-morrow, after the wedding, and I will give you them to light your pipe with."

"Oh, Mr. Meadows, that would be one load off my mind."

"You are short of cash, too; come to me--after the wedding, and I'll give you fifty pounds cash."

"You are very liberal, sir. I wish it was in a better cause."

"Now go home, and don't be a sneak and a fool--till after the wedding, or I will sell the bed from under your wife's back, and send you to the stone-jug. Be off."

Jefferies crept away, paralyzed in heart, and Meadows, standing up, called out in a rage: "Are there any more of you that hope to turn John Meadows? then come on, come a thousand strong, with the devil at your back--and then I'll beat you!" And for a moment the respectable man was almost grand; a man-rock standing braving earth and heaven.

"Hist! Mr. Meadows." He turned, and there was Crawley. "A word, sir. Will Fielding is in the town, in such a passion."

"Come to stop the wedding?"

"He was taking a glass of ale at the 'Toad and Pickax,' and you might hear him all over the yard."

"What is he going to do?"

"Sir, he has bought an uncommon heavy whip; he was showing it in the yard. 'This is for John Meadows' back,' said he, 'and I will give it him before the girl he has stolen from my brother. If she takes a dog instead of a man, it shall be a beaten dog,' says he."

Meadows rang the bell. "Harness the mare to the four-wheeled chaise. You know what to do, Crawley."

"Well, I can guess."

"But first get him told that I am always at Grassmere at six o'clock."

"But you won't go there this evening, of course."

"Why not?"

"Aren't you afraid he--"

"Afraid of Will Fielding? Why, you have never looked at me. I do notice your eyes are always on the ground. Crawley, when I was eighteen, one evening (it was harvest home, and all the folk had drunk their wit and manners out) I found a farmer's wife in a lane, hemmed in by three great ignorant brutes that were for kissing her, or some nonsense, and she crying help and murder and ready to faint with fright. It was a decent woman, and a neighbor, so I interfered as thus: I knocked the first fellow senseless on his back with a blow before they knew of me, and then the three were two. I fought the two, giving and taking for full ten minutes, and then I got a chance and one went down. I put my foot on his neck and kept him down for all he could do, and over his body I fought the best man of the lot, and thrashed him so that his whole mug was like a ball of beetroot. When he was quite sick he ran one way, and t'other got up roaring and ran another, and they had to send a hurdle for No. 1. Dame Fielding gave me of her own accord what all the row was about, and more than one, and hearty ones, too, I assure you, and had me in to supper, and told her man, and he shook my hand a good one."

"Why, sir, you don't mean to say the woman you fought for was Mrs. Fielding."

"But I tell you it was, and I had those two boys on my knee, two chubby toads, pulling at my curly hair--! why do I talk of these things? Oh, I remember, it was to show you I am not a man that can be bullied. I am a much better man than I was at eighteen. I won't be married in a black eye if I can help it. But, when I am once married, here I stand against all comers, and if you hear them grumble or threaten you, tell them that any Sunday afternoon, when there is nothing better to be done, I'll throw my cap into the ring and fight all the Fieldings that ever were pupped, one down another come on." Then turning quite cool and contemptuous all in a moment, he said, "These are words, and we have work on hand;" and, even as he spoke, he strode from the room pattered after by Crawley.

At six o'clock Meadows and Susan were walking arm in arm in the garden. Presently they saw a man advancing toward them, with his right hand behind him. "Why, it is Will Fielding," cried Susan, "come to thank you."

"I think not, by the look of him," replied Meadows, coolly.

"Susan, will you be so good as to take your hand from that man's arm. I have got a word to say to him."

Susan did more than requested, seeing at once that mischief was coming. She clung to William's right arm, and while he ground his teeth with ineffectual rage, for she was strong, as her sex are strong, for half a minute, and to throw her off he must have been much rougher with her than he chose to be, three men came behind unobserved by all but Meadows, and captured him on the old judgment. And, Crawley having represented him as a violent man, they literally laid the grasp of the law on him.

"But I have got the money to pay it," remonstrated William.

"Pay it, then."

"But my money is at home, give me two days. I'll write to my wife and she will send it me." The officers, with a coarse laugh, told him he must come with them meantime.

Meadows whispered Susan: "I'll pay it for him to-morrow."

They took off William Fielding in Meadows' four-wheeled chaise.

"Where are they taking him, John?"

"To the county jail."

"Oh, don't let them take him there. Can you not trust him?"

"Yes."

"Then why not pay for him?"

"But I don't carry money in my pocket, and the bank is closed."

"How unfortunate!"

"Very! but I'll send it over to-morrow early, and we will have him out."

"Oh, yes, poor fellow! the very first thing in the morning."

"Yes! the first thing--after we are married."

Soon after this Meadows bade Susan affectionately farewell, and rode off to Newborough to buy his gloves and some presents for his bride. On the road he overtook William Fielding going to jail, leaned over his saddle as he cantered by, and said, "Mrs. Meadows will send the money in to free you in the morning," then on again as cool as a cucumber and cantered into the town before sunset, put up black Rachel at the King's Head, made his purchases, and back to the inn. As he sat in the bar-parlor drinking a glass of ale and chatting with the landlady, two travelers came into the passage. They did not stop in it long, for one of them knew the house and led his companion into the coffee-room. But in that moment, by a flash of recognition, spite of their bronzed color and long beards, Meadows had seen who they were--George Fielding and Thomas Robinson.

Words could not paint in many pages what Meadows passed through in a few seconds. His very body was one moment cold as ice, the next burning.

The coffee-room door was open--he dragged himself into the passage, though each foot in turn seemed glued to the ground, and listened. He came back and sat down in the bar.

"Are they going to stay?" said the mistress to the waiter.

"Yes, to be called at five o'clock."

The bell rang. The waiter went and immediately returned. "Hot with," demanded the waiter, in a sharp, mechanical tone.

"Here, take my keys for the lump sugar," said the landlady, and she poured first the brandy and then the hot water into a tumbler, then went upstairs to see about the travelers' beds.

Meadows was left alone a few moments with the liquor. A sudden flash came to Meadows' eye, he put his hand hastily to his waistcoat-pocket, and then his eye brightened still more. Yes, it was there, he thought he had had the curiosity to keep it by him. He drew out the white lump Crawley had left on his table that night, and flung it into the glass just as the waiter returned with the sugar.

The waiter took the brandy and water into the coffee-room. Meadows sat still as a mouse, his brain boiling and bubbling--awestruck at what he had done, yet meditating worse.

The next time the waiter came in, "Waiter," said he, "one glass among two, that is short allowance."

"Oh! the big one is teetotal," replied the waiter.

"Mrs. White," said Meadows, "if you have got a bed for me I'll sleep here, for my nag is tired and the night is darkish."

"Always a bed for you, Mr. Meadows," was the gracious reply.

Soon the two friends rang for bed-candles. Robinson staggered with drowsiness. Meadows eyed them from behind a newspaper.

Half an hour later Mr. Meadows went to bed, too--but not to sleep.

AT seven o'clock in the morning Crawley was at Meadows' house by appointment. To his great surprise the servant told him master had not slept at home. While he was talking to her Meadows galloped up to the door, jumped off, and almost pulled Crawley upstairs with him. "Lock the door, Crawley." Crawley obeyed, but with some reluctance, for Meadows, the iron Meadows, was ghastly and shaken as he had never been shaken before. He sank into a chair. "Perdition seize the hour I first saw her!" As for Crawley, he was paralyzed by the terrible agitation of a spirit so much greater than his own.

"Crawley," said Meadows, with a sudden unnatural calm, "when the devil buys a soul for money how much does he give? a good lump, I hear. He values our souls high--we don't, some of us."

"Mr. Meadows, sir!"

"Now count those," yelled Meadows, bursting out again, and he flung a roll of notes furiously on the ground at Crawley's feet, "count and tell me what my soul has gone for. Oh! oh!"

Crawley seized them and counted them as fast as his trembling fingers would let him. So now an eye all remorse, and another eye all greed, were bent upon the same thing.

"Why, they are all hundred-pound notes, bright as silver from the Bank of England. Oh, dear! how new and crimp they are--where do they come from, sir?"

"From Australia."

"Ah! Oh, impossible! No! nothing is impossible to such a man as you. Twenty."

"They are at Newborough--slept at 'King's Head,'" whispered Meadows.

"Good Heavens! think of that. Thirty--"

"So did I."

"Ah! forty--four thousand pounds."

"The lump of stuff you left here hocussed one--it was a toss-up--luck was on my side--that one carried them--slept like death--long while hunting--found them under his pillow at last."

"Well done! and we fools were always beat at it. Sixty--one--two--five--seven. Seven thousand pounds."

"Seven thousand pounds! Who would have thought it? This is a dear job to me."

"Say a dear job to them and a glorious haul to you; but you deserve it all, ah!"

"Why, you fool," cried Meadows, "do you think I am going to keep the men's money?"

"Keep it? why, of course!"

"What! am I a thief? I, John Meadows, that never wronged a man of a penny? I take his sweetheart, I can't live without her; but I can live without his money. I have crimes enough on my head, but not theft, there I say halt."

"Then why in the name of Heaven did you take them at such a risk?" Crawley put this question roughly, for he was losing his respect for his idol.

"You are as blind as a mole, Crawley," was the disdainful answer. "Don't you see that I have made George Fielding penniless, and that now old Merton won't let him have his daughter? Why should he? He said, 'If you come back with one thousand pounds.' And don't you see that, when the writ is served on old Merton, he will be as strong as fire for me and against him. He can't marry her at all now. I shall soon or late, and the day I marry Susan that same afternoon seven thousand pounds will be put in George Fielding's hand, he won't know by whom, but you and I shall know. I am a sinner, but not a villain."

Crawley gave a dissatisfied grunt. Meadows struck a lucifer match and lighted a candle. He placed the candle in the grate--it was warm weather. "Come, now," said he coolly, "burn them; then they will tell no tales."

Crawley gave a shriek like a mother whose child is falling out of window, and threw himself on his knees, with the notes in his hand behind his back. "No! no! sir! Oh, don't think of it. Talk of crime, what are all the sins we have done together compared with this? You would not burn a wheat-rick, no, not your greatest enemy's; I know you would not, you, are too good a man. This is as bad; the good money that the bountiful Heaven has given us for--for the good of man."

"Come," said Meadows sternly, "no more of this folly," and he laid his iron grasp on Crawley.

"Mercy! mercy! think of me--of your faithful servant, who has risked his life and stuck at nothing for you. How ungrateful great men are!"

"Ungrateful! Crawley! Can you look me in the face and say that?"

"Never till now, but now I can;" and Crawley rose to his feet and faced the great man. The prize he was fighting for gave him supernatural courage. "To whom do you owe them? To me. You could never have had them but for my drug. And yet you would burn them before my eyes. A fortune to poor me."

"To you?"

"Yes! What does it matter to you what becomes of them so that he never sees them again? but it matters all to me. Give them to me and in twelve hours I will be in France with them. You won't miss me, sir. I have done my work. And it will be more prudent, for since I have left you I can't help drinking, and I might talk, you know, sir, I might, and let out what we should both be sorry for. Send me away to foreign countries where I can keep traveling, and make it always summer. I hate the long nights when it is dark. I see such cu-u-rious things. Pray! pray let me go and take these with me, and never trouble you again."

The words, though half nonsense, were the other half cunning, and the tones and looks were piteous. Meadows hesitated. Crawley knew too much; to get rid of him was a bait; and after all to annihilate the thing he had been all his life accumulating went against his heart. He rang the bell. "Hide the notes, Crawley. Bring me two shirts, a razor, and a comb. Crawley, these are the terms. That you don't go near that woman--" Crawley, with a brutal phrase, expressed his delight at the idea of getting rid of her forever. "That you go at once to the railway. Station opens to-day. First train starts in an hour. Up to London, over to France this evening."

"I will, sir. Hurrah! hurrah!" Then Crawley burst into protestations of gratitude which Meadows cut short. He rang for breakfast, fed his accomplice, gave him a great-coat for his journey, and took the precaution of going with him to the station. There he shook hands with him and returned to the principal street and entered the bank.

Crawley kept faith, he hugged his treasure to his bosom and sat down waiting for the train. "Luck is on our side," thought he; "if this had been open yesterday those two would have come on from Newborough."

He watched the preparations, they were decorating the locomotive with bouquets and branches. They did not start punctually, some soi-disant great people had not arrived. "I will have a dram," thought Crawley; he went and had three. Then he came back and as he was standing inspecting the carriages a hand was laid on his shoulder. He looked round, it was Mr. Wood, a functionary with whom he had often done business.

"Ah, Wood! how d'ye do? Going to make the first trip?"

"No, sir! I have business detains me in town."

"What! a capias, eh?" chuckled Crawley.

"Something of the sort. There is a friend of yours hard by wants to speak a word to you."

"Come along, then. Where is he?"

"This way, sir."

Crawley followed Wood to the waiting-room, and there on a bench sat Isaac Levi. Crawley stopped dead short and would have drawn back, but

Levi beckoned to a seat near him. Crawley came walking like an automaton from whose joints the oil had suddenly dried. With infinite repugnance he took the seat, not liking to refuse before several persons who saw the invitation. Mr. Wood sat on the other side of him. "What does it all mean?" thought Crawley, but his cue was to seem indifferent or flattered.

"You have shaved your beard, Mr. Crawley," said Isaac, in a low tone.

"My beard! I never had one," replied Crawley, in the same key.

"Yes, you had when last I saw you--in the gold mine; you set ruffians to abuse me, sir."

"Don't you believe that, Mr. Levi."

"I saw it and felt it."

The peculiarity of this situation was, that, the room being full of people, both parties wished, each for his own reason, not to excite general attention, and therefore delivered scarce above a whisper the sort of matter that is generally uttered very loud and excitedly.

"It is my turn now," whispered Levi; "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

"You must look sharp then," whispered Crawley; "to-morrow perhaps you may not have the chance."

"I never postpone vengeance--when it is ripe."

"Don't you, sir? dear me."

"You have seven thousand pounds about you, Mr. Crawley."

Crawley started and trembled. "Stolen!" whispered Isaac in his very ear. "Give it up to the officer."

Crawley rose instinctively. A firm hand was laid on each of his arms; he sat down again. "What--what---ever money I have is trusted to me by the wealthiest and most respectable man in the cou--nty, and--"

"Stolen by him, received by you! Give it to Wood, unless you prefer a public search."

"You can't search me without a warrant."

"Here is a warrant from the mayor. Take the notes out of your left breast and give them to the officer, or we must do it by force and publicity."

"I won't without Mr. Meadows' authority. Send for Mr. Meadows if you dare." Isaac reflected. "Well! we will take you to Mr. Meadows. Keep the money till you see him, but we must secure you. Put his coat over his hands first." The great-coat was put over his hands, and the next moment under the coat was heard a little sharp click.

"Let us go to the carriage," said Levi, in a brisk, cheerful tone.

Those present heard the friendly invitation and saw a little string of acquaintances, three in number, break up a conversation and go and get into a fly; one carried a great-coat and bundle before him with both hands.

MR. MEADOWS went to the bank--into the parlor--and said he must draw seven thousand pounds of cash and securities. The partners look blank.

"I know," said Meadows, "I should cripple you. Well, I am not going to, nor let any one else--it would not suit my book. Just hand me the securities and let me make over that sum to George Fielding and Thomas Robinson. There! now for some months to come those two men are not to know how rich they are, in fact not till I tell them." A very ready consent to this was given by both partners; I am afraid I might say an eager consent.

"There! now I feel another man, that is off me anyway," and Meadows strode home double the man. Soon his new top-boots were on, and his new dark blue coat with flat double-gilt buttons, and his hat broadish in the brim, and he looked the model of a British yeoman; he reached Grassmere before eleven o'clock. It was to be a very quiet wedding, but the bridesmaids, etc., were there, and Susan all in white, pale but very lovely. Father-in-law cracking jokes, Susan writhing under them.

"Now, then, is it to be a wedding without bells, for I hear none?"

"That it shall not," cried one of the young men; and off they ran to the church.

Meantime Meadows was the life and soul of the mirthful scene. He was in a violent excitement that passed with the rustics for gayety natural to the occasion. They did not notice his anxious glances up the hill that led to Newborough; his eager and repeated looks at his watch, the sigh of relief when the church-bells pealed out, the tremors of impatience, the struggle to appear cool as he sent one to hurry the clerk, another to tell the clergyman the bride was ready; the stamp of the foot when one of the bridesmaids took ten minutes to tie on a bonnet. He walked arm in arm, with Susan waiting for this girl; at last she was ready. Then came one running to say that the parson was not come home yet. What it cost him not to swear at the parson with Susan on his arm and the church in sight!

While he was thus fuming inwardly, a handsome, dark-eyed youth came up and inquired which was the bride. She was pointed out to him. "A letter for you, Miss Merton."

"For me? Who from?"

She glanced at the handwriting, and Meadows looked keenly in the boy's face. "A Jew," said he to himself. "Susan, you have got your gloves on." And in a moment he took the letter from her, but quietly, and opened it as if to return it to her to read. He glanced down it, saw "Jefferies, postmaster," and at the bottom "Isaac Levi." With wonderful presence of mind he tore it in pieces. "An insult, Susan," he cried. "A mean, malignant insult to set you against me--a wife against her husband."

Ere the words were out of his mouth he seized the young Jew and whirled him like a feather into the hands of his friends. "Duck him!" cried he. And in a moment, spite of his remonstrances and attempts at explanation, Nathan was flung into the horse-pond. He struggled out on the other side, and stood on the bank in a stupor of rage and terror, while the bridegroom menaced him with another dose, should he venture to return. "I will tell you all about it to-morrow, Susan."

"Calm yourself," replied Susan. "I know you have enemies, but why punish a messenger for the letter he only carries?"

"You are an angel, Susan. Boys, let him alone, do you hear?" N. B. He had been ducked.

And now a loud hurrah was heard from behind the church. "The parson, at last," cried Meadows, exultingly. Susan lowered her eyes, and hated herself for the shiver that passed through her. To her the parson was the executioner.

It was not the parson. The next moment two figures came round in sight. Meadows turned away with a groan. "George Fielding!" said he. The words dropped, as it were, out of his mouth.

Susan misunderstood this. She thought he read her heart, and ascribed her repugnance to her lingering attachment to George. She was angry with herself for letting this worthy man see her want of pride. "Why do you mention that name to me? What do I care for him who has deceived me? I wish he stood at the church door, that he might see how I would look at him and pass him leaning on your faithful arm."

"Susan!" cried a well-known voice behind her. She trembled and almost crouched ere she turned; but the moment she turned round she gave a scream that brought all the company running, and the bride forgot everything at the sight of George's handsome, honest face beaming truth and love, and threw herself into his arms. George kissed the bride.

"Oh!" cried the bridesmaids, awaking from their stupor, and remembering this was her old lover. "Oh!" "Oh!!" "Oh!!!" on an ascending scale.

These exclamations brought Susan to her senses. She sprang from George as though an adder had stung her; and, red as fire, her eyes like basilisks', she turned on him at a safe distance. "How dare you embrace me? How dare you come where I am? Father, ask this man why he comes here now to make me expose myself, and insult the honest man who honors me with his respect. Oh, father, come to me, and take me away from here."

"Susan, what on earth is this? what have I done?"

"What have you done? You are false to me! you never wrote me a letter for twelve months, and you are married to a lady in Bathurst! Oh, George!"

"If he is," cried Robinson, "he must be slyer than I give him credit for, for I have never left his side night nor day, and I never saw him say three civil words to a woman."

"Mr. Robinson!"

"Yes, Mr. Robinson. Somebody has been making a fool of you, Miss Merton. Why, all his cry night and day has been, 'Susan! Susan!' When we found the great nugget he kisses it, and says he, 'There, that is not because you are gold, but because you take me to Susan.'"

"Hold your tongue, Tom," said George, sternly. "Who puts me on my defense? Is there any man here who has been telling her I have ever had a thought of any girl but her? If there is, let him stand out now and say it to my face if he dares." There was a dead silence. "There is a lie without a backer, it seems;" and he looked round on all the company with his calm superior eye. "And now, Susan, what were you doing on that man's arm?"

"Oh!"

"Miss Merton and I are to be married to-day," said Meadows, "that is why I gave her my arm."

George gasped for breath, but he controlled himself by a mighty effort. "She thought me false, and now she knows I am true. Susan," faltered he, "I say nothing about the promises that have passed between us two, and the ring you gave. Here it is."

"He has kept my ring!"

"I was there before you, Mr. Meadows--but I won't stand upon that; I don't believe there is a man in the world loves a woman in the world better than I love Susan; but still I would not give a snap of the finger to have her if her will was toward another. So please yourself, my lass, and don't cry like that; only this must end. I won't live in doubt a moment, no, nor half a moment. Speak your pleasure and nothing else; choose between John Meadows and George Fielding."

"That is fair," cried one of the bridegrooms. The women secretly admired George. This is a man, thought they--won't stand our nonsense.

Susan looked up in mute astonishment. "What choice can there be? The moment I saw your face, and truth still shining in it, I forgot there was a John Meadows in the world!"

With these words Susan cast a terrified look all round, and, losing every other feeling in a paroxysm of shame, hid her burning face in her hands, and made a sudden bolt into the house and upstairs to her room, where she was followed and discovered by one of her bridesmaids tearing off her wedding-clothes, and laughing and crying all in a breath.

1st Bridegroom. "Well, Josh, what d'ye think?"

2d Bridegroom. "Why, I think there won't be a wedding to-day."

1st Bridegroom. "No, nor to-morrow neither. Sal, put on your bonnet and let's you and I go home. I came to Meadows' wedding; mustn't stay to anybody's else's."

These remarks were delivered openly, pro bono, and dissolved the wedding party. Four principal parties remained--Meadows, old Merton, and the two friends.

"Well, uncle, Susan has spoken her mind, now you speak yours."

"George, I have been an imprudent fool, I am on the brink of ruin. I owe more than two thousand pounds. We heard you had changed your mind, and Meadows came forward like a man, and said he would--"

"Your word, uncle, your promise. I crossed the seas on the faith of it." An upper window was gently opened, and a blushing face listened, and the hand that they were all discussing and disposing of drew back a little curtain, and clutched it convulsively.

"You did, George," said the old farmer.

"Says you, 'Bring back a thousand pounds to show me you are not a fool, and you shall have my daughter,' and she was to have your blessing. Am I right, Mr. Meadows? you were present."

"Those were the words," replied Meadows.

"Well! and have you brought back the thousand pounds?"

"I have."

"John, I must stand to my word; and I will--it is justice. Take the girl, and be as happy as you can with her, and her father in the work-house."

"I take her, and that is as much as to say that neither her father nor any one she respects shall go to the workhouse. How much is my share, Tom?"

"Four thousand pounds."

"No, not so much."

"Yes, it is. Jacky gave you his share of the great nugget, and you gave him sheep in return. Here they are, lads and lasses, seventy of them varying from one five six naught to one six two nine, and all as crimp as a muslin gown new starched. Why? I never put this," and he took pieces of newspaper out of his pocketbook, and looked stupidly at each as it came out.

"Why, Tom?"

"Robbed!"

"Robbed, Tom?"

"Robbed! oh! I put the book under my pillow, and there I found it this morning. Robbed! robbed! Kill me, George, I have ruined you."

"I can't speak," gasped George. "Oh, what is the meaning of this?"

"But I can speak! Don't tell me of a London thief being robbed!!! George Fielding, if you are a man at all, go and leave me and my daughter in peace. If you had come home with money to keep her, I was ready to give you Susan to my own ruin. Now it is your turn to show yourself the right stuff. My daughter has given her hand to a man who can make a lady of her, and set me on my legs again. You can only beggar us. Don't stand in the poor girl's light; for pity's sake, George, leave us in peace."

"You are right, old man; my head is confused;" and George put his hand feebly to his brow. "But I seem to see it is my duty to go, and I'll go." George staggered. Robinson made toward him to support him. "There, don't make a fuss with me. There is nothing the matter with me--only my heart is dead. Let me sit on this bench and draw my breath a minute--and then--I'll go. Give me your hand, Tom. Never heed their jibes. I'd trust you with more gold than the best of them was ever worth."

Robinson began to blubber the moment George took his hand, spite of the money lost. "We worked hard for it, too, good folks, and risked our lives as well as our toil;" and George and Robinson sat hand in hand upon the bench, and turned their heads away--that it was pitiful to see.

But still the pair held one another by the hand, and George said, faltering: "I have got this left me still. Ay, I have heard say that friendship was better than love, and I dare say so it is."

As if to plead against this verdict, Susan came timidly to her lover in his sorrow, and sat on his other side, and laid her head gently on his shoulder. "What signifies money to us two?" she murmured. "Oh, I have been robbed of what was dearer than life this bitter year, and now you are down-hearted at loss of money. How foolish to grieve for such nonsense when I am so hap--hap--happy!" and again the lovely face rested light as down on George's shoulder, weeping deliciously.

"It is hard, Tom," gasped George; "it is bitter hard; but I shall find a little bit of manhood by and by to do my duty. Give me breath! only give me breath! We will go back again where we came from, Tom; only I shall have nothing to work for now. Where is William, if you please? Has he forgotten me, too?"

"William is in prison for debt," said old Merton, gravely.

"No, he is not," put in Meadows, "for I sent the money to let him out an hour ago."

"You sent the money to let my brother out of jail? That sounds queer to me. I suppose I ought to thank you, but I can't."

"I don't ask your thanks, young man."

"You see, George," said old Merton, "ours is a poor family, and it will be a great thing for us all to have such a man as Mr. Meadows in it, if you will only let us."

"Oh, father, you make me blush," cried Susan, beginning to get her first glimpse of his character.

"He doesn't make me blush," cried George; "but he makes me sick. This old man would make me walk out of heaven if he was in it. Come, let us go back to Australia."

"Ay, that is the best thing you can do," cried old Merton.

"If he does, I shall go with him," said Susan, with sudden calmness. She added, dropping her voice, "If he thinks me worthy to go anywhere with him."

"You are worthy of better than that, and better shall be your luck;" and George sat down on the bench with one bitter sob that seemed to tear his manly heart in two.

There was a time Meadows would have melted at this sad sight, but now it enraged him. He whispered fiercely to old Merton: "Touch him on his pride; get rid of him, and your debts shall be all paid that hour; if not--" He then turned to that heart-stricken trio, touched his hat, "Good-day, all the company," said he, and strode away with rage in his heart to set the law in motion against old Merton, and so drive matters to a point.

But before he had taken a dozen steps he was met by two men who planted themselves right before him. "You can't pass, sir."

Meadows looked at them with humorous surprise. They had hooked noses. He did not like that so well.

"Why not?" said he, quietly, but with a wicked look.

One of the men whistled, a man popped out of the churchyard and joined the two; he had a hooked nose. Another came through the gate from the lane; another from behind the house. The scene kept quietly filling with hooked noses till it seemed as if the ten tribes were reassembling from the four winds.

"Are they going to pitch into me?" thought Meadows; and he felt in his pocket to see if his pistol was there.

Meantime, George and Susan and Tom rose to their feet in some astonishment.

"There is a chentleman coming to put a question or two," said the first speaker. And, in fact, an old acquaintance of ours, Mr. Williams, came riding up, and, hooking his horse to the gate, came in, saying, "Oh, here you are, Mr. Meadows. There is a ridiculous charge brought against you, but I am obliged to hear it before dismissing it. Give me a seat. Oh, here is a bench. It is very hot. I am informed that two men belonging to this place have been robbed of seven thousand pounds at the 'King's Head'--the 'King's Heads in Newborough."

"It is true, sir," cried Robinson, "but how did you know?"

"I am here to ask questions," was the sharp answer. "Who are you?"

"Thomas Robinson."

"Which is George Fielding?"

"I am George Fielding, sir.

"Have you been robbed?"

"We have, sir."

"Of how much?"

"Seven thousand pounds."

"Come, that tallies with the old gentleman's account. Hum! where did you sleep last night, Mr. Meadows?"

"At the 'King's Head' in Newborough, sir," replied Meadows, without any visible hesitation.

"Well, that is curious, but I need not say I don't believe it is more than coincidence. Where is the old gentleman? Oh! give way there, and let him come here."

Now all this was inexplicable to Meadows, but still it brought a deadly chill of vague apprehension over him. He felt as if a huge gossamer net was closing round him. Another moment the only spider capable of spinning it stood in front of him. "I thought so," dropped from his lips as Isaac Levi and he stood once more face to face.

"I accuse that man of the theft. Nathan and I heard him tell Crawley that he had drugged the young man's liquor and stolen the notes. Then we heard Crawley beg for the notes, and after much entreaty he gave them him."

"It is true!" cried Robinson, in violent agitation; "it must be true. You know what a light sleeper I am, and how often you had to shake me this morning. I was hocussed and no mistake!"

"Silence!"

"Yes, your worship."

"Where were you, Mr. Levi, to hear all this?"

"In the east room of my house."

"And where was he?"

"In the west room of his house."

"It is impossible."

"Say not so, sir. I will show you it is true. Meantime I will explain it."

He explained his contrivance at full. Meadows hung his head; he saw how terribly the subtle Oriental had outwitted him; yet his presence of mind never for a moment deserted him.

"Sir," said he, "I have had the misfortune to offend Mr. Levi, and he is my sworn enemy. If you really mean to go into this ridiculous affair, allow me to bring witnesses, and I will prove to you he has been threatening vengeance against me these two years--and you know a lie is not much to a Jew. Does this appear likely? I am worth sixty thousand pounds--why should I steal?"

"Why, indeed?" said Mr. Williams. "I stole these notes to give them away--that is your story, is it?"

"Nay, you stole them to beggar your rival, whose letters to the maiden he loved you had intercepted by fraud at the post-office in Farnborough." Susan and George uttered an exclamation at the same moment. "But, having stole them, you gave them to Crawley."

"How generous!" sneered Meadows. "Well, when you find Crawley with seven thousand pounds, and he says I gave them him, Mr. Williams will take your word against mine, and not till then, I think."

"Certainly not--the most respectable man for miles round!"

"So be it," retorted Isaac, coolly; "Nathan, bring Crawley." At that unexpected word, Meadows looked round for a way to escape. The hooked-nosed ones hemmed him in. Crawley was brought out of the fly, quaking with fear.

"Sir," said Levi, "if in that man's bosom, on the left-hand side, the missing notes are not found, let me suffer scorn; but, if they be found, give us justice on the evil-doer."

The constable searched Crawley amid the intense anxiety of all present. He found a bundle of notes. There was a universal cry.

"Stop, sir!" said Robinson, "to make sure I will describe our property--seventy notes of one hundred pounds each. Numbers one five six naught to one six two nine."

Mr. Williams examined the bundle, and at once handed them over to Robinson, who shoved them hastily into George's hands and danced for joy.

Mr. Williams looked ruefully at Meadows, then he hesitated; then, turning sharply to Crawley, he said, "Where did you get these?"

Meadows tried to catch his eye and prevail on him to say nothing; but Crawley, who had not heard Levi's evidence, made sure of saving himself by means of Meadows' reputation.

"I had them from Mr. Meadows," he cried; "and what about it? it is not the first time he has trusted me with much larger sums than that."

"Oh! you had them from Mr. Meadows?"

"Yes, I had!"

"Mr. Meadows, I am sorry to say I must commit you; but I still hope you will clear yourself elsewhere."

"I have not the least uneasiness about that, sir, thank you. You will admit me to bail, of course?"

"Impossible! Wood, here is a warrant, I will sign it."

While the magistrate was signing the warrant, Meadows' head fell upon his breast; he seemed to collapse standing.

Isaac Levi eyed him scornfully. "You had no mercy on the old Jew. You took his house from him, not for your need but for hate. So he made that house a trap and caught you in your villainy."

"Yes! you have caught me," cried Meadows, "but you will never cage me!" and in a moment his pistol was at his own temple and he pulled the trigger--the cap failed; he pulled the other trigger, the other cap failed. He gave a yell like a wounded tiger, and stood at bay gnashing his teeth with rage and despair. Half a dozen men threw themselves upon him, and a struggle ensued that almost baffles description. He dragged those six men about up and down, some clinging to his legs, some to his body. He whirled nearly every one of them to the ground in turn; and, when by pulling at his legs they got him down, he fought like a badger on his back, seized two by the throat, and putting his feet under another drove him into the air doubled up like a ball, and he fell on Levi and sent the old man into Mr. Williams' arms, who sat down with a Jew in his lap, to the derangement of his magisterial dignity.

At last he was mastered, and his hands tied behind him with two handkerchiefs.

"Take the rascal to jail!" cried Williams, in a passion. Meadows groaned. "Ay! take me," said he, "you can't make me live there. I've lived respected all these years, and now I shall be called a felon. Take me where I may hide my head and die!" and the wretched man moved away with feeble steps, his strength and spirit crushed now his hands were tied.

Then Crawley followed him, abusing and reviling him. "So this is the end of all your maneuvering! Oh, what a fool I was to side with such a bungler as you against Mr. Levi. Here am I, an innocent man, ruined through knowing a thief--ah! you don't like that word, but what else are you but a thief?" and so he followed his late idol and heaped reproaches and insults on him, till at last Meadows turned round and cast a vague look of mute despair, as much as to say, "How am I fallen, when this can trample me!"

One of the company saw this look and understood it. Yielding to an impulse he took three steps, and laid his hand on Crawley. "Ye little snake," said he, "let the man alone!" and he sent Crawley spinning like a teetotum; then turned on his own heel and came away, looking a little red and ashamed of what he had done. My reader shall guess which of the company this was.

Half way to the county jail Meadows and Crawley met William Fielding coming back.

It took hours and hours to realize all the happiness that had fallen on two loving hearts. First had to pass away many a spasm of terror at the wrongs they had suffered, the danger they had escaped, the long misery they had grazed. They remained rooted to the narrow spot of ground where such great and strange events had passed in a few minutes, and their destinies had fluctuated so violently, and all ended in joy unspeakable. And everybody put questions to everybody, and all compared notes, and the hours fled while they unraveled their own strange story. And Susan and George almost worshipped Isaac Levi; and Susan kissed him and called him her father, and hung upon his neck all gratitude. And he passed his hand over her chestnut hair, and said, "Go to, foolish child," but his deep rich voice trembled a little, and wonderful tenderness and benevolence glistened in that fiery eye.

He would now have left them, but nobody there would part with him; behooved him to stay and eat fish and pudding with them--the meat they would excuse him if he would be good and not talk about going again. And after dinner George and Tom must tell their whole story; and, as they told their eventful lives, it was observed that the hearers were far more agitated than the narrators. The latter had been in a gold mine; had supped so full of adventures and crimes and horrors that nothing astonished them, and they were made sensible of the tremendous scenes they had been through by the loud ejaculations, the pallor, the excitement of their hearers. As for Susan, again and again during the men's narratives the tears streamed down her face, and once she was taken faint at George's peril, and the story had to be interrupted and water sprinkled on her, and the men in their innocence were for not going on with their part, but she peremptorily insisted, and sneered at them for being so foolish as to take any notice of her foolishness--she would have every word. After all was he not there alive and well, sent back to her safe after so many perils, never, never to leave England again!

"Oh, giorno felice!" A day to be imagined; or described by a pen a thousand times greater and subtler than mine, but of this be sure--it was a day such as, neither to Susan nor George, nor to you nor me, nor to any man or woman upon earth, has ever come twice between the cradle and the grave.

A MONTH of Elysium. And then one day George asked Susan, plump, when it would be agreeable to her to marry him.

"Marry you, George?" replied Susan, opening her eyes; "why, never! I shall never marry any one after--you must be well aware of that." Susan proceeded to inform George, that, though foolishness was a part of her character, selfishness was not; recent events had destroyed an agreeable delusion under which she had imagined herself worthy to be Mrs. George Fielding; she therefore, though with some reluctance, intended to resign that situation to some wiser and better woman than she had turned out. In this agreeable resolution she persisted, varying it occasionally with little showers of tears unaccompanied by the slightest convulsion of the muscles of the face. But, as I am not, like George Fielding, in love with Susan Merton, or with self-deception (another's), I spare the reader all the pretty things this young lady said and believed and did, to postpone her inevitable happiness. Yes, inevitable, for this sort of thing never yet kept lovers long apart since the world was, except in a novel worse than common. I will but relate how that fine fellow, George, dried "these foolish drops" on one occasion.

"Susan," said he, "if I had found you going to be married to another man with the roses on your cheek, I should have turned on my heel and back to Australia. But a look in your face was enough; you were miserable, and any old fool could see your heart was dead against it; look at you now blooming like a rose, so what is the use of us two fighting against human nature? we can't be happy apart--let us come together."

"Ah! George, if I thought your happiness depended on having--a foolish wife--"

"Why, you know it does," replied the inadvertent Agricola.

"That alters the case; sooner than you should be unhappy--I think--I--"

"Name the day, then."

In short the bells rang a merry peal, and to reconcile Susan to her unavoidable happiness, Mr. Eden came down and gave an additional weight (in her way of viewing things) to the marriage ceremony by officiating. It must be owned that this favorable circumstance cost her a few tears, too.

How so, Mr. Reade?

Marry, sir, thus: Mr. Eden was what they call eccentric; among his other deviations from usage he delivered the meaning of sentences in church along with the words.

This was a thunder-clap to poor Susan. She had often heard a chanting machine utter the marriage service all on one note, and heard it with a certain smile of unintelligent complacency her sex wear out of politeness; but when the man Eden told her at the altar with simple earnestness what a high and deep and solemn contract she was making then and there with God and man, she began to cry, and wept like April through the ceremony.

I have not quite done with this pair, but leave them a few minutes, for some words are due to other characters, and to none, I think, more than to this very Mr. Eden, whose zeal and wisdom brought our hero and unheroine happily together through the subtle sequence of causes I have related, the prime thread a converted thief.

Mr. Eden's strength broke down under the prodigious effort to defeat the effect of separate confinement on the bodies and souls of his prisoners. Dr. Gulson ordered him abroad. Having now since the removal of Hawes given the separate and silent system a long and impartial trial, his last public act was to write at the foot of his report a solemn protest against it, as an impious and mad attempt to defy God's will as written on the face of man's nature--to crush too those very instincts from which rise communities, cities, laws, prisons, churches, civilization--and to wreck souls and bodies under pretense of curing souls, not by knowledge, wisdom, patience, Christian love, or any great moral effort, but by the easy and physical expedient of turning one key on each prisoner instead of on a score.

"These," said Mr. Eden, "are the dreams of selfish, lazy, heartless dunces and reckless bigots, dwarf Robespierres, with self-deceiving hearts that dream philanthropy, fluent lips that cant philanthropy and hands swift to shed blood--which is not blood to them--because they are mere sensual brutes, so low in intelligence that, although men are murdered and die before their eyes, they cannot see it was murder, because there was no knocking on the head or cutting of throats."

The reverend gentleman then formally washed his hands of the bloodshed and reason-shed of the separate system, and resigned his office, earnestly requesting at the same time that, as soon as the government should come round to his opinion, they would permit him to co-operate in any enlightened experiment where God should no longer be defied by a knot of worms as in ---- Jail.

Then he went abroad, but though professedly hunting health he visited and inspected half the principal prisons in Europe. After many months events justified his prediction. The government started a large prison on common sense and humanity, and Mr. Lacy's interest procured Mr. Eden the place of its chaplain.

This prison was what every prison in the English provinces will be in five years' time--a well-ordered community, an epitome of the world at large, for which a prison is to prepare men, not unfit them as frenzied dunces would do; it was also a self-sustaining community, like the world. The prisoners ate prisoner-grown corn and meat, wore prisoner-made clothes and bedding, wire lighted by gas made in the prison, etc., etc., etc., etc. The agricultural laborers had out-door work suited to their future destiny, and mechanical trades were zealously ransacked for the city rogues. Anti-theft reigned triumphant. No idleness, no wicked waste of sweat.

The members of this community sleep in separate cells, as men do in other well-ordered communities, but they do not pine and wither and die in cells for offenses committee outside the prison walls. Here, if you see a man caged like a wild beast all day, you may be sure he is there, not so much for his own good as for that of the little community in which he has proved himself unworthy to mix pro tem. Foul language and contamination are checkmated here, not by the lazy, selfish, cruel expedient of universal solitude, but by Argus-like surveillance. Officers, sufficient in number, listen with sharp ears, and look with keen eyes. The contaminator is sure to be seized and confined till prudence, if not virtue, ties his tongue. Thus he is disarmed, and the better-disposed encourage one another. Compare this legitimate and necessary use of that most terrible of tortures, the cell, with the tigro-asinine use of it in seven English prisons out of nine at the present date. It is just the difference between arsenic as used by a good physician and by a poisoner. It is the difference between a razor-bladed, needle-pointed knife in the hands of a Christian, a philosopher, a skilled surgeon, and the same knife in the hands of a savage, a brute, a scoundrel, or a fanatical idiot.

Mr. Eden had returned from abroad but a fortnight when he was called on to unite George and Susan.

I have little more to add than that he was very hard worked and supremely happy in his new situation, and that I have failed to do him justice in these pages. But he shall have justice one day, when pitiless asses will find themselves more foul in the eyes of the All-pure than the thieves they crushed under four walls, and "The just shall shine forth as the sun, and they that turn* many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever."

* Not crush.

Thomas Robinson did not stay long at Grassmere. Things were said in the village that wounded him. Ill-repute will not stop directly ill-conduct does. He went to see Mr. Eden, sent his name in as Mr. Sinclair, was received with open arms, and gave the good man a glow of happiness such as most of us, I fear, go to the grave without feeling--or earning. He presented him a massive gold ring he had hammered out of a nugget. Mr. Eden had never worn a ring in his life, but he wore this with an innocent pride, and showed it people, and valued it more than he would the Pitt diamond, which a French king bought of an English subject, and the price was so heavy he paid for it by installments spread over many years.

Robinson very wisely went back to Australia, and, more wisely still, married Jenny, with whom he had corresponded ever since he left her.

I have no fear he will ever break the Eighth Commandment again. His heart was touched long ago, and ever since then his understanding had received conviction upon conviction; for, oh, the blaze of light that enters our souls when our fate puts us in his place--in her place--in their place--whom we used to strike, never realizing how it hurt them! He is respected for his intelligence and good-nature; he is sober, industrious, pushing and punctilious in business. One trait of the Bohemian remains. About every four months a restlessness comes over him; then the wise Jenny of her own accord proposes a trip. Poor Tom's eyes sparkle directly; off they go together. A foolish wife would have made him go alone. They come back, and my lord goes to his duties with fresh zest till the periodical fit comes again. No harm ever comes of it.

Servants are at a great premium, masters at a discount, in the colony; hence a domestic phenomenon, which my English readers can hardly conceive, but I am told my American friends have a faint glimpse of it in the occasional deportment of their "helps" in out-of-the-way places.

Now Tom, and especially Jenny, had looked forward to reigning in their own house, and it was therefore a disappointment when they found themselves snubbed and treated with hauteur, and Jenny revolted against servant after servant, who straightway abdicated and left her forlorn. At last their advertisement was answered by a male candidate for menial authority, who proved to be Mr. Miles, their late master. Tom and Jenny colored up, and both agreed it was out of the question--they should feel too ashamed. Mr. Miles answered by offering to bet a crown he should make them the best servant in the street; and, strange to say, the bargain was struck and he did turn out a model servant. He was civil and respectful, especially in public, and never abused his situation. Comparing his conduct with his predecessors', it really appeared that a gentleman can beat snobs in various relations of life. As Tom's master and Jenny's, he had never descended to servility, nor was he betrayed into arrogance now that he had risen to be their servant.

A word about Jacky. After the meal off the scented rabbit in the bush, Robinson said slyly to George: "I thought you promised Jacky a hiding--well, here he is."

"Now, Tom," replied the other, coloring up, "is it reasonable, and he has just saved our two lives? but if you think that I won't take him to task, you are much mistaken."

George then remonstrated with the chief for spoiling Abner with his tomahawk. Jacky opened his eyes with astonishment and admiration. Here was another instance of the white fellow's wonderful power of seeing things a good way behind him. He half closed his eyes, and tried in humble imitation to peer back into the past. Yes! he could just manage to see himself very indistinctly giving Abner a crack; but stop! let him see, it was impossible to be positive, but was not there also some small trifle of insolence, ingratitude, and above all bungality, on the part of this Abner? When the distance had become too great to see the whole of a transaction, why strain the eyes looking at a part? Finally Jacky submitted that these microscopic researches cost a good deal of trouble, and on the whole his tribe were wiser than the white fellows in this, that they reveled in the present, and looked on the past as a period that never had been, and the future as one that never would be. On this George resigned the moral culture of his friend. "Soil is not altogether bad," said Agricola, "but, bless your heart, it isn't a quarter of an inch deep."

On George's departure, Jacky, being under the temporary impression of his words, collected together a mixed company of blacks, and marched them to his possessions. Arrived, he harangued them on the cleverness of the white fellows, and invited them to play at Europeans.

"Behold this ingenious structure," said he, in Australian; "this is called a house; its use is to protect us from the weather at night; all you have to do is to notice which way the wind blows, and go and lie down on the opposite side of the house and there you are. Then again, when you are cold, you will find a number of wooden articles in the house. You go in, you bring them out and burn them and are warm." He then produced what he had always considered the chef d'oeuvre of the white races, a box of lucifer matches; this, too, was a present from George. "See what clever fellows they are," said he, "they carry about fire, which is fire or not fire at the fortunate possessor's will;" and he let off a lucifer. These the tribe admired, but doubted whether all those little sticks had the same marvelous property and would become fire in the hour of need; Jacky sneered at their incredulity, and let them all off one by one in a series of preliminary experiments; this impaired their future usefulness. In short, they settled there; one or two's heads had to be broken for killing the breeders for dinner, and that practice stopped; but the pot-bellied youngsters generally celebrated the birth of a lamb by spearing it. They slept on the lee side of the house, warmed at night by the chairs and tables, etc., which they lighted. They got on very nicely, only one fine morning, without the slightest warning, whir-r-r-r they all went off to the woods, Jacky and all, and never returned. The remaining bullocks strayed devious, and the douce McLaughlan blandly absorbed the sheep.

Hasty and imperfect as my sketch of this Jacky is, give it a place in your notebook of sketches, for in a few years the Australian savage will breathe only in these pages, and the Saxon plow will erase his very grave, his milmeridien.

brutus lived; but the form and strength he had abused were gone--he is the shape of a note of interrogation, and by a coincidence is now an "asker," i.e., he begs, receives alms, and sets on a gang of burglars, with whom he is in league, to rob the good Christians that show him pity.

mephistopheles came suddenly to grief; when gold was found in Victoria he crossed over to that port and robbed. One day he robbed the tent of an old man, a native of the colony, who was digging there with his son, a lad of fifteen. Now these currency lads are very sharp and determined. The youngster caught a glimpse of the retiring thief and followed him and saw him enter a tent. He watched at the entrance, and when mephistopheles came out again, he put a pistol to the man's breast and shot him dead without a word of remonstrance, accusation or explanation.

A few diggers ran out of their claims. "If our gold is not on him," says the youngster, "I have made a mistake."

The gold was found on the carcass, and the diggers went coolly back to their work.

The youngster went directly to the commissioner and told him what he had done. "I don't see that I am called on to interfere," replied that functionary; "he was taken in the act; you have buried him, of course."

"Not I. I let him lie for whoever chose to own him."

"You let him lie? What, when there is a printed order from the government stuck over the whole mine that nobody is to leave carrion about! You go off directly and bury your carrion or you will get into trouble, young man." And the official's manner became harsh and threatening.

If ever a man was "shot like a dog," surely the assassin of Carlo was.

Mr. Meadows in the prison refused his food, and fell into a deep depression; but the third day he revived, and fell to scheming again. He sent to Mr. Levi and offered to give him a long lease of his old house if he would but be absent from the trial. This was a sore temptation to the old man. But meantime stronger measures were taken in his defense and without consulting him.

One evening that Susan and George were in the garden at Grassmere, suddenly an old woman came toward them with slow and hesitating steps. Susan fled at the sight of her--she hated the very name this old woman bore. George stood his ground, looking sheepish; the old woman stood before him trembling violently and fighting against her tears. She could not speak, but held out a letter to him. He took it, the ink was rusty, it was written twenty years ago; it was from his mother to her neighbor, Mrs. Meadows, then on a visit at Newborough, telling her how young John had fought for and protected her against a band of drunken ruffians, and how grateful she was.

"And I do hope, dame, he will be as good friends with my lads when they are men as you and I have been this many a day."

George did not speak for a long time. He held the letter, and it trembled a little in his hand. He looked at the old woman, standing a piteous, silent supplicant. "Mrs. Meadows," said he, scarce above a whisper, "give me this letter, if you will be so good. I have not got her handwriting, except our names in the Bible."

She gave him the letter half reluctantly, and looked fearfully and inquiringly in his face. He smiled kindly, and a sort of proud curl came for a moment to his lip, and the woman read the man. This royal rustic would not have taken the letter if he had not granted the mother's unspoken prayer.

"God bless you both!" said she, and went on her way.

The assizes came, and Meadows' two plaintiffs both were absent: Robinson gone to Australia, and George forfeited his recognizances and had, to pay a hundred pound for it. The defendants were freed. Then Isaac Levi said to himself, "He will not keep faith with me." But he did not know his man. Meadows had a conscience, though an oblique one. A promise from him was sacred in his own eyes. A man came to Grassmere and left a hundred pound in a letter for George Fielding. Then he went on to Levi, and gave him a parcel and a note. The parcel contained the title-deeds of the house; and the note said: "Take the house and the furniture and pay me what you consider they are worth. And, old man, I think you might take your curse off me, for I have never known a heart at rest since you laid it on me, and you see now our case is altered--you have a home now and John Meadows has none."

Then the old man was softened, and he wrote a line in reply, and said: "Three just men shall value the house and furniture, and I will pay, etc., etc. Put now adversity to profit--repent and prosper. Isaac Levi wishes you no ill from this day, but rather good." Thus died, as mortal feelings are apt to die, an enmity its owners thought immortal.

A steam-vessel glided down the Thames bound for Port Phillip. On the deck were to be seen a little girl crying bitterly--this was Hannah--a stalwart, yeoman-like figure, who stood unmoved as the shores glided by,

and an old woman who held his arm as if she needed to feel him at the moment of leaving her native land. This old woman had hated and denounced his sins, and there was scarce a point of morality on which she thoroughly agreed with him. Yet at threescore years and ten she left her native land with two sole objects--to comfort this stout man, and win him to repentance.

"He shall repent," said she to herself. "Even now his eyes are opening, his heart is softening. Three times he has said to me, 'That George Fielding is a better man than I am.' He will repent. Again he said to me, I have thought too little of you, and too much where it was a sin for me even to look.' He will repent--his voice is softer--he bears no malice--he blames none but himself. It is never too late to mend. He will repent, and I shall see him happy and lay my old bones to rest contented, though not where I thought to lay them, in Grassmere churchyard."

Ah, you do well to hold that quaint little old figure with that strong arm closer to you than you have done this many years, ay, since you were a curly-headed boy. It is a good sign, John; on neither side of the equator shall you ever find a friend like her.

"All other love is mockery and deceit.
'Tis like the mirage of the desert that appears
A cool refreshing water, and allures
The thirsty traveler, but flies anon
And leaves him disappointed, wondering
So fair a vision should so futile prove.
A mother's love is like unto a well
Sealed and kept secret, a deep-hidden fount
That flows when every other spring is dry."*

* Sophia Woodrooffe.

Peter Crawley, left to his own resources, practices at the County Courts in his old neighborhood, and drinks with all his clients, who are of the lowest imaginable order. He complains that "he can't peck," yet continues the cause of his infirmity, living almost entirely upon cock-a-doodle broth--eggs beat up in brandy and a little water. Like Scipio, he is never less alone than when alone; with this difference, that the companions of P. C. 's solitude do not add to the pleasure of his existence. Unless somebody can make him see that it is never too late to mend, this little rogue, fool and sot will "shut up like a knife some day" (so says a medical friend), and then it will be too late.

It is nine in the evening. A little party is collected of farmers and their wives and daughters. Mrs. George Fielding rises and says, "Now I must go home." Remonstrance of hostess. "George will be at home by now."

"Well, wait till he comes for you."

"Oh, he won't come, for fear of shortening my pleasure."

Susan then explains that George is so foolish that he never will go into the house when she is not in it. "And here is a drizzle come on, and there he will be sitting out in it, I know, if I don't go and drive him in."

Events justify the prediction. The good wife finds her husband sitting on the gate kicking his heels quite contented and peaceable, only he would not pay the house the compliment of going into it when she was not there. He told her once he looked on it as no better than a coal-hole when she was not shining up and down it.

N. B.--They have been some years married. A calm but very tender conjugal love sits at this innocent hearth.

George has made a great concession for an Englishman. He has solemnly deposited before witnesses his sobriquet of "Unlucky George," not (he was careful to explain) because he found the great nugget, nor because the meadow he bought in Bathurst for two hundred pounds has just been sold by Robinson for twelve thousand pounds, but on account of his being Susan's husband.

And Susan is very happy. Besides the pleasure of loving and being loved, she is in her place in creation. The class of women (a very large one) to which she belongs comes into the world to make others happy. Susan is skillful at this and very successful. She makes everybody happy round her, "and that is so pleasant." She makes the man she loves happy, and that is delightful.

My reader shall laugh at her; my unfriendly critic shall sneer at her. As a heroine of a novel she deserves it; but I hope for their own sakes neither will undervalue the original in their passage through life. These average women are not the spice of fiction, but they are the salt of real life.

William Fielding is godfather to Susan's little boy.

He can stand by his brother's side and look without compunction on Anne Fielding's grave, and think without an unmanly shudder of his own.