CHAPTER XXX

Mr. Neuchamp, having now occasional leisure to reflect, discovered

that he was provided with an extensive and valuable property which he

_had_ partly come to Australia to seek, and with an affianced bride,

whom he had not at all included among his probable possessions. As

for the great project of Colonial Reform, which had stood out grandly

dominating the landscape in the future of his dreams, with the solitary

exception of the conversion of Jack Windsor, he could not aver that he

had accomplished anything.

His co-operative community had notably failed in practice. But for

the aid and counsel of Mr. Levison, it might have overthrown his own

fortune, without particularly benefiting the individuals of this

society.

Whenever he had acted upon his own discretion, and in furtherance of

advanced views, he had been conspicuously wrong. Where he had followed

the ideas of others, or been forced into them by circumstances, he

had been invariably right. Where he had been generous, he had been

deceived; where he had been cautious, he had found himself extravagant

in loss; where he had been rash, riches had rolled in upon him with

flowing tide. His most elaborate estimates of character had been

ludicrously erroneous. His advice had been inapplicable, his theories

unsound. Practice—mostly blindfold—had alone given him a glimmering

knowledge of the relatively component parts of this most contradictory,

unintelligible antipodean world.

Mr. Neuchamp, having reached the very visible landmark of an engagement

in his pilgrimage of love, was much minded to press for an immediate

union, believing, now that the rain had come, there existed no rational

impediments in the way of this last supreme success. Well-informed

persons will know that no such outrage upon _les convenances_ could for

a moment be tolerated. Baffled but not despondent, he returned to the

charge with such determination that the event was fixed to take place

in about two months, as being the earliest hour anything so dreadful

could be thought of.

So much being gained, Ernest became speedily aware that being at all

hours and seasons subject to the raids of milliners‘attendants and

others was a state of existence out of harmony with a poet’s soul.

Thus, after divers unsatisfactory and interrupted interviews with

Antonia, he took his passage by the mail, and heroically started for

Rainbar.

This brilliant combination of business with necessity would, he

thought, serve to while away the weary hours between the scorned

present and the beautiful future. Rainbar and Mildool had to be visited

at some time or other. Although the luxurious life of the metropolis

had gained upon him, Ernest Neuchamp always arose, Antæus-like, fresh

to the call of duty.

When he quitted the railway terminus and entered the mail-coach which

was to convey him to his destination, the full magnitude of the mighty

change of season burst upon him. During his stay in Sydney the short,

bright southern spring-time had been born and was ripening into summer,

with what effect upon plant life it was now a marvel of marvels to see.

Mr. Neuchamp’s novitiate had been served during the latter years of a

‘dry cycle.’ He had seen fair growth of pasture towards Christmas time,

but of the amazing crop of grass and herbage uncared for, wasted, or

burned, in what Mr. Windsor called ‘an out-and-out wet season,’ he had

no previous experience.

From the moment that the coach cleared the forest parks which skirted

the plains, Ernest found himself embarked upon a ‘measureless prairie,’

where the tall green grass waved far as eye could see in the summer

breeze. A millennium of peace and plenty had apparently arrived for

all manner of graminivorous creatures. How different was the aspect of

these ‘happy hunting grounds,’ velvet-green of hue, flower-bespangled,

brook-traversed, with the forgotten sound of falling waters ever and

anon breaking on the ear, with hum of bee and carol blithe of bird,

as the sleek-coated, high-conditioned coach-horses rattled the light

drag merrily over the long long road! What a wondrous transformation!

Would Augusta, _la belle cousine_, have believed that all this glorious

natural beauty had been born, grown, and developed ‘since the rain

came’?

When at length the journey was over, and the proprietor of Rainbar and

Mildool was deposited, with his portmanteau, at the garden gate of

the former station, Mr. Neuchamp was constrained to confess that he

hardly knew his own place. There had been much growth and greenery when

he left with the fat cattle; but the riotous extravagance of nature

in that direction could not have been credited by him without actual

eye-witness.

Around the buildings, the garden fence, the stockyard, the cowshed,

was a growth of giant herbage, composed of wild oats, wild barley,

marsh-mallows, clover, and fodder plants unnamed, that almost smothered

these humble buildings and enclosures. A few milch cows fed lazily,

looking as if they had been employed in testing the comparative merits

of oilcake and Thorley’s cattle-food, for an agricultural experiment.

The river-flats below the house were knee-deep in clover and meadow

grasses, causing Mr. Neuchamp to wonder whether or no it would be worth

while to go in for a mowing-machine and a few horse-rakes, for the easy

conversion of a fraction of it into a few hundred tons of meadow hay,

to be stored against the next, ‘dry year.’ The mixed grasses, as he had

tested in a small way, made excellent hay. But how far off looked such

a calamity! Thus ever with ‘youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm’

do we lightly measure the future, recking neither of stormy sky nor of

the ravening deep.

After Mr. Neuchamp had sufficiently admired the grassy wilderness,

thoughts arose respecting dinner, and also a feeling of wonder where

everybody was. The station appeared to be minding itself. The cook was

absent, though recent indications of his presence were visible in the

kitchen. Charley Banks was away and Jack Windsor, probably at Mildool;

also Piambook, whose open countenance and dazzling teeth would have

been better than nothing. Where was Mrs. Windsor, _née_ Walton? He had

rather looked forward to having a talk with her under new conditions

of life. She could not be at Mildool, as there was no shelter for a

decent woman there. What in the name of wonder had become of them

all? There were no Indians in this country, or he might have turned

his thoughts in the direction of Blackfeet or Comanches, the ‘wolf

Apaché and the cannibal Navajo.’ Not even a Mormon settlement handy

enough to organise a ‘mountain-meadows massacre’! He never thought

Rainbar so lonely before. He went into the cottage, and in a leisurely

way unpacked his portmanteau in the snug bedroom which he had so long

inhabited—where he had so often, before the rain came, lain down in

sorrow and arisen in despair. What a tiny wooden box it seemed! Yet he

had thought it comfortable, even luxurious. Like those of many other

distinguished travellers and heroes long absent from the scene of early

conflict or youthful habitation, the eyes of Mr. Neuchamp had altered

their focus.

After three months’ familiarity with the lodging of clubs and villas,

the neat but necessarily contracted apartments of his bush cottage

appeared like cupboards, or even akin to a watch-box which he had once

dwelt in at Garrandilla.

However, he knew by former experience that a week or two of station

life would restore his vision, his appetite, and his contentment with

the district. Further than that he did not go. At the present price

of cattle, it was not likely that he would need ever again to spend

as many months consecutively at Rainbar as he had devoted to that

desirable but isolated abode before the ‘drought broke up.’

Having had ample time for comparison and appropriate reflections, he

was at length set free from the apprehension that he was the sole

inhabitant of Rainbar by the appearance of old Johnny, the cook,

who expressed great delight and satisfaction at seeing him, and,

explaining his absence by the statement that he had taken a walk of

five miles down the river in order to buy a bag of potatoes from a dray

loaded with those rare esculents, proceeded to place him in possession

of facts.

‘Every one about the place was away mustering at Mildool,’ he said,

‘including Mr. Banks, both the blackfellows, Jack Windsor, and even

Mrs. Windsor, who, finding that there was an unoccupied hut formerly

belonging to a dairyman at Mildool, had joined the mustering party. He

(Johnny) hadn’t had a soul to talk to for three weeks since the muster

began, and was as miserable as a bandicoot.’

The old man bustled about, laid the cloth neatly, and cooked and

served an inviting meal, which Ernest, after the reckless preparations

supplied to coach passengers, really enjoyed. It was far into the night

when the sound of horses‘hoofs was heard, and Mr. Banks, carrying

his saddle and bridle, which he placed upon the verandah, let go his

courser to graze at ease, entered the spare bedroom, undressed, and was

in bed and asleep all in the space of about two minutes and a half, as

it seemed to Mr. Neuchamp, from the first sound of his arrival. He did

not care to make himself known to the wearied youngster, and reserved

that sensation, very wisely, as might be many other pieces of news and

matters of business, until morning light.

With the new day arising, the active youth was much astonished, and

even more gratified, to find his employer again under the same roof. At

the daylight breakfast of the bush—_de rigueur_ when unusual work of

any kind is going forward—he favoured Ernest with a full recital of all

the exciting news.

‘Everything was well as could possibly be. All the cattle at Rainbar

were fat as pigs—all the “circle dot” cattle, all Freemans‘lot, which

had really turned out a famous bargain. A dealer from Ballarat had been

up a week since, and to him he had sold the whole of the Freeman horses

at fifteen pounds a head, cash, young and old. He didn’t think, when

old Cottonbush put the brand on them, that they’d ever see a ten-pound

note for the whole boiling. He had the dealer’s cheque—a good one too,

or he wouldn’t have taken it—for twelve hundred and fifteen pounds!

There were just eighty-one head.

‘As for the back country, it looked lovely. Grass and water everywhere.

The Back Lake was full; the river was bank high, and if there was a

flood—a regular big one—he wouldn’t say but what the water might flow

into the canal after all and fill the Outer Lake. By the way, there

were some back blocks for sale at the back of Rainbar and Mildool, and

if he had his way they should be bought, as it would give them the

command of all the back country as far as Barra Creek, and keep other

people from coming in by and by, and perhaps giving trouble; nothing

like securing all your back country while it is cheap.

‘With regard to Mildool, it was the best bargain he (Charley Banks) had

ever seen. All unbranded stock were to be given in, and there would be

calves and yearlings enough to brand to pay two years’ wages to every

man employed on both runs. They had pretty well got through the count;

there would be a two or three hundred head over the muster number,

which would be no harm, and it was only ordinary store price for half

fat cattle broken in to the run. As to fat stock, you might go on to

any camp and cut out with your eyes shut; you couldn’t go wrong; they

were all fat together, young and old. Mooney, the dealer, stayed a

night last week, and said he would give seven pounds all round for a

thousand head, half cows, to be taken in three months. He thought it

was a fair offer. It saved all the bother of sending men on the roads,

and when you let the mob out of your yard you get your cheque, or

draft, as the case might be. He was always for selling on the run, as

long as the buyers were known men.‘

‘How was Mrs. Windsor?’

‘Oh, she was a brick—a regular trump—something like a woman! When she

found Jack would only come back from Mildool once a week, she inquired

whether there was any sort of a hut that could hold a small family

at Mildool; was told there was the old dairyman’s hut at Green Bend,

about a mile from the station. So she said she would rather live in a

packing-case than be separated from her husband; and as Mildool was to

be their home, they might as well go there at once. The end of it was

that she made Jack take her traps over, and she has got the old place

so neat and comfortable that any one might live there, small as it is,

and enjoy life. She was a downright sensible woman, as well as a deuced

good-looking one, and she would make Jack a rich man before he died.’

‘Was there anything else to tell?’

‘Well, not much. He was going to let Jack have Boinmaroo at Mildool,

and keep Piambook here; when they mustered at either place they could

join forces. Oh! the Freemans. Well, they had all gone a month back.

Joe and Bill had gone to take up more land in the Albury district. Wish

them joy wherever they go. We’re quit of them, that’s one comfort.

Abraham Freeman and his lot cleared out for his old place at Bowning.

They’ll do well there in a quiet way. Poor Tottie was sorry to leave

Rainbar, and cried like fun. Had to comfort her a bit when the old

woman wasn’t looking. It’s a beastly nuisance having other people’s

stock on your run, and other people’s boys galloping about all over the

country, whether you like it or not. Was deuced glad to see their teams

yoked and their furniture on, I can tell you. Suppose you’d like to

ride over to Mildool, now you are here?’

Mr. Neuchamp thought he might as well, although fully satisfied that

the muster would have been satisfactorily completed without him. So the

two men rode over that day and had a look at the humours of a delivery

muster.

There was, as usual, great skirmishing about the ownership of calves

temporarily separated from their maternal parents, one stockman

averring that he remembered every spot on a certain calf’s hide since

its early infancy, others corroborating his assertion that it ‘belonged

to,’ or was the progeny of, his old black ‘triangle-bar’ cow; Mr.

Windsor, as counsel for the Crown, declaring, on the other hand, that

no calf should leave the Mildool run unless provided with a manifest

mother, then and there substantiating her claim to maternity by such

personal attentions or privileges as could not be fabricated or

misunderstood. To him the adverse stockman would remark that, if he was

going to talk like that, he might stick to every blessed clear-skin on

the river. Mr. Windsor retorting that he doesn’t say for that, but if

people think they can collar calves for the asking, they’ve come to the

wrong shop when they ride to Mildool muster. And so on, and so on.

Nathless, in course of time all things are arranged, in some shape,

with or without a proportionate allowance of growling, as the men

say. It being apparent that Mr. Windsor, now full-fledged overseer

of Mildool, knows a thing or two, and will stand up stoutly for his

master’s rights, fewer encroachments are, let us suppose, attempted.

The cattle are counted and finally gathered, and are discovered to

exceed, by three hundred odd, the station number. The former manager

feels complimented that he has been able to muster beyond his books.

The purchaser is satisfied, as the additional cattle are merely charged

to him at store cattle price, and, being ‘to the manor born,’ will

swiftly ‘grow into money.’ The strange stockmen depart, carrying with

them a large mixed drove of strayed cattle. The ex-overseer pays his

men and then leaves for down the country, there to wait on the agents,

and receive his _congé_ or further employment, as the case may be.

Charley Banks and the black boys, Jack Windsor, and Mr. Neuchamp are

left in undisputed possession of the new kingdom.

With such a season, with such prices ruling, the management is the

merest routine work, a few hundred calves to brand, arrangements to

make for an early muster to show the herd to the great cattle-dealer,

who wants to buy a thousand head fat to be taken away in three months,

and paid for by his acceptance at that date. Mr. Mooney happens to come

before Ernest leaves for Sydney, and the negotiation being successful,

the new proprietor of Mildool sets out for the metropolis with a

negotiable bill in his pocket for seven thousand pounds—more than a

third of the purchase-money of the run.

While Mr. Neuchamp was possessing his soul in tranquillity at Rainbar,

he was surprised at receiving a letter from his erstwhile Turonia

comrade, Mr. Bright. That cheerful financier wrote as follows:

TURONIA, _10th December 18—_.

MY DEAR NEUCHAMP—I hear you are to be married to the nicest girl in

Sydney. I thought it only reasonable, considering our two or three

larks here, to offer my congratulations; and, by the bye, talking of

things happening, that fellow Greffham, whom you remember my helping

to arrest, was hanged last Wednesday at Medhurst.

The evidence, joined to his paying away the numbered notes, known to

be in the escort parcel, was awfully strong against him. He made no

confession, and was as cool and unconcerned to the very last, as you

and I ever saw him at the billiard-table. What a wonderful uphill

game he could play! It is just possible he might have got off; but

Merlin fished up additional evidence which fixed him, in the eyes of

the jury, I think—-the groom at the inn, who swore he saw a small

parcel covered with a gray rug on his saddle, as he returned from the

direction of Running Creek, which he had not when he passed up. You

ought to have seen him and Merlin look at each other when Merlin asked

the Crown prosecutor to have Carl Anderson called. It was a ‘duel with

eyes.’ But, even without that, I don’t see how he could have accounted

for the notes.

I happened to be in Medhurst the day he was to be turned off. I

received a message that he wanted to see me, so I went to the gaol. I

knew the sheriff well. They showed me into his cell at once.

When I got in, Greffham nearly had finished dressing, and had only to

put on his frock-coat to be better turned out, if possible, than he

was for the lawn party Branksome gave when the Governor came up. He

happened to be cleaning his teeth—you remember how white and even they

were—as I came through the door.

‘Sit down, old man,’ he said, just as usual, shying his toothbrush

into the corner of the cell. ‘I daresay they’ll do; and I suppose I

shan’t want _that_ any more. What should you say? ’Pon my soul, there

isn’t a chair to offer you; devilish close about furniture, aren’t

they now? But it’s very kind of you, Bright, to come and see a fellow,

when he’s—well—peculiarly situated, eh?’

Here he laughed quite naturally, I give you my word—not forced at

all. He certainly _was_ the coolest hand I ever saw; and he died as he

lived.

‘What I wanted to see you for, Bright, was this’—here his voice shook

and he _did_ appear to show a little feeling—‘you’ll take these two

letters for me, like a good fellow; one I want you to send to —— after

I am gone; the other you can open _then_. Make what use you like

of the contents. I shan’t care then; say nothing _now_ to gratify

curiosity. As to what I may have done, or not done, I hold myself the

best judge of my reasons. You know what my life has been. Open and

straightforward, if somewhat reckless. My cards have always been on

the table. I have risked all that man holds dear on a throw before.

This time I have lost. I pay the stakes; there is no more to be said.

Lionel Greffham is not the man to say “I repent.” He is what he is,

and will die as he has lived. My time on earth has not been spun out

much, but, measured by enjoyment, with a front seat mostly at life’s

opera, it adds up fairly. Give me a Havannah from your case. You

will see me pretty “fit” for the stage when they ring in the leading

performer. By the way, I told them to give you my revolver; and while

I think of it, just remember this, if you want to make _very close

shooting_ at any time, only put in three parts of the powder in the

cartridge.‘

I really believe these were his last words, except to the —— hang-man.

He finished his cigar, and lounged up to the gallows, where he died in

the face of a tremendous crowd, calmly and scornfully, just as he was

accustomed to bear himself to them in life. Jack Ketch was a new hand,

and nervous. I heard Greffham say, just as if he was rowing a fellow

for awkwardness in saddling his horse, ‘You clumsy idiot, what are

you trembling for? Hang me, if I can see what there is to make a fuss

about! I’ll bet you a pound I tuck you up in ten minutes without any

baggling. _Now_, you’re right. Am _I_ standing quite square?’

‘You’re all right, sir,’ the man said respectfully. The drop fell,

and poor Greffham (I can’t help saying it, although he was a precious

scoundrel) died without the least contrition. Showed perfectly good

taste to the last. Deuced rum people one meets on a goldfield, don’t

you, now?

I suppose you’re not likely to come this way again. We’re not quite so

jolly as we were. The Colonel has gone back to India. Old De Bracy has

got a good Government appointment, for which he looks more suited than

market-gardening, though he was hard to beat at that, or anything

he tackled. I hear you’ve made pots of money. Parklands was here the

other day, and told me. I have a deuced good mind to turn squatter

myself. My regards to old Frankston, and ask him if he remembers the

last story I told him. Ha, ha!—Yours sincerely,

JOHN WILDER BRIGHT.

Now the great muster and delivery at Mildool was over and everyday

life at Rainbar had again to be faced, Ernest began to feel like one

Alexander, sometimes called Great, who had conquered his way into the

kingdom of Ennui. He was the possessor of a fortune and of a bride,

both above his utmost hopes, his loftiest aspirations; but he began

to fear that he had lost that which leaves life very destitute of

savour—he feared with a new and terrible dread that he had lost his

Occupation!

For life seemed so much more easy, so much less necessary to take

thought about, now that he had two stations than when he had but

one—one likely to be wrested from him. So is it that Difficulty is

oft our friend in disguise, Success but the veiled foe which smiles

at our faltering footsteps and watches to destroy. He saw now, that

with Jack Windsor at Mildool, and Charley Banks, alert, energetic,

fully experienced, at Rainbar, his life henceforth would be that of

a visitor, a supernumerary—unless indeed he employed his mind in the

construction and organisation of ‘improvements’! Ha, ha! ’_Vade retro_,

Sathanas!‘ The Genie was safe immured in his brazen sealed-up vessel.

There should he remain.

Still was there one ‘improvement’ in which he had never altogether lost

faith, long and dispiriting as had been the divorce between formation

and utility. This was the cutting the connecting channel between the

Back Lake and the ‘Outer Lake.’ Long had the ‘master’s ditch’ been as

useless as a fish-pond in the bosom of the Sahara, as a rose-garden in

a glacier, as an oyster-bed in a steppe. Cattle had walked over it;

grass had grown in it; stockmen and thoughtless souls had jeered at it,

and at the English stranger who had thrown away upon its construction

the money of which he possessed a quantity so greatly in excess of his

apparent intelligence. As long as he remained the proprietor of the

run, it would be hardly in keeping with the manner of the bush to call

it ‘Neuchamp’s Folly.’ But had failure or absence chanced to occur in

his case, the satirical nomenclature would not have been deferred for a

week. In the solitary rides and musings to which, in default of daily

work and labour, Mr. Neuchamp was fain to betake himself, it chanced

that he had repeatedly examined that portion of this great sheet of

water, which rang with the whistling wings of wild fowl, and on breezy

days surged with long rippling waves against its bank.

While in Sydney a number of back blocks, at no greater distance from

this outer lake than it was from the former ‘frontage,’ had been put

under offer to him. What if he should accept the terms—the price was

low—and trust to the chance of the next great flood in the full-fed

chafing river sending the water leaping down his tiny canal, and thus

giving a value never before dreamed of to this splendidly grand but

unnatural region. In spite of his half-settled determination to accept

no other speculative risks, but, like a wise man, to rest contented

with proved success, the next post conveyed instructions to Messrs.

Paul Frankston and Co. to close for all the blocks, each five miles

square, from A to M, comprising all the unoccupied country at the back

of Rainbar and Mildool, at the price named.

On the following morning the weather was misty and unusually cloudy,

with an apparent tendency to rain. No rain fell, however; but the raw

air, the unusual bleakness of the atmosphere, seemed abnormal to Ernest

Neuchamp.

‘I should not wonder,’ said Mr. Banks, in explanation, ‘that it was

raining cats and dogs somewhere else, snowing, or something of that

sort. Perhaps at the head of the river. If that’s the case, we shall

have a flood and no mistake. Such a one as none of us has seen yet.

However, we’ve neither hoof nor horn nor fleece on the frontage. It

can’t hurt us, that’s one comfort.’

Mr. Banks’s prognostications were correct. Within three days—

... like a horse unbroken,

When first he feels the rein,

The furious river struggled hard,

And tossed his tawny mane,

And burst the curb and bounded,

Rejoicing to be free,

And whirling down in fierce career

Battlement and plank and pier,

Rushed headlong to the sea.

Battlement and plank and pier were in this case represented by hut

slabs and rafters, haystacks and pumpkins, from the arable lands and

meadows through which the great river held its upper course; while

drowned stock and the posts and rails of many a mile of submerged

fencing represented the latter floating trifles. There was much that

was grand in the steadily deepening, broadening tide which slowly and

remorselessly crawled over the wide green flats, which undermined

the great waterworn precipices of the red-clayed bluffs, bringing

down enormous fragments and masses, many tons in weight, which fell,

foamed, and disappeared in the turbid, hurrying wave. Who could have

recognised in this fierce, swollen, tyrant river, yellow as the Tiber,

broad as the Danube, resistless as Ocean, the shallow, pellucid

streamlet, rippling over its sandy shallows, of the dead, bygone famine

year?

On the larger flats it was miles wide. The white, straight tree-trunks

stood like colonnades with arches framed in foliage, disappearing in

endless perspective above a limitless plain of gliding waters.

By night, as Mr. Neuchamp awoke in his cottage, which was built upon

an elevation said by tradition to be above the reach of floods, the

‘remorseless dash of billows’ sounded distinctly, unpleasantly close in

the darkness.

On the following day, the flood still continuing to rise, Piambook was

despatched to the Back Lake to report, and upon his return stated that

‘water yan along that one picaninny blind creek like it Murray, make

haste longer Outer Lake.’ Full of hope and expectant of triumph, Mr.

Neuchamp started out for ‘Lake country,’ accompanied by Mr. Banks.

When they arrived at the first lake the unusual fulness and volume of

the water in that reservoir showed that the main stream must have been

forced outwards along the course of the ancient, natural channel, by

which in years of exceptional high floods—and in those years only—the

lake had been filled.

Now, thought Mr. Neuchamp, the hour, long delayed, long doubted, has

surely come. Who could have dreamed but a few short months since, when

our very souls were adust and athirst with perennial famine, that our

eyes should behold the sight which I see now? How should it teach us

to hoard the garnered gold of truth, the ‘eternal verity’ in our heart

of hearts! ‘My lord delayeth his coming.’ Was that held to be a reason,

an excuse for the unfaithful, self-indulgent? Truly this would seem to

some as great a miracle as the leaping water which followed the stroke

of the prophet’s staff in that other desert of which we read of old.

And now his eyes did actually behold the first trickling, wondrous

motion of the brimming reservoir to advance, gravitation-led, along

the narrow path to its far-distant sister lake. Slowly the full waters

rose to the very lip of the vast natural cup or vase, and then, first

saturating the entrance, poured down the narrow outlet which the

forecasting mind of man had prepared for it. It trickled, it flowed, it

ran, it coursed, foaming and rushing, along the cutting, of which the

fall at first exceeded that of the general passage. It was done! It was

over! A proud success!

Charley Banks threw up his hat. Together they rode recklessly onward

to the Outer Lake, and there Ernest Neuchamp enjoyed silently the deep

satisfaction—then known but to the projector and inventor—of witnessing

the waters of the Inner Lake, for the first time since the sea had

ceased to murmur over these boundless levels, flow fast and flashing

forward, driven by the pressure of the immense body behind, into the

vast, deep, grass-clothed basin of the Outer Lake.

This was a triumph truly. For this alone it was worth while to have

journeyed across the long long ocean tide, to have toiled and suffered,

waited and watched, to have eaten his heart with fear and sickening

dread of the gaunt destroyer ‘Ruin,’ ever stalking nearer and nearer.

This was true life—real adventure—the hazard and the triumph which

alone constitute true manhood.

In the ecstasy of the moment Ernest Neuchamp forgot the fortune he had

gained, the bride whom he had won, the home of his youth, the grand and

glorious future, the not uneventful past. All things seemed as dreams

and visions by the side of this grand and living Reality.

As he sat on his horse and gazed, still flowed the glorious wave into

the century-dry basin by the channel which he, Ernest Neuchamp, had,

in defiance of Nature, opinion, and society, conceived, formed, and

successfully completed. Seasons might come and go; another dry time

might come; the water might periodically evaporate and disappear,—but

nothing could evade the great fact henceforth in the history of the

land, that he had established the connection between the river and this

distant, long-dry, unthought-of reservoir. There would be no more hint

or menace of Neuchamp’s Folly—more likely, Neuchamp’s River.

Lake Neuchamp! Pshaw! it was an inland sea. Why not name it now? Why

not render immortal, not his own perhaps ancient patronymic, but the

lovely and beloved name of his soul’s divinity? Now was the hour, the

minute, when the virgin waters were falling for the first time in

creation into the flower-besprinkled lap of the green earth before

their eyes!

‘Charley, my boy,’ he said to Mr. Banks, ‘take off your hat. Piambook,

do liket me,’ he said, removing his own. ‘I name this water, now

about to be filled for the first time within the memory of man,

“Lake Antonia.” So mote it be. Hip, hip, hurrah!‘ and the echoes of

the waste rang to the unfamiliar sounds of the great British shout

of welcome, of salutation, of battle-joy, of deathdefiance, which

England’s friends and England’s foes have had ere now just cause to

know.

‘Hurrah!’ joined in Charley Banks with genuine feeling. ‘By George! I

never thought to see this sight—last year particularly; but, of course,

we might have known it wasn’t going to be dry always, as Levison said.

We don’t see far beyond our noses, most of us. But it _was_ hard to

conjure up any notion of a regular out-and-out waterfall like this with

a twelvemonth’s dust, and last year’s burnt feed keeping as black as

the day it took fire. I believe there will be thirty feet of water in

this when it’s full up, and it soon will be at this rate.’

‘Budgeree tumble down water that one,’ said Piambook. ‘Old man

blackfellow yabber, debil-debil, make a light here when he yan long

that one scrub.’

Another occasion of congratulation awaited Mr. Neuchamp, the pleasure

and pride accompanying which were perhaps only second in degree to

the feelings inspired by the engineering triumph of Lake Antonia.

His stud of Austral-Arabian horses had shared in the general advance

and development of the property; they were now a perfect marvel of

successful rearing.

He had them brought in daily from the sandhills near the plain where

they ordinarily grazed, and passed hours in reviewing the colts and

fillies, the yearlings, the mares and the foals. Every grade and stage,

from the equine baby which gambolled and frisked by the side of its

dam, to the well-furnished three-year-old filly—‘Velut in latis equa

trima campis ludit exsultim, metuitque tangi,’—all were satin-coated,

sleek and round, fuller-fleshed, stronger, swifter; more riotously

healthy could they not have been had they been fed with golden oats in

an emperor’s stable. Daintily now they picked the half-ripened tops

from the fields of wild oats or barley which spread for leagues around.

They drank of the pure clear waters of every pool and brooklet. They

lay at night in the thickly-carpeted sandy knolls, and snuffed up the

free desert breeze, fresh wafted from inmost sands or farthest seas.

Partaking on one side of their parentage of the stately height and

generous scope of their southern dams, culled from the noble race of

island steeds which bear up the large frames of the modern Anglo-Saxon,

they inherited a strong, perhaps overpowering infusion of the priceless

blood of the courser of the desert. Their delicate heads, their wide

nostrils, their adamantine legs, their perfect symmetry, all told

of the ancient lineage of Omar the Keheilan, whose dam was Najima

Sabeh or the Morning Star, of the strain Seglawee Dzedran, which, as

every camel-driver of the Anezeh knows, dates back to El Kamsch, that

glorious equine constellation, the five mares of Mahomet!

Here, again, was another instance of what Ernest could not but

acknowledge gratefully as the generosity of Fate. Had but the season

continued obdurate, his utter irrevocable ruin could not have been

stayed. As a consequence, this stud, so precious, so profitable, so

distinguished as it was apparently destined to be (for Mr. Banks told

him that numbers of offers had already been received for all available

surplus stock, while the agent of a large dealer had implored him to

put a price upon the whole stud), would doubtless have passed under the

hammer as most unconsidered trifles, to be sneered at, scattered, for

ever wasted and lost, as had been many a good fellow’s pet stud ere now.

At length the day arrived when, having witnessed the satisfactory

conclusion of every conceivable business duty and task which could be

transacted at Rainbar or Mildool, Mr. Neuchamp took his place in the

mail for Sydney, which city he had calculated to reach within a week of

the dread ceremonial which was to seal his destiny. The coach did _not_

break down or capsize, fracturing Mr. Neuchamp’s leg in two places. The

train fulfilled its appointed task, and the stern steam-giant did not

select that opportunity for running off the rails or equalising angles.

Something of the sort might have been reasonably expected to happen to

a hero so near the rapturous denouement of the third volume, in which,

indeed, every hero of average respectability is killed, mysteriously

imprisoned, or married.

Mr. Neuchamp had undergone trials and troubles, risks and anxieties,

losses and crosses; but the season of tribulation was for ever past

for him. He had henceforth but to submit to the compulsory laurel

crown, to the caresses of Fortune’s favourite delegates, to listen to

the plaudits of the crowd, to withstand the whispers and glances of

beauty. He was now wise, beautiful, strong, and brave, a conqueror, an

Adonis—in a word, he was _rich_!

He stood successful, and the world’s praises, grudgingly bestowed upon

struggling fortitude, were showered upon the obviously victorious

speculator. All kinds of rumours went forth about him. His possessions

were multiplied, so that Rainbar and Mildool stood sponsors for a tract

of country about as large as from Kashgar to Khiva.

The canal was magnified into the dimensions of its namesake of Suez,

and a trade was prophesied which would overshadow Melbourne and

revolutionise Adelaide. He had contracted for the remount service for

the whole Madras Presidency, such a matter being quite within the scope

of his immense and high-bred studs. His herds of cattle were to supply

Ballarat and Sandhurst with fat stock, and Melbourne buyers were on

their way to secure everything he could deliver for the next two years!

Ernest Neuchamp of Rainbar was the man of the day; the popular idol.

Squatter though he might be, some of Jack Windsor’s grateful utterances

had been circulated, and a democratic but strongly appreciative and

generous populace adored him. Portraits of Mr. Neuchamp and his

faithful retainer, Jack Windsor, contending victoriously with a swarthy

piratical crowd, led on by the Count with a cutlass and a belt full

of revolvers, appeared in the windows of the print-shops. Heroism and

unselfish generosity, like murder, ‘will out.’

Whether accidentally or otherwise, the Morahmee conflict had

transpired. I make no reflections upon the well-known inviolable

secrecy which shrouds all postnuptial communications. I content myself

with stating a fact. Mr. Windsor was now a married man.

Ernest was at first annoyed, then surprised, lastly, unaffectedly

amused, when a highly popular dramatic version of the incident appeared

at the Victoria Theatre, wherein he was represented as defying the

Count, and assuring him that ‘berlood should flow from Morahmee Jetty

to the South Head Lighthouse ere he relinquished the two maidens

to his lawless grasp,’ while Jack Windsor’s representative, with a

cabbage-tree hat and a hanging velvet band broad enough to make a sash

for Carry, placed himself in an exaggerated, pugilistic attitude,

and implored the foreign seamen to ‘come on and confront on his own

ground, by the shore of that harbour which was his country’s pride, a

true-born Sydney native!’ This brought down the house, and occasioned

Mr. Neuchamp such anguish of mind that he began to think Jermyn Croker

not such a bad fellow after all, and to feel unkindly towards the great

land and the warm-hearted people of his adoption.

Incapable of being stimulated by flattery into a false estimate of

himself, these exaggerated symptoms of appreciation but pained him

acutely; they disturbed his philosophical mind, ever craving for the

performance of justice and intolerant of all lower standards of right.

As for Antonia Frankston, like most women, she was gratified by these

tokens of the distinction which had been so profusely accorded to her

hero. He was a hero who, in her eyes, though worthy of triumphs and

processions, evaded his claims to such distinctions. He was too prone,

she thought, to be over Scriptural in his social habitudes, and unless

roused and incited, to take the lower rather than the higher seat at

the board. Now that the people, wavering and impulsive, but still a

mighty and tangible power, had endorsed and adopted him, Antonia’s

expansive mind recognised the brevet rank bestowed upon him. After all,

had he not done much and dared greatly? Was it not well for the world

to know it? If he was to be decorated, few deserved it more. So Antonia

accepted serenely and in good faith the plaudits and universal flattery

which now commenced to be showered upon the hero of her choice, the

idol of her heart, the image of all written manhood.

The days which Mr. Neuchamp spent in Sydney after his return from

Mildool and Rainbar were certainly more tedious than any which he had

ever known in the pleasant city; but at length they passed away and

were no more—strange thought! those atoms from the mighty mass of

Time—drops from his flowing river—draughts, alas! quaffed or spilled

from life’s golden chalice. They were past, faded, dead, irrevocably

gone, as the days of the years before Pharaoh, before the shepherd

kings, before the dawn of human life, Eden, or the first gleam of light

which flashed upon a darkened, formless world!

Sad, pathetic even, is the death of a day! Its circling hours have

known peace, joy, loving regard, social glee, charity, justice, mercy,

repose. The allotted task has been done. The parent’s smile, the

wife’s love, the babe’s prattle, have all glorified earth during its

short season. And now the day is done! its tiny term is over, lost in

the shoreless sea of past immensities! The brightly inconstant orb

shines tenderly on the new-born stranger, full of joyous hope or dread

expectancy. Who can tell what this, the new and garish day, may bring

forth? Let us weep for the loved, fast-fading Child of Time, in whose

golden tresses, at least, twined no cypress wreath.

Then, heralded by calm and cloudless hours, did the wondrous unit, the

Day of Days, dawn for Ernest Neuchamp. Rarely—even in that matchless

clime, where the too ardent sun alone may be blamed by the husbandman,

rarely by the citizen or the tourist—did a more perfect, unrivalled,

wondrous day steal rosy through the ocean mists, the folded vapours, to

change into fretted gold and Tyrian dyes the tender tints of flushed

dawn. All nature visibly, audibly rejoiced. The tiny wavelets murmured

on the milk-white sands of the Morahmee beach, that their darling—she

who loved them and talked with them in many a hushed eve, in many a

solemn starry midnight—was this day to be wed. The strange foreign

pines and flower trees of the Morahmee plantation, brought from many

a distant land to please the lady of the mansion, echoed the sound

as they waved to and fro with oriental languor and tropical mystery.

The flowerets she daily tended turned imperceptibly their delicately

various sheen of petals to each other and sighed the tender secret.

With how many secrets are not the flowers entrusted? Have they not been

sworn to silence since those days of the great dead empires, when the

vows and pleadings, songs and laughter, beneath the rose-chaplets were

sacred evermore?

Her gems, of which Antonia had great store—for there was more

difficulty in preventing Paul from overlading her caskets than of

replenishing them—even they knew it. They flashed and glittered, and

reddened, and sent out green and purple light, for they are envious,

hard, and remorseless of nature, as they noted the arrival of a

bediamonded necklace, and a brooch outshining in splendour any of their

rich and rare and very exclusive ‘set.’

The pensioners, her dependants, of the house, among the humble, and

the very poor, knew it and raised for her welfare the brief unstudied

prayer which comes from a thankful heart. The poor, in ordinary

acceptation, are, and have always been, in Australia, difficult

to discover and to distinguish. But to the earnest quest of the

unaffectedly charitable, anxious to do good to soul or body, to succour

the tempted, to help the needy, to save him that is ready to perish,

worthy occasions of ministration have never been absent from the

outskirts of every large city.

The forlorn spinster, friendless and forsaken, the overworked

matron,—the shabby genteel sufferers too secure to starve, too poor to

enjoy, too proud to complain, and, occasionally, what seemed to be an

example of unmerciful disaster,—among these were the rich maiden’s

unobtrusive but unremittingly performed good works, of which none

heard, none knew, but the recipients, and perhaps the discreetest of

co-workers.

* * * * *

And thus, with the day just dawned, had the maiden life of Antonia

Frankston come to an end. From this day forth her being was to merge in

that of one who, falling with the suddenness of a shipwrecked mariner

into their society, had been, as would have been such a waif, treated

with every friendly office, with the ample up-springing kindness of

a princely heart, by her fond father. That father, no mean judge of

his fellow-man, had seen in his early career but the noble errors of

a lofty nature and an elevated ideal. Such disproportions between

judgment and experience but prove the natural dignity of the mind as

fully as the precocious wisdom of the gutter-bred urchin waif, his base

descent and companionship.

Paul Frankston had long foreseen that, when the lessons of life should

have cleared the encrustation from the character of his _protégé_, it

would shine forth bright and burnished as Toledo steel—all-sufficient

for defence, nay, equal to spirited attack, should such need arise. He

saw that the future possessor and guardian of his soul’s treasure was

a ‘man’ as well as a ‘gentleman.’ On both of these essentials he laid

great weight. For the rest, his principles were high and unfaltering,

his habits unimpeachable. Whatever trifling defects there might be in

his character were merely such as were incident to mortality. They must

be left to the influence of time, experience, and of Antonia.

‘If she doesn’t turn him out a perfect article,’ said Paul,

unconsciously quitting the mental for the actual soliloquy, ‘why,

nothing and no one can. If I had been any one else, and she had

commenced early enough at me, I really believe that she’d have changed

old Paul Frankston into a bishop, or, at any rate, a rural dean at

least; even Charley Carryall——’

But whether Captain Carryall’s utterances and anecdotes were scarcely

of a nature calculated to harmonise with bishops and deans, or whether

Mr. Frankston’s many engagements at this important crisis suddenly

engaged his attention, can never be known with that precision which

this chronicler is always anxious to supply. One thing only is certain,

that he looked at his watch, and hastily arising from his arm-chair,

departed into the city.

For the information of a section of readers for whom we feel much

respect and gratitude, it may be mentioned that the wedding took place

at St. James’s, a venerable but architecturally imperfect pile in the

vicinity of Hyde Park. There be churches near Morahmee more replete

with ‘miserable sinners’ in robes of Worth and garments of Poole, but

Mr. Frankston would none of them. In the old church had he stood beside

his mother, a schoolboy, wondering and wearied, but acquiescent, after

the manner of British children; in the old church had he plighted his

troth to Antonia’s sainted mother; in the old church should his darling

utter her vows, and in no other. Are there any words which can fitly

interpret the deep joy and endless thankfulness which fill the heart

and humble the mind of him who, all unworthy, knows that the chalice

of life’s deepest joy is even then past all risk and danger, steadily

uplifted to his reverent lips?

Doubts there have been, delays that fretted, fears that shook the soul,

clouds that dimmed, darkness that hid the sky of love. All these have

sped. Here is naught but the glad and gracious Present, that blue and

golden day which, pardoning and giving amnesty to the Past, beseeches,

well-nigh assures, the stern veiled form of the Future.

Some of these reflections would doubtless have mingled with the

contemplations of Ernest Neuchamp at Aurora’s summons on that glad morn

but for an unimportant fact—that he was at that well-known poetical

period most soundly asleep.

Restlessly wakeful during the earlier night-watches, he slept heavily

at length, and only awoke, terrible to relate, with barely time for a

careful toilet. Hastily disposing of a cup of coffee and a roll, he

betook himself, in company with Mr. Parklands, who, I grieve to relate,

had been playing loo all night, and was equally late and guilty, to the

ancient church, where they were, by the good fortune of Parklands‘watch

being rather fast—like all his movements—exactly, accurately the

canonical five minutes before the time. Both of the important

personages, being secretly troubled, looked slightly, becomingly pale.

But the pallor of Parklands, entirely due to an unprosperous week,

involving heavier disbursements and later sittings than ordinary, told

much in his favour with the bridesmaids, so much so, that he always

averred, in his customary irreverent speech, that ‘his flint was fixed’

on the occasion.

Probably owing to the calmly superior aspect of Mr. Hartley Selmore,

or the tonic supplied by Jermyn Croker’s patent disapprobation and

contempt of the whole proceedings, the protagonist and his acolouthos

went through the ordeal with that exact proportion of courage,

reverence, deftness, and satisfaction, the full rendering of which

is often hard upon him who makes necessarily ‘a first appearance.’

As for Antonia’s loveliness on that day, when, radiant, white-robed,

and serene, she placed her hand in that of her lover, and greeted

him with the trustful smile in which the virgin-soul shines out o’er

the maiden-bride’s countenance, Ernest Neuchamp may be pardoned for

thinking that the angel of his dreams had been permitted to visit the

earth, to rehearse for his especial joy a premature beatific vision.

Mr. Parklands effected a sensation by dropping the bridal-ring,

but as he displayed much quickness of eye and manual dexterity in

regaining it, the incident had rather a beneficial effect than

otherwise. Everything was happily concluded, even to the kissing of

the bridesmaids, Mr. Parklands, with his usual energy and daring,

having insisted on carrying out personally that pleasing portion of the

programme, supposed to appertain of right to the holder of the ancient

and honourable office of groomsman. This compelled the chasing of two

unwilling damsels half-way down the aisle, after which the slightly

scandalised spectators quitted the church, while the wedding-guests

betook themselves to Morahmee.

There, as they arrived, Mr. Frankston, sweeping the bay mechanically

with long-practised eye, exclaimed, ‘What boat is that heading for our

jetty at such a pace?—a whaleboat, too, with a Kanaka crew. There’s a

tall man with the steer oar in his fist; by Jove! it’s Charley Carryall

for a thousand.’

And that cheerful mariner and successful narrator it proved to be when

the weather-beaten boat came foaming up to the little pier, drawn half

out of the water by her wild-looking, long-haired crew, encouraged by

their captain, who was backing up the stroke as if an eighty-barrel

whale depended upon their speed.

‘Frantically glad to see you, Charley, my boy,’ shouted Paul; ‘never

hoped for such luck; the only man necessary to make the affair

perfect—absolutely perfect. Isn’t he, Antonia? But how did you guess

what we were about, and get here in time? I see the old _Banksia_ is

only creeping up the harbour now.’

‘_That_ guided me,’ said the Captain, pointing to the profusely

decorated Morahmee flagstaff—an invariable adjunct to a marine villa.

‘I was sure all that bunting wasn’t up for anything short of Antonia’s

wedding. So I dressed and came away. The operculums I was bringing our

little girl here will just come in appropriately. They’re the first any

of you have seen, I daresay.’

The faintly subdued tone which is usual and natural in the pre-banquet

stage could not be reasonably protracted after the first fusilade of

Paul’s wonderful Pommery and Veuve Clicquot, Steinberger and Roederer.

The guests were many and joyous, the day brilliant, the occasion

fortunate and mirth-inspiring, the entertainment unparalleled, and

henceforth proverbial in a city of sumptuous and lavish hospitality.

Small wonder, then, that the merriment was as free and unconstrained as

the welcome was cordial, and the banquet regal in its costly profusion.

How the jests circulated! how the silvery laughter rang! how the

bright eyes sparkled! how the fair cheeks glowed! how the soft breeze

whispered love! how the blue wave murmured joy!

Did not Mr. Selmore propose the health of the bride and bridegroom with

such pathetic eloquence that the uninstructed were doubtful as to

whether he was Antonia’s uncle or Mr. Neuchamp’s father? He referred to

the mingled energy, foresight, acuteness, and originality displayed by

his valued, and, he might add, distinguished friend Ernest Neuchamp.

By utilising qualities of the highest order, joined with information

always yielded, he was proud to say, by himself and other pioneers, he

had achieved an unequalled, but, he must add, a most deserved success,

which placed him in the front rank of the pastoral proprietors of New

South Wales.

Any one would have imagined from Mr. Hartley Selmore’s benevolent flow

of eulogy that he had carefully nursed the infancy of Mr. Neuchamp’s

fortunes instead of ruthlessly endeavouring to strangle the tender

nursling. He himself, by means of luck and much discount, had managed

to hang on, ostensible proprietor of his numerous stations, until the

tide turned. Now he was a wealthy man, and needed not to call the

governor of the Bank of England his cousin.

With prosperity his character and estimation had much improved.

There were those yet who said he was an unprincipled remorseless old

humbug, and would none of him. But in a general way he was acceptable;

popular, in private and in public. His natural talents were great; his

acquirements above the average; his manner irresistible; it was no

one’s particular interest or business to bring him to book,—so he dined

and played billiards at the clubs, buttonholed officials, and greeted

illustrious strangers, as if the greater portion of the pastoral

interior of Australia belonged to him, or as though he were one of the

Conscript Fathers, distinguished for an excess of Roman virtues, of

this rising nation.

Mr. Parklands indeed desired to throw some missile at him for his

‘cheek,’ as he confided to a young lady with sensational blue eyes,

but desisted from that practical criticism upon being implored by his

fair neighbour not to think of it, for her sake, and that of the ladies

generally. The speaker was pretty enough to speak with authority, and

so Hartley, like other fortunate conspirators and oppressors, departed

in triumph, with the plaudits and congratulations of the unthinking

public. For the rest, the affair went off much as such society

fireworks do. Augusta Neuchamp, in a Paris dress, looked so extremely

well that Jermyn Croker congratulated himself warmly, and mingled such

vitriolic scintillations with his pleasantries, that every one was awed

into admiration. The mail steamer was to sail in a few days, and he

flattered himself that he had contrived a surprise for all his friends,

which should contain an element of ignoring contempt so complete in

conception and execution, that his departure from the colony should

faithfully reflect the opinions and convictions formed during his

residence in it.

Having, after considerable hesitation, finally determined to enter

upon the frightfully uncertain adventure of matrimony, he had offered

himself and heart, such as it was, in marriage to Miss Augusta, with

many apologies for the apparent necessity of the ceremony being

performed in a colony. That young lady had endeared herself to Mr.

Croker by her unsparing criticisms, by her ceaseless discontent

with all things Australian, by her unmistakable air of _ton_ and

distinction. He did not entirely overlook her possession of a moderate

but assured income.

With his customary disregard for the feelings of others, he had

insisted upon being married, without the usual time-honoured ceremonies

and concomitants, on the morning upon which the mail steamer started

for Europe. By going on board directly afterwards, the Sydney people

would be precluded from hearing of the event until after their

departure; while their fellow-passengers, most of them strangers, would

be ignorant as to whether the newly-married couple were of a week’s

date or of six months.

This arrangement, in which he had no great difficulty in persuading

Miss Augusta to acquiesce, would have excellently answered Mr. Croker’s

unselfish expectations but for one circumstance, which he doubtless

noted to the debit of colonial wrongs and shortcomings—he had neglected

to procure the co-operation of the elements.

No sooner had the ceremony, unwitnessed save by Paul Frankston and Mr.

and Mrs. Neuchamp, taken place, and the happy pair been transferred

to the _Nubia_, their luggage having been safely deposited in that

magnificent ocean steamer days before,—no sooner had the great steamer

neared the limit of the harbour, when a southerly gale, an absolute

hurricane, broke upon the coast with such almost unprecedented fury

that till it abated no sane commander of the Peninsular and Oriental

Company’s service would have dreamed of quitting safe anchorage.

For three days the ‘tempest howled and wailed,’ and most uncomfortably

the _Nubia_ lay at anchor, safe but most uneasy, and, as she was rather

crank, rolling and pitching nearly as wildly as she could have done in

the open sea.

It so chanced that one of Mr. Croker’s few weak points was an

extraordinarily extreme susceptibility to _mal de mer_. On all

occasions upon which he had cleared the Heads, for years past, he had

suffered terribly. But never since his first outward-bound experience

in early life had he suffered torments, prostration, akin to this. He

lay in his cabin death-like, despairing, well-nigh in collapse.

Miss Neuchamp, in spite of her much travelling, was always a martyr

during the first week of a voyage, if the weather chanced to be bad.

Now it certainly was bad, very bad; and in consequence Miss Augusta

lay, under the charge of a stewardess, in a stern cabin, well-nigh

sick unto death, heedless of life and its chequered presentments, and

as oblivious, not to say indifferent, to the fate of Jermyn Croker as

if she had yesterday sworn to love and obey the chief officer of the

_Nubia_.

This was temporary anguish, mordant and keen, doubtless. But Time, the

healer, would certainly in a few days have set it straight. The fact

of an unknown lady and gentleman being indisposed at the commencement

of the voyage afflicts nobody. But here was apparently the finger of

the fiend. A ruffianly pilot, coming off in his hardy yawl, brought on

board a copy of the _Sydney Morning Herald_ of the day following their

attempted departure, in which it was duly set forth how, at St. James’s

Church, by Canon Druid, Jermyn, second son of Crusty Croker, Esq., of

Crankleye Hall, Cornwall, was then and there married to Augusta, only

daughter of the Rev. Cyril Neuchamp, incumbent of Neuchamp-Barton,

Buckinghamshire, England. Now the joke was out. Even under such

unpromising circumstances it told. Here were two mortals, passionately

devoted of course, and in that state of matrimonial experience when

all things tend to the wildest overrating, so cast down, so utterly

prostrated by the foul Sea Demon, that they positively did not care

a rush for each other. The great Jermyn lay, faintly ejaculating

‘Steward, Ste-w-a-ar-d,’ at intervals, and making neither lament nor

inquiry about his similarly suffering bride. As for Augusta, she had

scarce more strength of body or mind than permitted her to moan out,

‘I shall die, I shall die’; and apparently, for all she cared, in that

unreal, phantasmal, pseudo-existence, which only was not death, though

more dreadful, Jermyn Croker might have fallen overboard, or have been

changed into a Seedee stoker. Then for this to happen to Jermyn Croker,

of all people! The humour of the situation was inexhaustible!

And though the fierce south wind departed and the _Nubia_ drove

swiftly majestic across the long seas that part Cape Otway from the

stormy Leuwin, though in due time the spice-laden gales blew ‘soft

from Ceylon’s isle,’ and the savage peaks of Aden, the lofty summit of

the Djebel Moussa rose to view in the grand succession of historical

landscapes; yet to the last day of the voyage a stray question in

reference to the precise effects of very bad cases of sea-sickness

would be directed, as to persons of proved knowledge and experience, to

Mr. and Mrs. Jermyn Croker, by their fellow-passengers.

It is due to Mr. Croker, as a person of importance, to touch lightly

upon his after-career. His wife discovered too late that in reaching

England he had only changed the theme upon which his universal

depreciations were composed. ‘Non animam sed cœlum mutant qui trans

mare currunt.’ He abused the climate and the people of England with a

savage freedom only paralleled by his Australian practice. Becoming

tired of receiving 3 or 4 per cent for his money, he one day, in a fit

of wrath, embarked one-half of his capital in a somewhat uncertain

South American loan. His cash was absorbed, to reappear spasmodically

in the shape of interest, of which there was little, while of principal

it soon became apparent that there would be none.

Reduced to the practice of marked though not distressing economy,

Mr. Croker enjoyed the peculiar pleasure which is yielded to men of

his disposition, of witnessing the possession of luxuries by others

and a style of living which they are debarred from emulating. He was

gladdened, too, by the occasional vision of an Australian with more

money than he could spend, who rallied him upon his grave air, and

bluntly asked why he was such a confounded fool as to sell out just as

prices were really rising. Finally, to aggravate his sufferings, long

unendurable by his own account, Mr. Parklands had the effrontery to

come home, and, in the very neighbourhood where he, Croker, was living

for economy, to buy a large estate which happened to be for sale.

The unfailing flow of the new proprietor’s high spirits, his liberal

ways, and frank manners, combined with exceptional straight going in

the hunting-field, rendered him immensely popular, as indeed he had

always contrived to be wherever fate and speculation led his roving

steps. But it may be questioned whether his brother-colonist ever saw

his old friend spinning by behind a blood team, or heard of his being

among the select few in a ‘quick thing,’ without fulminating one of his

choicest anathemas, comprehending at once the order to which he and

Parklands had belonged, the country they had quitted, and the one in

which they now sojourned.

Mr. Banks remained in the employment of Mr. Neuchamp at Rainbar until,

having saved and acquired by guarded investment a moderate capital, he

had a tempting offer of joining, as junior partner, in the purchase of

a large station in new country. Always a good-looking, manly fellow,

he managed to secure the affections of a niece of Mr. Middleton, whom

he met on one of his rare trips to Sydney, and, before he left for the

Tadmor Downs, Lower Barcoo, they were married.

Mr. Joe Freeman had employed some of the compulsory leisure time

rendered necessary during his fulfilment of the residence clause for

Mr. Levison, in an exhaustive study of the Crown Lands Alienation Act.

From that important statute (20 Vic. No. 7, sec. 13) he discovered

that, provided a man had children enough, there is but little limit to

the quantity of the country’s soil that he can secure and occupy at a

rate of expenditure singularly small and favourable to the speculative

‘landist’ of the period.

Thus Joe Freeman, after considerable ciphering, made out that he could

‘take up’ for himself and his three younger children a total of twelve

hundred and eighty acres of first-class land! He had determined that

as long as there was an alluvial flat in the colony his choice should

not consist of _bad_ land. Added to this would be a pre-emptive grazing

right of three times the extent. This would come to three thousand

eight hundred and forty acres, which, added to the freehold of twelve

hundred and eighty acres, gave a total of five thousand one hundred and

twenty acres. The entire use of this territory he could secure by a

payment of five shillings per acre for the _freehold portion_ only—say,

three hundred and twenty pounds.

‘Of course his three children were compelled, by law, to reside on

their selections. As two of these were under five years old, some

difficulty in the carrying out of the apparently stringent section No.

18 might be anticipated.

This difficulty was utterly obliterated by building his cottage

_exactly_ upon the intersecting lines of the four half-sections, thus:

[Illustration: Diagram]

By this clever contrivance Mary Ellen, the baby, as well as Bob, aged

three years, were ‘residing upon their selections’ when they were in

bed at night, inasmuch as that haven of rest (for the other members of

the family) was carefully placed across the south line which divided

the estates.

Nor was this all. Bill Freeman took up a similar quantity of land in

precisely the same way, locating it about a mile from his brother’s

selection, so that as it was clearly not worth any other selector’s

while to come between them, they would probably have the use of another

section or two of land for nothing. The squatter on whose run this

little sum was worked out was a struggling, burdened man, unable to

buy out or borrow. He was ruined. But the individual, in all ages, has

suffered for the State.

Mr. Neuchamp’s Australian career had now reached a point when life,

however heroic, is generally conceded to be less adventurous. His end,

in a literary sense, is near. We feel bound in honour, however, to add

the information, that upon the assurance of Mr. Frankston that they

could not leave New South Wales temporarily at a more prosperous time,

Ernest Neuchamp resolved once more to tempt the main, and to taste the

joy of revisiting, with his Australian bride, his ancestral home.

Having taken the precaution to call a council of the most eminent

floriculturists of flower-loving Sydney to his aid, he procured and

shipped a case of orchidaceous plants, second to none that had ever

left the land, for the delectation of his brother Courtenay. He had

long since paid the timely remittance which had so lightened his load

of anxiety in the ‘dry season’ at Rainbar, with such an addition of

‘colonial interest’ as temporarily altered the views of the highly

conservative senior as to the soundness of Australian securities.

Upon the genuine delight which Antonia experienced when the full glory

of British luxury, the garnered wealth of a thousand years, burst

upon her, it is not necessary here to dilate, nor, after a year’s

continental travel, upon the rejoicings which followed the birth of

Mr. Courtenay Frankston Neuchamp at the hall of his sires. His uncle

immediately foresaw a full and pleasing occupation provided for

his remaining years, in securing whatever lands in the vicinity of

Neuchampstead might chance to be purchasable. They would be needed for

the due territorial dignity of a gentleman, who, upon his accession

to the estate, would probably have thirty or forty thousand a year

additional to the present rental, to spend on one of the oldest

properties in the kingdom.

‘He himself,’ he said, ‘was unhappily a bachelor. He humbly trusted

so to remain, but he was proud and pleased to think that the old House

would once more be worthily represented. He had never seen the remotest

possibility of such a state of matters taking place in his own time,

and had never dreamed, therefore, of the smallest self-assertion.

‘The case was now widely different. The cadet of the House, against,

he would frankly own, his counsel and opinion, had chosen to seek his

fortune on distant shores, as had many younger sons unavailingly. He

had not only found it, but had returned, moreover, with the traditional

Princess, proper to the King’s younger son, in all legends and

romances. In his charming sister he recognised a princess in her own

right, and an undeniable confirmation of his firmly-held though not

expressed opinion, that his brother Ernest’s enthusiasm had always been

tempered by a foundation of prudence and unerring taste.’

Again in his native land, in his own county, Antonia had to submit

to the lionisation of her husband, who came to be looked upon as a

sort of compromise between Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh, with a

dash of Francis Drake. The very handsome income which the flourishing

property of Rainbar and Mildool, _cum_ Back-blocks A to M, and the

unwearied rainy seasons and high markets, permitted him to draw, was

magnified tenfold. His liberal expenditure gratified the taste of the

lower class, among whom legends involving romantic discoveries and

annexations of goldfields received ready credence.

Mr. Ernest Neuchamp was courteously distinguished by the county

magnates, popular among the country gentlemen who had been his friends

and those of his family from his youth, and the idol of the peasantry,

who instinctively discerned, as do children and pet animals, that he

viewed them with a sympathetic and considerate regard.

When Mrs. Ernest Neuchamp, of Neuchampstead, was presented to her

Gracious Sovereign by ‘the Duchess,’ that exalted lady deigned to

express high approval of her very delicately beautiful and exquisitely

apparelled subject from the far southern land, and to inquire if all

Australian ladies were so lovely and so sweet of aspect and manner as

the very lovely young creature she saw before her. The Court Circular

was unprecedentedly enthusiastic; and in very high places was Ernest

assured that he was looked upon as having conferred lustre upon

his order and benefits upon his younger countrymen, to whom he had

exhibited so good and worthy an example.

All this panegyrical demonstration Ernest Neuchamp received not

unsuitably, but with much of his old philosophical calmness of critical

attitude. What he really had ‘gone out into the wilderness’ to see,

and to do, he reflected he had neither seen nor done. What he found

himself elevated to high places for doing, was the presumable amassing

of a large fortune, a proceeding popular and always favourably looked

upon. But this was only a secondary feature in his programme, and one

in which he had taken comparatively little interest. He could not

help smiling to himself with humorous appreciation of the satiric

pleasantry of the position, conscious also that his depreciation of

great commercial shrewdness and boldness in speculation was held to

be but the proverbial modesty of a master mind; while the interest

which he could not restrain himself from taking in plans for the weal

and progress of his old friend and client, Demos, was considered to

be the dilettante distraction with which, as great statesmen take to

wood-chopping or poultry-rearing, the mighty hunter, the great operator

of the trackless waste, like Garibaldi at Caprera, occupied himself. It

was hardly worth while doing battle with the complimentary critics,

who would insist upon crediting him with all the sterner virtues of

their ideal colonist—a great and glorious personage who combined the

autocracy of a Russian with the _savoir faire_ of a Parisian, the

energy of an Englishman with the instinct of a Parsee and the rapidity

of an American; after a while, no doubt, they would find out their

god to have feet of clay. He would care little for that. But, in the

meanwhile, no misgivings mingled with their enthusiastic admiration.

The younger son of an ancient house, which possessed historic claims

to the consideration of the county, had returned laden with gold,

which he scattered with free and loving hand. That august magnate

‘the Duke’ had (vicariously, of course—he had long lost the habit of

personal action save in a few restricted modes) to look to his laurels.

There was danger, else, that his old-world star would pale before this

newly-arisen constellation, bright with the fresher lustre of the

Southern Cross.

All these admitted luxuries and triumphs notwithstanding, a day came

when both Ernest Neuchamp, and Antonia his wife, began to approach,

with increasing eagerness and decision, the question of return. In

the three years which they had spent ‘at home’ they had, they could

not conceal from themselves, exhausted the resources of Britain—of

Europe—in their present state of sensation.

Natural as was such a feeling in the heart of Antonia, with whom a

yearning for her birthland, her childhood’s home, for but once again

to hear the sigh of the summer wave from the verandah at Morahmee, was

gradually gaining intensity, one wonders that Ernest Neuchamp should

have fully shared her desire to return. Yet such was undoubtedly the

fact.

Briton as he was to the core, he had, during the third year of their

furlough, been often impatient, often aweary, of an aimless life—that

of a gazer, a spectator, a dilettante. Truth to tell, the strong free

life of the new world had unfitted him for an existence of a mere

recipiency.

A fox-hunter, a fisherman, a fair shot, and a lover of coursing,

he yet realised the curious fact that he was unable to satisfy his

personal needs by devoting the greater portion of his leisure to these

recreations, perfect in accessories and appointments, unrivalled in

social concomitants, as are these kingly sports when enjoyed in Britain.

Passionately fond of art, a connoisseur, and erstwhile an amateur of

fair attainment, a haunter of libraries, a discriminating judge of old

editions and rare imprints, he yet commenced to become impatient of

days and weeks so spent. Such a life appeared to him now to be a waste

of time. In vain his brother Courtenay remonstrated.

‘I feel, my dear Courtenay, and it is no use disguising the truth to

you or to myself, that I can no longer rest content in this little

England of yours. It is a snug nest, but the bird has flown over the

orchard wall, his wings have swept the waste and beat the foam; he can

never again, I fear, dwell there, as of old; never again, I fear.’

‘But why, in the name of all that is exasperating and eccentric, can

you not be quiet, and let well alone?’ asked Courtenay, not without

a flavour of just resentment. ‘You have money; an obedient, utterly

devoted father-in-law, of a species unknown in Britain; a charming

wife, who might lead me like a bear, were I so fortunate as to have

been appropriated by her; troops of friends, I might almost say

admirers—for you must own you are awfully overrated in the county. What

in the wide world can urge you to tempt fortune by re-embarkation and

this superfluous buccaneering?’

‘I suppose it is vain to try and knock it out of your old head,

Courtenay, that there is no more buccaneering in New South Wales than

in old South Wales. But, talking of buccaneers, I suppose I _am_ like

one of old Morgan’s men who had swung in a West Indian hammock, and

seen the sack of Panama; thereafter unable to content himself in his

native Devon.

‘You might as well have asked of old Raoul de Neuchamp to go back

and make cider in Normandy, after he had fought shoulder to shoulder

with Taillefer and Rollo at Hastings, and tasted the stern delight

of harrying Saxon Franklins and burning monasteries. I have found a

land where deeds are to be done, and where conquest, though but of

the forces of Nature, is still possible. Here in this happy isle your

lances are only used in the tilt-yard and tournament, your swords hang

on the wall, your armour is rusty, your knights fight but over the

wine-cup, your ladye-loves are ever in the bowers. With us, across the

main, still the warhorse carries mail, the lances are not headless, and

many a shrewd blow on shield and helmet rings still.

‘I am in the condition of “The Imprisoned Huntsman”—

‘My hawk is tired of perch and hood,

My idle greyhound loathes his food,

My steed is weary of his stall,

And I am sick of captive thrall;

I would I were, as I have been,

Hunting the roe in forest green,

With bended bow and bloodhound free,

For that is the life that is meet for me.’

‘I know from experience that it is as probable that a star should come

down from the sky and do duty in the kitchen grate,’ said Courtenay

Neuchamp sardonically, ‘as that you should listen to any one’s opinion

but your own, or I would suggest that the falcon, and greyhound,

and steed business is better if not exclusively performed in this

hemisphere. I never doubted you would go your own road. But what

does Antonia say to leaving the land of court circulars and Queen’s

drawing-rooms and Paris bonnets fresh once a week?’

‘She says’—and here Mrs. Neuchamp crept up to her husband’s side and

placed her hand in his—‘that she is tired of Paradise—tired of perfect

houses, unsurpassable servants and dinners, drives and drawing-rooms,

lawn parties and archery meetings, the Academy and the Park, Belgravia

and South Kensington—in fact, of everything and everybody except

Neuchampstead and dear old Courtenay. She wants, like some one else, to

go out into the world again, a real world, and not a sham one like the

one in which rich people live in England. She is _living_, not life.

Perhaps I am “_un peu_ Zingara”—who knows? It’s a mercy I’m not very

dark, like some other Australians I have seen. But it is now the time

to say, my dear Courtenay, that Ernest and I have grown tired of play,

and want to go back to that end of the world where work grows.‘

‘Please don’t smother me with wisdom and virtue,’ pleaded Courtenay,

with a look of pathetic entreaty. ‘I know we are very ignorant and

selfish, and so on, in this old-fashioned England of ours. I really

think I might have become a convert and a colonist myself, if taken up

early by a sufficiently zealous and prepossessing missionaress. I feel

now that it is too late. Club-worship is with me too strongly ingrained

in my nature. Clubs and idols are closely connected, you know. But are

we never to meet again?’ and here the rarely changed countenance of

Courtenay Neuchamp softened visibly.

‘We will have another look at you in late years,’ said Antonia softly;

‘perhaps we may come altogether when—when—we are old.’

‘I think I may promise that,’ said Mr. Neuchamp. ‘When Frank is old

enough to set up for himself at Morahmee, with an occasional trip to

Rainbar and Mildool, to keep himself from forgetting how to ride,

then I think we may possibly make our last voyage to the old home, in

preparation for that journey on which I trust we three may set forth at

periods not very distantly divided.’

The brothers shook hands silently. Antonia bestowed a sister’s kiss

upon the calm brow of the elder brother, and quitted the room. No

more was said. But all needful preparations were made, and ere the

autumn leaves had commenced to fall from the aged woods which girdled

Neuchampstead, the _Massilia_ was steaming through the Straits of

Bonifacio with Ernest Neuchamp watching the snowy mountain-tops of

Corsica, while Antonia alternately enlivened the baby Frank or dipped

into _The Crescent and the Cross,_ which she had long intended to read

over again in a leisurely and considerate manner.

* * * * *

But little remains to tell of the after-life of Ernest Neuchamp.

Settled once more in ‘the sunny land,’ he found his time fully and not

unworthily occupied in the superintendence of his extensive properties

and investments. There was much necessary journeying between Rainbar

and Morahmee, at which latter place Paul Frankston had insisted upon

their taking up their permanent abode. ‘I am going down hill,’ he

said; ‘the old house will be yours when I am gone; why should I sit

here lonely in my age while my darling and her children are so near

me? Don’t be afraid of the nursery-racket bothering me. Every note

of their young voices is music in my ears, being what they are.’ So

in Ernest’s absence in the bush, or during the sitting of the House

of Assembly—having from a stern sense of duty permitted himself to

be elected as the representative of the electoral district of Lower

Oxley—Antonia had a guardian and a companion. She resolved upon

making the journey to Rainbar, indeed, in order that she might fully

comprehend the nature of the life which her husband had formerly led.

During her stay she formed a tolerably fair estimate of the value of

the property, being a lady of an observing turn of mind, and possessing

by inheritance a hitherto latent tendency towards the management of

affairs not generally granted to the sex. She visited Lake Antonia,

and warmly congratulated Mr. Neuchamp upon that grand achievement.

She patted Osmund and Ben Bolt, now bordering on the dignity of

pensioners. She drove over to Mrs. Windsor’s cottage at Mildool, where

she found Carry established as rather a _grande dame_, with the general

approbation of the district and of all the tourists and travellers who

shared the proverbial hospitality of Mildool. She caused the stud to be

driven in for inspection, when she had sufficient presence of mind to

choose a pair of phaeton horses for herself out of them. But she told

her husband that she could not perceive any advantage to be derived

from living at Rainbar as long as their income maintained its present

average, and that he could manage the interesting but exceedingly warm

and isolated territory equally well by proxy.

Jack Windsor, upon Mr. Banks’s promotion and marriage, became manager

of the whole consolidated establishment, with a proportionate advance

in salary. He developed his leading qualities of shrewdness and energy

to their fullest capacity under the influence of prosperity. Being

perfectly satisfied with his position and duties, having a good home, a

contented wife, the means of educating his large family, the respect of

the whole country-side, and the habit of saving a large portion of his

liberal salary, besides an abundance of the exact species of occupation

and exercise which suited him, it is not probable that he will make

any attempt to ‘better himself.’ It is not certain that Mrs. Windsor

would not favour the investment of their savings in property ‘down the

country’ for the sake of the children, etc.; but Jack will not hear of

it. ‘I should feel first-rate,’ he says scornfully, ‘shouldn’t I, in

a place of my own, with a man and a boy, and forty or fifty head of

crawling cattle to stare at while they were getting fit for market?

That’s not my style. It wouldn’t suit any of us—not you either, old

woman, to be poking about, helping at the wash-tub or something, or

peelin’ potatoes for dinner. We couldn’t stand it after the life we’ve

had here. I couldn’t do without half-a-dozen stabled hacks and a lot

of smart men to keep up to the mark. Give me something _big_ to work

at, done well, and paying for good keep and good spending all round.

Five hundred and forty head of fat cattle cut out in two days like the

last Mildool lot, and all the country-side at the muster—that’s John

Windsor’s style—none of your Hawkesbury corn-shelling, butter-and-eggs

racket. You ought to have married old Homminey, Carry, if that’s what

you wanted. Besides, after thinking and saving and driving up to high

pressure for the master so long, it would feel unnatural-like to be

only working for myself.‘ So the argument was settled. Mr. Windsor

had, it seems, tasted too fully of the luxury of power and command to

relinquish it for humble independence.

The undisputed sway over a large staff of working hands, the

unquestioned control of money and credit, within certain limits, had

become with him more and more an indispensable habitude. Accustomed

to the tone of the leader and the centurion, he could not endure the

thought of changing his wide eventful life into the decorous dulness of

the small landed proprietor. Mrs. Windsor, too, who dressed exceedingly

well, and was admitted on equal terms to the society of the district,

a position which, from her tact, good sense, and extremely agreeable

appearance, she suitably filled and fully deserved, would probably, as

her husband forcibly explained, have felt the change almost as much as

himself. So Mr. Neuchamp was spared the annoyance of looking out for a

new manager.

Hardy Baldacre accumulated a very large fortune, but was prevented,

in middle life, from proving the exact amount of coin and property

which may be amassed by the consistent practice of grinding parsimony,

combined with an elimination of all the literary, artistic, social, and

sympathetic tendencies. He habitually condemned the entire section,

under the fatal _affiche_ of ‘don’t pay.’ To the surprise—we cannot

with accuracy affirm, to the regret—of the general public, this very

extensive proprietor fell a victim to a fit of _delirium tremens_,

supervening upon the practice of irregular and excessive alcoholism.

Into this vice of barren minds, the pitiless economist, guilty of so

few other recreations, was gradually but irresistibly drawn.

The _White Falcon_ fled far and fast with the fugitive noble, whose

debts added the keenest edge among his late friends and creditors to

the memory of his treasons. He escaped, with his usual good fortune,

the civil and criminal tentacula in which the dread octopus of the law

would speedily have enveloped him. He laughed at British and Australian

warrants. But passing into one of the Dutch Indian settlements, he was

sufficiently imprudent to pursue there also the same career of reckless

expenditure. By an accident his character was disclosed, and his arrest

effected at the moment of premeditated flight. A severe logic, learned

in the strict commercial schools of Holland, where debt meets with no

favour, guards the commerce of her intertropical colonies. The _White

Falcon_ was promptly seized and sold to satisfy a small portion of the

princely liabilities of the owner, while for long years, in a dreary

dungeon, like another and a better sea-rover, Albert von Schätterheims

was doomed to eat his heart in the darksome solitude of an ignoble and

hopeless captivity.

The Freeman family prospered in a general sense. Abraham Freeman

settled down upon a comfortable but not over-fertile farm in the

neighbourhood of Bowning. The thickness of the timber, and the

conversion of much of it into fencing-rails, served to provide him

with occupation, and therefore with good principles, as Tottie saucily

observed, to his life’s end. That high-spirited damsel grieved much

at first over the slowness and general fuss about trifles, which,

after her extended experience, seemed to her to characterise the whole

district, but was eventually persuaded by a thriving young miller

that there were worse places to reside in. He was resolute, however,

in forbidding the carrying of bags of flour, and as she was provided

with a smart buggy and unlimited bonnets, her taste for adventurous

excitement became modified in time, and the black ambling mare was

handed over to the boys.

William and Joe Freeman made much money by nomadic agrarianism. After

years passed in arduously constructing sham improvements and ‘carrying

out the residence clause,’ with no intention of residing, they found

themselves able to purchase a station.

Having paid down a large sum in cash, they entered into possession

of their property with feelings of much self-gratulation, as being

now truly squatters, just as much so, indeed, as Mr. Neuchamp, who

had thought himself so well able to patronise them. But, unluckily

for them, and in direct contravention of the saying, ‘Hawks winna

pike oot hawks’ een,‘ the ex-owner of the station, formerly indeed an

old acquaintance who had risen in life, displayed the most nefarious

keenness in plotting an unscrupled treachery. He settled down, under

the conditional purchase clause, section 13, upon the very best part

of the run, the goodwill of which he had the day before been paid for.

Having a large family, and the land laws having been recently altered

so that a double area could be selected by each ‘person,’ he, with

the Messrs. Freemans‘own cash, actually annexed, irrevocably, an area

which reduced the value of the grazing property by about one-third.

Shrewd and unscrupulous as themselves, he calmly informed the frantic

Freemans ‘that he had only complied with the law.’ He laughed at their

accusations of bad faith. ‘Every man for himself,’ he retorted, adding

that ‘if all stories were true, they hadn’t been very particular

themselves, but had sat down on the cove’s run that first helped ’em

when they was bull-punchers without credit for a bag of flour.’

Rendered furious by this very original application of their own

practice to the detriment of their own property, they wasted much of

their—well—we must say, legally acquired gains in endless suits and

actions for trespass against this most unprincipled free selector,

and others who shortly followed his example. The lawyers came to know

Freeman _versus_ Downey as a _cause célèbre_. It is just possible that

these brothers may come to comprehend, by individual suffering, the

harassed feeling which their action had, many a time and oft, tended to

produce in others.

The later years of Mr. Neuchamp’s life have been stated by himself to

be only too well filled with prosperity and happiness as compared with

his deserts. Those who know him are aware that he could not become an

idler—either aimless or bored. He lives principally in Sydney. But if

ever he finds a course of unmitigated town-life commencing to assail

his nervous system, he runs off to a grazing station within easy rail,

where he has long superintended the production of the prize shorthorns,

Herefords, and Devons necessary for the keeping up the supply of pure

blood for his immense and distant herds. Here he revels in fresh

air—the priceless sense of pure country life—and that absolute leisure

and absolute freedom from interruption which the happiest paterfamilias

rarely experiences in the home proper. Here Ernest Neuchamp builds up

fresh stores of health, new reserves of animal spirits. Here Ernest

probably thinks out those theories of perfected representative

government in which, however, he fails at present to persuade an

impatient, perhaps illogical, democracy to concur. His children are

numerous, and all give promise, as, after a protracted and impartial

consideration of their character, he is led to believe, of worthily

carrying forward the temporarily modified but rarely relinquished

hereditary tenets of his ancient House.

Time rolls on. The great city expanding beautifies the terraced slopes

and gardened promontories of the glorious haven. Old Paul Frankston

lies buried in no crowded cemetery, but in a rock-hewn family vault

under giant araucarias, within sound of the wave he loved so well.

Yet is Morahmee still celebrated for that unselfish, unrestricted

hospitality to the stranger-guest which made Paul Frankston’s name a

synonym for general sympathy and readiest aid.

Assuredly Ernest Neuchamp, now one of the largest proprietors in

Australia, both of pastoral and urban property, has not suffered the

reputation to decline. He remembers too well the hearty open visage,

the kindly voice, the ready cheer of him who was so true at need, so

delicate in feeling, so stanch in deed. Succoured himself at the crisis

of fortune and happiness, he has vowed to help all whose inexperience

arouses a sympathetic memory. The opinion of a social leader and

eminent pastoralist may be considered to have exceptional weight and

value. However that may be, much of his time is taken up in honouring

the numberless letters of introduction showered upon him from Britain.

Young gentlemen arrive in scores who have been obligingly provided with

these valuable documents by sanguine ex-colonists. By the bearers they

were regarded as passports to an assured independence. Some of these

youthful squires, with spurs unwon, need restraining from imprudence,

others a gentle course of urging towards effort and self-denial. But

it has been noticed that the only occasions on which their respective

guide, philosopher, and friend speaks with decision bordering on

asperity, is when he exposes the fallacy of the reasoning upon which

any ardent neophyte aspires to the position of A Colonial Reformer.

THE END

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.

* * * * *

Transcriber's note:

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations

in hyphenation and all other spelling and punctuation remain unchanged.

Italics are represented thus _italic_.

In “the [Ǝ]NE brand” on page 106 [Ǝ] represent the character depressed

by half a line and in “the M[D] brand” on page 154 [D] represents a

reversed D depressed by half a line.