Chapter XXXVI…

Chapter XXXVI

GEORGE FIELDING found Farmer Dodd waiting to drive him to the town where he was to meet Mr. Winchester. The farmer's wife would press a glass of wine upon George. She was an old playmate of his, and the tear was in her eye as she shook his hand and bade Heaven bless him, and send him safe back to “The Grove.”

“A taking of his hand and him going across sea!! Can't ye do no better nor that?” cried the stout farmer; “I'm not a-looking, dame.”

So then Mrs. Dodd put her hands on George's shoulders and kissed him rustic-wise on both cheeks--and he felt a tear on his cheek, and stammered “Good-by, Jane--you and I were always good neighbors, but now we shan't be neighbors for a while. Ned, drive me away, please, and let me shut my eyes and forget that ever I was born.”

The farmer made a signal of intelligence to his wife and drove him hastily away.

They went along in silence for about two miles. Then the farmer suddenly stopped. George looked up, the other looked down.

“Allen's Corner, George. You know 'The Grove' is in sight from here, and after this we shan't see it again on account of this here wood, you know.”

“Thank ye, Ned! Yes--one more look--the afternoon sun lies upon it. Oh, how different it do seem to my eyes now, by what it used when I rode by from market; but then I was going to it, now I'm going far, far from it--never heed me, Ned--I shall be better in a moment. Heaven forgive me for thinking so little of the village folk as I have done.” Then he suddenly threw up his hands. “God bless the place and bless the folk,” he cried very loud; “God bless them all, from the oldest man in it, and that is grandfather, down to Isaac King's little girl that was born yester-night! and may none of them ever come to this corner, and their faces turned toward the sea.”

“Doant ye, George! doant ye! doant ye! doant ye!” cried Edward Dodd in great agitation.

“Let the mare go on, Ned; she is fretting through her skin.”

“I'll fret her,” roared the farmer, lifting his whip exactly as if it was a sword, and a cut to be made at a dragoon's helmet. “I'll cut her liver out.”

“No, ye shan't,” said George. “Poor thing, she is thinking of her corn at the Queen's Head in Newborough. She isn't going across the sea--let her go, I've taken my last look and said my last word;” and he covered up his face.

Farmer Dodd drove on in silence, except that every now and then he gave an audible snivel, and whenever this occurred he always accommodated the mare with a smart cut--reasonable!

At Newborough they found Mr. Winchester. He drove George to the rail, and that night they slept on board the Phoenix emigrant ship. Here they found three hundred men and women in a ship where there was room for two hundred and fifty, accommodation for eighty.

Next morning, “Farmer,” said Mr. Winchester gayly, “we have four hours before we sail--some of these poor people will suffer great hardships between this and Sydney; suppose you and I go and buy a lot of blankets, brawn, needles, canvas, greatcoats, felt, American beef, solidified milk, Macintoshes, high-lows and thimbles. That will rouse us up a little.”

“Thank you, sir, kindly.”

Out they went into the Ratcliffe Highway, and chaffered with some of the greatest rascals in trade. The difference between what they asked and what they took made George stare. Their little cabin was crowded with goods, only just room left for the aristocrat, the farmer and Carlo. And now the hour came. Poor George was roused from his lethargy by the noise and bustle; and oh, the creaking of cables sickened his heart. Then the steamer came up and took them in tow, and these our countrymen and women were pulled away from their native land too little and too full to hold us all. It was a sad sight, saddest to those whose own flesh and blood was on the shore and saw the steamer pull them away; bitterest to those who had no friend to watch them go.

How they clung to England! they stretched out their hands to her, and when they could hold to her no other way they waved their hats and their handkerchiefs to their countrymen, who waved to them from shore--and so they spun out a little longer the slender chain that visibly bound them to her. And at this moment even the iron-hearted and the reckless were soft and sad. Our hearts' roots lie in the soil we have grown on.

No wonder then George Fielding leaned over the ship-side benumbed with sorrow, and counted each foot of water as it glided by, and thought “Now I am so much farther from Susan.”

For a wonder he was not sea-sick, but his appetite was gone from a nobler cause; he could hardly be persuaded to eat at all for many days.

The steamer cast off at Gravesend, and the captain made sail and beat down the Channel. Off the Scilly Isles a northeasterly breeze, and the Phoenix crowded all her canvas; when topsails, royals, skyscrapers and all were drawing the men rigged out booms alow and aloft, and by means of them set studding sails out several yards clear of the hull on either side; so on she plowed, her canvas spread out like an enormous fan or a huge albatross all wings. A goodly, gallant show; but under all this vast and swelling plumage an exile's heart.

Of all that smarted, ached and throbbed beneath that swelling plumage few suffered more than poor George. It was his first great sorrow; and all so new and strange.

The ship touched at Madeira, and then flew southward with the favoring gale. Many leagues she sailed, and still George hung over the bulwarks and sadly watched the waves. This simple-minded, honest fellow was not a girl. If they had offered to put the ship about and take him back he would not have consented, but yet to go on almost broke his heart. He was steel and butter. His friend, the honorable Frank Winchester, was or seemed all steel. He was one of those sanguine spirits that don't admit into their minds the notion of ultimate failure. He was supported, too, by a natural and indomitable gayety. Whatever most men grumble or whine at he took as practical jokes played by Fortune partly to try his good humor, but more to amuse him.

The poorer passengers suffered much discomfort, and the blankets, etc., stored in Winchester's cabin often warmed these two honest hearts, as with pitying hands they wrapped them round some shivering fellow-creature.

Off Cape Verd a heavy gale came on. It lasted thirty-six hours, and the distress and sufferings of the over-crowded passengers were terrible. An unpaternal government had allowed a ship to undertake a voyage of twelve thousand miles, with a short crew, short provisions, and just twice as many passengers as could be protected from the weather.

Driven from the deck by the piercing wind and the deluges of water that came on board, and crowded into the narrowest compass, many of these unfortunates almost died of sickness and polluted air; and when in despair they rushed back upon deck, horrors and suffering met them in another shape; in vain they huddled together for a little warmth and tried to shield themselves with blankets stretched to windward. The bitter blast cut like a razor through their threadbare defenses, and the water rushed in torrents along the deck and crept cold as ice up their bodies as they sat huddled, or lay sick and despairing on the hard and tossing wood; and whenever a heavier sea than usual struck the ship a despairing scream burst from the women, and the good ship groaned and shivered and seemed to share their fears, and the blast yelled into their souls, “I am mighty as fate--as fate. And pitiless! pitiless! pitiless! pitiless! pitiless!”

Oh! then, how they longed for a mud cabin, or a hole picked with a pickax in some ancient city wall, or a cow-house, or a cart-shed in their native land.

But it is an ill wind that blows nobody good. This storm raised George Fielding's better part of man. Integer vitae scelerisque purus was not very much afraid to die. Once when the Phoenix gave a weather roll that wetted the foresail to the yard-arm, he said, “My poor Susan!” with a pitying accent, not a quavering one. But most of the time he was busy crawling on all-fours from one sufferer to another with a drop of brandy in a phial. The wind emptied a glass of the very moisture let alone the liquid in a moment. So George would put his bottle to some poor creature's lips, and if it was a man he would tell him in his simple way Who was stronger than the wind or the sea, and that the ship could not go down without His will. To the women he whispered that he had just had a word with the captain, and he said it was only a gale not a tempest, as the passengers fancied, and there was no danger, none whatever.

The gale blew itself out, and then for an hour or two the ship rolled frightfully; but at last the angry sea went down, the decks were mopped, the Phoenix shook her wet feathers and spread her wings again and glided on her way.

George felt a little better; the storm shook him and roused him and did him good. And it was a coincidence in the history of these two lovers that just as Susan under Mr. Eden's advice was applying the healing ointment of charitable employment to her wound, George, too, was finding a little comfort and life from the little bit of good he and his friend did to the poor population in his wooden hamlet.

After a voyage of four months one evening the captain shortened sail, though the breeze was fair and the night clear. Upon being asked the reason of this strange order he said knowingly, “If you get up with the sun perhaps you will see the reason.”

Curiosity being excited, one or two did rise before the sun. Just as he emerged from the sea a young seaman called Patterson, who was in the foretop, hailed the deck.

“What is it?” roared the mate.

“Land on the weather bow,” sung out the seaman in reply.

Land! In one moment the word ran like electric fire through all the veins of the Phoenix; the upper deck was crowded in a minute, but all were disappointed. No one saw land but Mr. Patterson, whose elevation and keen sight gave him an advantage. But a heavenly smell as of a region of cowslips came and perfumed the air and rejoiced all the hearts; at six o'clock a something like a narrow cloud broke the watery horizon on the weather bow. All sail was made and at noon the coast of Australia glittered like a diamond under their lee. Then the three hundred prisoners fell into a wild excitement--some became irritable, others absurdly affectionate to people they did not care a button for. The captain himself was not free from the intoxication; he walked the deck in jerks instead of his usual roll, and clapped on sail as if he would fly on shore.

At half-past one they glided out of the open sea into the Port Jackson River. They were now in a harbor fifteen miles long, land-locked on both sides, and not a shoal or a rock in it. This wonderful haven, in which all the navies that float or ever will float might maneuver all day and ride at anchor all night without jostling, was the sea avenue by which they approached a land of wonders.

It was the second of December. The sky was purple and the sun blazed in its center. The land glittered like a thousand emeralds beneath his glowing smile, and the waves seemed to drink his glory and melt it into their tints, so rich were the flakes of burning gold that shone in the heart of their transparent, lovely blue.

“Oh! what a heavenly land! and after four months' prison at sea.”

Our humble hero's heart beat high with hope. Surely in so glorious a place as this he could make a thousand pounds, and then dart back with it to Susan. Long before the ship came to an anchor George got a sheet of paper and by a natural impulse wrote to Susan a letter, telling her all the misery the Phoenix and her passengers had come through between London Bridge and Sydney Cove, and as soon as he had written it he tore it up and threw it into the water. “It would have vexed her to hear what I have gone through. Time enough to tell her that when I am home again sitting by the fire with her hand in mine.”

So then he tried again and wrote a cheerful letter, and concealed all his troubles except his sorrow at being obliged to go so far from her even for a time. “But it is only for a time, Susan dear. And, Susan dear, I've got a good friend here, and one that can feel for us; for he is here on the same errand as I am. I am to bide with him six months and help him the best I can, and so I shall learn how matters are managed here; and after that I am to set up on my own account; and, Susan dear, I do think by all I can see there is money to be made here. Heaven knows my heart was never much set on gain, but it is now because it is the road to you. Please tell Will Carlo has been a great comfort to me and is a general favorite. He pointed a rat on board ship--but it was excusable, and him cooped up so long and had almost forgotten the smell of a bird, I daresay; and if anybody comes to make believe to threaten me he is ready to pull them down in a minute. So tell Will this, and that I do think his master is as much my friend at home as the dog is out here.

“Susan dear, I do beg of you as a great favor to keep up your heart, and not give way to grief or desponding feelings. I don't; leastways I won't. Poor Mr. Winchester is here on the same errand as I am. But I often think his heart is stouter than mine, which is much to his credit and little to mine. Susan dear, I have come to the country that is farther from Grassmere than any other in the globe--that seems hard; and my very face is turned the opposite way to yours as I walk, but nothing can ever turn my heart away from my Susan. I desire my respects to Mr. Merton and that you would tell him I will make the one thousand pounds, please God. But I hope you will pray for me, Susan, that I may have that success; you are so good that I do think the Almighty will hear you sooner than me or any one. So no more at present, dear Susan, but remain, with sincere respect, your loving servant and faithful lover till death, GEORGE FIELDING.”

They landed. Mr. Winchester purchased the right of feeding cattle over a large tract a hundred miles distant from Sydney, and after a few days spent in that capital started with their wagons into the interior. There for about five months George was Mr. Winchester's factotum, and though he had himself much to learn, the country and its habits being new to him, still he saved his friend from fundamental errors, and, from five in the morning till eight at night, put zeal, honesty and the muscular strength of two ordinary men at his friend's service.

At the expiration of this period Mr. Winchester said to him one evening, “George, I can do my work alone now, and the time is come to show my sense of your services and friendship. I have bought a run for you about eight miles from here, and now you are to choose five hundred sheep and thirty beasts; the black pony you ride goes with them.”

“Oh no, sir! it is enough to rob you of them at all without me going and taking the pick of them.”

“Well! will you consent to pen the flocks and then lift one hurdle and take them as they come out, so many from each lot?”

“That I consent to, sir, and remain your debtor for life.”

“I can't see it; I set my life a great deal higher than sheepskin.”

Mr. Winchester did not stop there, he forced a hundred pounds upon George. “If you start in any business with an empty pocket you are a gone coon.”

So these two friends parted with mutual esteem, and George set to work by prudence and vigor to make the thousand pounds.

One thousand pounds! This one is to have the woman he loves for a thousand pounds. That sounds cheap. Heaven upon earth for a thousand pounds. What is a thousand pounds? Nothing. There are slippery men that gain this in a week by time bargains, trading on capital of round 0's; others who net as much in an evening, and as honorably, by cards. There are merchants who net twenty times this sum by a single operation.

“An operation?” inquires Belgravia.

This is an operation: You send forth a man not given to drink and consequently chatter to Amsterdam, another not given to drink and chatter to New Orleans, another n. g. t. d. and c. to Bordeaux, Cadiz, Canton, Liverpool, Japan, and where not, all with secret instructions. Then at an appointed day all the men n. g. t. d. and c. begin gradually, secretly, cannily, to buy up in all those places all the lac-dye or something of the kind that you and I thought there was about thirty pounds of in creation. This done mercator raises the price of lac-dye or what not throughout Europe. If he is greedy and raises it a halfpenny a pound, perhaps commerce revolts and invokes nature against so vast an oppression, and nature comes and crushes our speculator. But if he be wise and puts on what mankind can bear, say three mites per pound, then he sells tons and tons at this fractional profit on each pound, and makes fourteen thousand pounds by lac-dye or the like of which you and I thought creation held thirty or at most thirty-two pounds.

These men are the warriors of commerce; but its smaller captains, watching the fluctuations of this or that market, can often turn a thousand pounds ere we could say J. R. Far more than a thousand pounds have been made in a year by selling pastry off a table in the Boulevards of Paris.

In matters practical a single idea is worth thousands.

This nation being always in a hurry paid four thousand pounds to a man to show them how to separate letter-stamps in a hurry. “Punch the divisions full of little holes,” said he, and he held out his hand for the four thousand pounds; and now test his invention, tear one head from another in a hurry, and you will see that money sometimes goes cheaper than invention.

A single idea is sometimes worth a thousand pounds in a book, though books are by far the least lucrative channels ideas run in; Mr. Bradshaw's duodecimo, to wit--profit seven thousand pounds per annum. A thousand pounds! How many men have toiled for money all their lives, have met with success, yet never reached a thousand pounds.

Eight thousand servants, fed and half clothed at their master's expense, have put by for forty years, and yet not even by aid of interest and compound interest and perquisites and commissions squeezed out of little tradesmen and other time-honored embezzlements, have reached the rubicon of four figures. Five thousand little shopkeepers, active, intelligent and greedy, have bought wholesale and sold retail, yet never mounted so high as this above rent, housekeeping, bad debts and casualties. Many a writer of genius has charmed his nation and adorned her language, yet never held a thousand pounds in his hand even for a day. Many a great painter has written the world-wide language of form and color, and attained to European fame, but not to a thousand pounds sterling English.

Among all these aspirants and a million more George Fielding now made one, urged and possessed by as keen an incentive as ever spurred a man.

George's materials were five hundred sheep, twenty cows, ten bullocks, two large sheep-dogs and Carlo. It was a keen clear, frosty day in July when he drove his herd to his own pasture. His heart beat high that morning. He left Abner, his shepherd, a white native of the colony, to drive the slow cattle. He strode out in advance, and scarce felt the ground beneath his feet. The thermometer was at 28 degrees, yet his coat was only tied round his neck by the sleeves as he swept along all health, fire, manhood, love and hope. He marched this day like dear Smollett's lines, whose thoughts, though he had never heard them, fired his heart.

“Thy spirit, Independence, let me share, Lord of the lion heart and eagle eye; Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare, Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.”

He was on the ground long before Abner, and set to work building a roofless hut on the west side of some thick bushes, and hard by the only water near at hand. And here he fixed his headquarters, stretched a blanket across the hut for a roof, and slept his own master.

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Chapter XXXVII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter XXXVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Humph!” said McLaughlan, and fidgeted.

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

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

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

“Can I? I don't know what you mean.”

“Ye dinna ken what I mean? Maybe no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But how am I to catch him? How am I even to find him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presently Jacky got up. “I find one,” said he.

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

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

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

“Well and what does black fellow see?” snapped George.

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

“Oh, come along!” cried George.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it?”

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

“What is it?”

“A little water; not much.”

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

“Come,” was the answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other assented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, what is wrong about them?”

“Come and see.”

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

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

“What! must they all--”

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

Jacky was called.

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

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

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

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

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

When he told Jacky that worthy's eyes sparkled.

“Black fellow likes another place. Not every day the same.”

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

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

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

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

“Never saw them till the dog pinned them.”

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

Abner looked down.

“Why, Abner?”

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

George looked uneasy and his face fell.

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

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

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

“Yes” said George feebly. “Let us hope the best.”

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

“So they say.”

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

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

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

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

“Who was that?”

“A newcomer. Vesey is his name.”

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

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

“Give me a stone of it.”

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

George rode home with his purchase.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shoot him! what for?”

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

* Stupidity.

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

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

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

“Why you cry?” said Jacky. “I very angry because you cry.”

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

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

* Long ago.

** Opossum.

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

* At last.

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

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

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

“I shall come back when the sun there.”

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

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

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

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Chapter XXXIX

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

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

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Chapter XL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Two fool bay!” inquired Jacky, puzzled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Never you mind you about him.”

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

“No! it is a good deal hot

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

“Dat very curious.”

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

“You ill a little--soon be well.”

“I doubt I shall be worse before I am better.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One, one, one, and one more day.”

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

“Here Jacky! what you want?”

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

Jacky went out and soon returned.

“Not see one rub himself.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, do um all.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter XLI

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

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

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

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

Who was this pure-minded friend? A dog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter XLII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I'll never take while I can make.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might hear such dialogues as this:

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

Mr. Eden. “Much the same.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Are the nurses kind to you?”

“That, they are, sir, kinder than I deserve.”

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

“No! have you, sir?”

“He sends his best wishes for your recovery.”

“Now that is very good of him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter XLIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are they?” said Robinson ruefully.

“Do you not observe that you are becoming tremulous?”

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

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

“I shall have to, whether I can or not.”

“Will you?”

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

“Oh, your reverence! is that good news?”

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

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

“For being human, eh, my poor fellow?”

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

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

“You are going among a thousand temptations.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I ask a return; square the account with me.”

“That I can never do.”

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

“I will, upon my honor.”

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

“Yes!”

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

“Them that take it must cut my hand off with it.”

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

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

“George Fielding; he has a farm near Bathurst.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter XLIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Robinson now was out of spirits.

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

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Chapter XLV

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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Chapter XLVI

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

“Didn't I tell you?”

“You didn't do it easy.”

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

“He isn't worth so much trouble.”

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

“I don't say I could.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter XLVII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“---- England,” was the other's patriotic reply.

“And translated from the French.”

“That is better! but what is it?”

“Them that buy it--they will see!”

“Something flash?”

“Rather, I should say.”

“Is there plenty about the women in it?”

The trader answered obliquely.

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

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

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

Sunken-eyes swore at the peddler.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, what is the matter?”

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

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

“Of course he did.”

“Well! and ain't they?”

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

mephisto. “'Mend your Ways,' a tract.”

brutus. “I'll break his head instead.”

mephisto. “'Narrative of Mr. James the Missionary.'”

brutus. “The cheating, undermining rip.”

mephisto. “And here is another to the same tune.”

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

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

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

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

brutus. “Ay! let us see about the housekeeper.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter XLVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He is not so green as let them see him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE DOOR WAS LOCKED.

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

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Chapter XLIX

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

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

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

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

“THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH.”

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

He read it, shaking all over as he read.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As No. 2 passed him, he just panted out

“Won't catch him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter L

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

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

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

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

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

The first person he met was the housemaid, Jenny.

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

Robinson stammered out, “Nowhere in particular. Why?”

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

“What, is he come home?”

“Came home last night.”

“I'll go and take him his hot water.”

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

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

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

“Come, none of your chaff, Jenny.”

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

“I do nothing of the kind.”

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

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

“Really?”

“Really!”

“Tom?”

“Well, Jane!”

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

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

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

“You took a deal of trouble on my account.”

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

“So I should say.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh! not so rough, confound you. Ah! Ugh!”

“Coat's a little too tight, sir.”

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

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

“Mr. Miles, sir.”

“Hallo!”

“I am going to ask you a favor.”

“Out with it!”

“You have been a kind master to me.”

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

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

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

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

“And what am I to do for another?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eh?” cried Mr. Miles, “what is the row?”

“Look at your poor hand, sir!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This promise brought the inquisitive Jenny to the basin directly.

“You know Hazeltine?”

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” said Jenny, “I have heard of him, too.”

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

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

“So do half a dozen more of them.”

“This one is about the biggest gambler and sharper unhung.”

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

“What is lush?”

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

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

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

“To gamble?”

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

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

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

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

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

“And did not you?”

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

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

“Yes,” said the other, “I passed him even.”

“But did you catch him?”

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

“And what became of the poor man?” asked Jane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Guilty--what of?” asked Jenny.

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

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

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

“What, isn't the story ended?”

“Ended? The cream of it is coming.”

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

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

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

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

“This will do it more.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What other?” inquired Jenny.

“The other unfor--the other rascal--the burglar.”

“Why he never said there were two.”

“Y--yes!--he said they found their shoes.”

“No, he said he found a pair of shoes.”

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

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

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

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

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

“How interesting it is!” cried Jenny--“what about?”

“Well! it was about your friend.”

“My friend?”

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

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

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

“Why, what did he say?”

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

“The wretches!”

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

“But, of course, you undeceived them,” said Robinson.

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

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

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

“Will you, sir? that is right--but how?”

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

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

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

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

“Ah!”

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

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

“Have you done, Tom?”

“Just one more turn, sir.”

“Then, Jenny, you see who that is?”

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

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

“Yes, sir!”

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

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

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

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

“Tom!” said Jenny quietly.

“Would you mind going, Jenny?”

“Me! it is not my business.”

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

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

“Look at me with my coat off and covered with brickdust.”

“Put your coat on and shake the dust off.”

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

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

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

“What is the matter?”

“That impudent young villain wanted to kiss me.”

“Oh! is that all?”

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

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

“Then why did you never tell me?”

“I thought by your manner--you knew it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, come and paint mine!”

“No, mine!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No takers,” replied Mr. Hazeltine with his mouth full.

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

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

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

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

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

“Done!”

“Done!”

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

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

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

“How? By what?” cried Mr. Miles.

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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Chapter LI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Give it me when I start.”

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

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

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

“Do you know where he is?”

“Not I.”

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

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

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

“That is my business,” said he.

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

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

“Well, it is you for howling anyway,” said Robinson.

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

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

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

Robinson was awestruck. “Oh! what is this?” said he. “Have I come all this way to bury him?”

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

“Jacky,” said he, “is that you?”

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

“A friend.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You take a deal of trouble about me.”

“I do,” was the dry answer.

“It is very good of you, but--”

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

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

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

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

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

“About me?”

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

“She says true.”

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

“What?”

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

“What?”

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

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

“Wasn't she, Tom?”

“And what sweet eyes!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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