should lead me away from the comfort which
the peasant who mourns finds in faith! Why
should riddles so dark have been thrust upon
me?—me, no fond child of fancy; me, sober pupil
of schools the severest. Yet what marvel—the
strangest my senses have witnessed or feigned
in the fraud they have palmed on me—is greater
than that by which a simple affection, that all
men profess to have known, has changed the
courses of life prearranged by my hopes and
confirmed by my judgment? How calmly before
I knew love I have anatomised its mechanism,
as the tyro who dissects the webwork of tissues
and nerves in the dead. Lo! it lives, lives in me;
and, in living, escapes from my scalpel and mocks
all my knowledge. Can love be reduced to the
realm of the senses? No! what nun is more
barred by her grate from the realm of the senses
than my bride by her solemn affliction? Is
love, then, the union of kindred, harmonious
minds? No! my beloved one sits by my side,
and I guess not her thoughts, and my mind is
to her a sealed fountain. Yet I love her more—
oh ineffably more! for the doom which destroys
the two causes philosophy assigns to love—in
the form, in the mind! How can I now, in my
vain physiology, say what is love—what is not?
Is it love which must tell me that man has a
soul, and that in soul will be found the solution
of problems, never to be solved in body or mind
alone?"

My self-questionings halted here, as Lilian's
hand touched my shoulder. She had risen from
her seat, and had come to me.

"Are not the stars very far from earth?" she
said.

"Very far."

"Are they seen for the first time to-night?"

"They were seen, I presume, as we see them,
by the fathers of all human races!"

"Yet close below us they shine reflected in
the waters; and yet, see, wave flows on wave
before we can count it!"

"Lilian, by what sympathy do you read and
answer my thought?"

Her reply was incoherent and meaningless.
If a gleam of intelligence had mysteriously
lighted my heart to her view, it was gone. But
drawing her nearer towards me, my eye long
followed wistfully the path of light, dividing
the darkness on either hand, till it closed in the
sloping horizon.

CHAPTER LXX.

THE voyage is over. At the seaport at which
we landed I found a letter from Faber. My
instructions had reached him in time to effect
the purchase on which his descriptions had fixed
my desire. The stock, the implements of
husbandry, the furniture of the house, were included
in the purchase. All was prepared for my arrival,
and I hastened from the then miserable village,
which may some day rise into one of the mightiest
capitals of the world, to my lodge in the wilderness.

It was the burst of the Australian spring,
which commences in our autumn month of
October. The air was loaded with the perfume
of the acacias. Amidst the glades of the open
forest land, or climbing the craggy banks of
winding silvery creeks,* creepers and flowers of
dazzling hue contrasted the olive-green of the
surrounding foliage. The exhilarating effect of
the climate in that season heightens the charm
of the strange scenery. In the brilliancy of the
sky, in the lightness of the atmosphere, the sense
of life is wondrously quickened. With the very
breath the Adventurer draws in from the racy air,
he feels as if inhaling hope.

* Creek is the name given by Australian colonists
to precarious watercourses and tributary streams.

We have reached our home—we are settled
in it; the early unfamiliar impressions are worn
away. We have learned to dispense with much
that we at first missed, and are reconciled to
much that at first disappointed or displeased.

The house is built but of logs—the late
proprietor had commenced, upon a rising ground, a
mile distant, a more imposing edifice of stone;
but it is not half finished.

This log-house is commodious, and much has
been done, within and without, to conceal or
adorn its primitive rudeness. It is of irregular,
picturesque form, with verandahs round three
sides of it, to which the grape-vine has been
trained, with glossy leaves that clamber up to
the gable roof. There is a large garden in front,
in which many English fruit-trees have been set,
and grow fast amongst the plants of the tropics
and the orange-trees of SouthernEurope. Beyond,
stretch undulous pastures, studded with flocks
and herds; to the left, soar up, in long range,
the many-coloured hills; to the right, meanders
a creek, belted by feathery trees; and on its
opposite bank a forest opens, through frequent
breaks, into park-like glades and alleys. The
territory, of which I so suddenly find myself the
lord, is vast, even for a colonial capitalist.

It had been originally purchased as " a special
survey," comprising twenty thousand acres, with
the privilege of pasture over forty thousand more.
In very little of this land, though it includes
some of the most fertile districts in the known
world, has cultivation been even commenced.
At the time I entered into possession even sheep
were barely profitable; labour was scarce and
costly. Regarded as a speculation, I could not
wonder that my predecessor fled in fear from his
domain. Had I invested the bulk of my capital
in this lordly purchase, I should have deemed
myself a ruined man; but a villa near London,
with a hundred acres, would have cost me as
much to buy, and thrice as much to keep up. I
could afford the investment I had made. I found
a Scotch bailiff already on the estate, and I was
contented to escape from rural occupations, to
which I brought no experience, by making it
worth his while to serve me with zeal. Two
domestics of my own, and two who had been
for many years with Mrs. Ashleigh, had
accompanied us; they remained faithful, and seemed
contented. So the clockwork of our mere household
arrangements went on much the same as
in our native homes. Lillian was not subjected