lone, among I knew not how many men of all sorts of characters.

"'It was not fair of you, Sir,' I said; 'I never thought but what you
were married when you took me up so natural.'

"'But really, Peggy, you are the very person we want here, and I can
make it worth your while to stay. You want good wages, and you will get
them; you are not a child, and you can take care of yourself. It is
hard that because I am so unlucky as to have no wife, I am to have
neither cleanliness nor comfort. Make the best of a bad bargain, Peggy;
I confess that your eagerness after good wages led me too far, but I
felt the temptation strong. Try the place for a week, and if you do not
like it, you can go back. Mr. Phillips's drays are going into town, and
if you cannot make up your mind to be contented here, you can return to
Melbourne with them.'

"I took the measure of Mr. Brandon that week, and I came to the
determination that I ought to stay. To be sure it was wrong of him to
fetch me out on false pretences, as it were, but I had walked into the
trap myself, and, as he said, he was in great need of a servant. He
might be weak, but he was not wicked; at least, I felt that I could
hold my own. It was a rough place for a gentleman to live in. Am I
wearying you, young ladies? I could leave off now, and go on the morn's
night."

"I am interested very much in your story," said Elsie.

"And so am I," said Jane. "I know not where fortune, or rather, as you
more properly call it, Providence may send us; and your experience has
a peculiar fascination to me. Do, pray, go on."

"Well, as I was saying, it was a rough place, and he was a gentleman in
his up-bringing and in many of his ways. You would not have believed,
if you had seen him in Melbourne, and heard him speak such English,
that he could go about in an old ragged, dirty shooting-coat, with a
cabbage-tree hat as black as a coal nearly--that he could live in a
slab hut, with a clay, or rather, a dirt floor, and a window-bole with
no glass in it--and that he could have all the cooking and half the
work of the house done at the fireside he sat at, and sit down at a
table without a table-cloth, and drink tea out of tin pannikins. The
notion of getting such wages in a place with such surroundings quite
dumb-founded me; and he had the things too; for by-and-by I found
napery and china in a big chest that I used for a table out of doors;
and bit by bit I made great improvements at Barragong.