e?"

"Yes. Here come Jim and Mary with the pack-horse, and as it is past
twelve, we'll have our dinner, rest an hour, and then take the beach way
home."

Eight months had passed since Mrs Westonley and Mary had come to Ocho
Rios, and they had been eight months of work and happiness to them all,
for the fortunes of Gerrard had changed greatly, and he was now in
a fair way of becoming a prosperous man again. The numerous gold
discoveries had brought a great inrush of diggers, and cattle for
killing were now worth four times the price they had been a year before.
He had built his new house, which was ready and actually furnished when
his sister and Mary arrived at Somerset, where he had met them. Together
they had ridden across the peninsula, through the dry, parched-up
bush so lately devastated by fire, and when Ocho Rios was reached, the
country was certainly looking at its worst, as he had mentioned in
his letter. But since then glorious rains had fallen, and no one not
acquainted with the marvellous changes produced by copious rains in a
tropical land, would believe that the shady Leichhardt tree under which
Gerrard and his sister were camped had four months previously been
withered and scorched by the great fire which had swept across the
peninsula.

The name of "Ocho Rios" had been given to the station by the man who
had first taken up the block of country for a cattle-run. He was an
ex-Jamaican sugar planter, whose estate had been situated in the Ocho
Rios (Eight Rivers) district of that beautiful island; and who had
been ruined by the emancipation of the negroes in 1838. And, as his new
possession was in the vicinity of eight small creeks flowing westward
into the Gulf of Carpentaria, he had given it the same name.

"How far are we from the sea now, Uncle Tom?" asked Mary, as she and Jim
rode up leading the pack-horse.

"About seven miles or so. Ever seen mango trees, Mary?"

"No, Uncle Tom, but Aunt Lizzie has, and says that mangoes are lovely.
She ate some at Point de Galle, when she was a little girl going to
England. Didn't you, Aunt?"

Mrs Westonley smiled, and looked at Gerrard inquiringly, wondering what
had made him ask the question. He had a way of "springing" pleasant
surprises upon people. When she came to the new bark-roofed house at
Ocho Rios, she had never expected to find anything but the common chairs
and tables, usually to be seen on cattle stations in the Far North.
Certainly Tom had told