sented ourselves at his quarters, and he talked to us for being abroad
in plain clothes.

'Our aspect of penitence won upon Sir Hussey. "If you had not bolted," he
added after the lecture, "I'm not sure that I should have felt it
necessary to summon you before me. But, frankly, I could not stand the
notion that any of my officers should run away from me." There the matter
amiably closed, and it was not till afterwards that I had an idea, which
might have appealed to Sir Hussey's gift of humour.

'I should have advanced to him the plea that, at least, we ran away
alone, not in better company. A twinkle would have shone in his eyes, for
he eloped with the young lady who became his wife. He got her out of her
home at Bath, through a window, and they were happy ever after.' To end a
day happily was a maxim with Sir George, since it meant wisdom for the
morrow.

V SOUTHWARD HO!

Now, the morrow called Sir George Grey, as it calls most, whether they
hear it or no.

In him, boyish meditation had ever been braided by melancholy, a legacy
of the shock with which his father's death burst upon his mother. As he
grew up, this became a deep-seated pity for the suffering, wide and
bitter, among the common people. His mother's care, his step-father's
converse, fostered that feeling, and the service in Ireland, with its
lurid emphasis of the misery he had seen in England, determined him in
quite a definite way. A valley of despair moaned in his ear.

'Can nothing,' he reflected with himself, 'be done for this canker, this
wretchedness? Not much, from the inside, it may be, for the evil has too
firm a grip. But down there, in the far south, is a new world! Surely it
has the secret of sweeter, freer homes; surely in those new countries lie
better possibilities? Yes, there the future has its supreme chance,
there is the field for a happier state of existence! All can be given a
chance, and in the spacious view, it will be planting posts of an
Anglo-Saxon fence which shall prevent the development of the New World
from being interfered with by the Old World.'

It was an abounding moment at which to be taken into partnership for the
carrying forward of the universe. Half the globe, as we are intimate with
it to-day, was then unknown, and North-West Australia was a no-man's
land, saving to the Aborigines. It was believed by geographers that a big
river, artery to an immense area of Australia, must here drain into the
sea. A G