s, though she hinted, "Don't be too ready to leave the coast
clear. Remember that you are a wholesome check."

CHAPTER III.

THE "DRAGON'S HEAD."

Harold's right hand healed quickly, and was free in a few days, but the
left had to be kept for some time in a sling, and be daily attended to,
though he heeded it but little, walking miles to look at horses and to
try them, for he could manage them perfectly with one hand, and in this
way he saw a good deal of Dermot Tracy, who exerted himself to find a
horse to carry the mighty frame.

The catastrophe at the fair had gained him two friends, entirely unlike
one another--Dermot, who thenceforward viewed him with unvarying
hero-worship, and accepted Eustace as his appendage; and George
Yolland, the very reverse of all Dermot's high-bred form of Irishism,
and careless, easy self-indulgence.

A rough-hewn, rugged young man, intensely in earnest, and therefore
neither popular nor successful was that young partner of Dr. Kingston.
Had Harold been squire, the resignation of the patient into his hands
would have been less facile; but as a mere Australian visitor, he was
no prize, and might follow his own taste if he preferred the
practitioner to whom club, cottage, and union patients were abandoned.

By him Harold was let into those secrets of the lower stratum of
society he had longed to understand. Attention to the poor boy who had
been torn by the lion brought him into the great village of workmen's
huts, that had risen up round the Hydriot clay works on the Lerne.

These had been set up by a company about eighteen years before, much
against all our wills. With Lord Erymanth at our head, we had opposed
with all our might the breaking up of the beautiful moorland that ran
right down into Mycening, and the defilement of our pure and rapid
Lerne; but modern progress had been too strong for us. Huge brick
inclosures with unpleasant smoky chimneys had arisen, and around them a
whole colony of bare, ugly little houses, filled with squalid women and
children, little the better for the men's wages when they were high,
and now that the Company was in a languishing state, miserable beyond
description. We county people had simply viewed ourselves as the
injured parties by this importation, bemoaned the ugliness of the
erections, were furious at the interruptions to our country walks,
prophesied the total collapse of the Company, and never suspected that
we had any dutie