e had seen hundreds already, and die and leave no sign? And there
sprang up in him at once the intensest yearning after his father and
the haunts of his boyhood, and the wildest dread that he should never
see them. Might not his father be dead ere he could return?--if ever
he did return. That twelve thousand miles of sea looked to him a gulf
impassable. Oh, that he were safe at home! that he could start that
moment! And for one minute a helplessness, as of a lost child, came
over him.

Perhaps it had been well for him had he given that feeling vent,
and, confessing himself a lost child, cried out of the darkness to a
Father; but the next minute he had dashed it proudly away.

"Pretty baby I am, to get frightened, at my time of life, because
I find myself in a dark wood--and the sun shining all the while as
jollily as ever away there in the west! It is morning somewhere or
other now, and it will be morning here again to-morrow. 'Good times
and bad times, and all times pass over;'--I learnt that lesson out of
old Bewick's vignettes, and it has stood me in good stead this many
a year, and shall now. Die? Nonsense. I take more killing than that
comes to. So for one more bout with old Dame Fortune. If she throws me
again, why, I'll get up again, as I have any time these fifteen years.
Mark's right. I'll stay here and work till I make a hit, or luck
runs dry, and then home and settle; and, meanwhile, I'll go down to
Melbourne to-morrow, and send the dear old man two hundred pounds; and
then back again here, and to it again."

And with a fate-defiant smile, half bitter and half cheerful, Tom
rose and went down again to his mates, and stopped their inquiries
by--"What's done can't be mended, and needn't be mentioned; whining
won't make me work the harder, and harder than ever I must work."

Strange it is, how mortal man, "who cometh up and is cut down like the
flower," can thus harden himself into stoical security, and count on
the morrow, which may never come. Yet so it is; and, perhaps, if it
were not so, no work would get done on earth,--at least by the many
who know not that God is guiding them, while they fancy that they are
guiding themselves.

CHAPTER II.

STILL LIFE.

I must now, if I am to bring you to "Two years ago," and to my story,
as it was told to me, ask you to follow me into the good old West
Country, and set you down at the back of an old harbour pier; thirty
feet of grey and brown boulders, s