eat girl
now. She called her father, and all the household, and after a while the
old doctor came home, and the fatted calf was killed, and all made merry
over the return of this altogether unrepentant prodigal son.

Tom Thurnall stayed a month at home, and then went to America, whence he
wrote home in about six months. Then came a long silence, and then a
letter from California; and then letters more regularly from Australia.
Sickened with California life, he had crossed the Pacific once more, and
was hard at work in the diggings, doctoring and gold-finding by turns.

"A rolling stone gathers no moss," said his father.

"He has the pluck of a hound, and the cunning of a fox," said Mark, "and
he'll be a credit to you yet."

So the years slipped on till the autumn of 1853. And then Tom, at the
diggings at Ballarat, got a letter from Mary Armsworth.

"Your father is quite well in health, but his eyes have grown much
worse, and the doctors are afraid that he has little chance of
recovering the sight, at least of the left eye. And something has
happened to the railroad in which he had invested so much, and he has
given up the old house. He wants you to come home; but my father has
entreated him to let you stay. You know, while we are here, he is safe."

Tom walked away slowly into the forest. He felt that the crisis of his
life was come.

"I'll stay here and work," he said to himself finally, "till I make a
hit or luck runs dry, and then home and settle; and, meanwhile, I'll go
down to Melbourne tomorrow, and send the dear old dad two hundred
pounds."

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.

_II.--The Wreck_

Half the village of Aberalva is collected on the long sloping point of a
cliff. Sailors wrapped in pilot-cloth, oil-skinned coast guardsmen,
women with their gowns turned over their heads, while every moment some
fresh comer stumbles down the slope and asks, "Where's the wreck?" A
shift of wind, a drift of cloud, and the moon flashes out a moment.

"There she is, sir," says Brown, the head-boatman to the coastguard
lieutenant.

Some three hundred yards out at sea lies a long, curved, black line,
amid the white, wild leaping hills of water. A murmur from the crowd.

"A Liverpool clipper, by the lines of her."

"God help the poor passengers, then!" sobs a woman. "They're past our
h