leading towards the river came the
men they had been flying from, in number about fourteen. They had
crossed the river, for some unknown reason, and to the fear-struck
hiders it seemed as though they were making straight towards their
lair.

He had got Widderin's head in his breast, blindfolding him with his
coat, for should he neigh now they were undone indeed! As the
bushrangers approached, the horse began to get uneasy and paw the
ground, putting Sam in such an agony of terror that the sweat rolled
down his face. In the midst of this he felt a hand on his arm, and
Alice's voice, which he scarcely recognised, said in a fierce
whisper: 'Give me one of your pistols, sir!'

'Leave that to me!' he replied, in the same tone.

'As you please,' she said; 'but I must not fall alive into their
hands. Never look your mother in the face again if I do.'

He gave one more glance around, and saw that the enemy would come
within a hundred yards of their hiding-place. Then he held the horse
faster than ever and shut his eyes.

Was it a minute only, or an hour, until they heard the sound of the
voices dying away in the roar of the river, and, opening their eyes
once more, looked into one another's faces? Faces they thought that
they had never seen before--so each told the other afterwards--so
wild, so haggard, and so strange.

If, as Professor Masson says, 'it is by his characters that a novelist
is chiefly judged,' Henry Kingsley's future reputation will be found to
depend almost solely on what he accomplished in _Geoffry Hamlyn_, _The
Hillyars and the Burtons_ and _Ravenshoe_. In the first two of these
there is an abundance of original observation and little conscious study
of character. The vivid Australian scenes of the one, and the Chelsea
life of the other, are transcripts of the author's own memories. His
knowledge of the squatters he got by working for them and living with
them; what he knew of police and convicts and bushrangers he learned in
doing police duty; the life of the Burtons, as told in 'Jim Burton's
Story,' was that which the author saw during his boyhood round his
father's old rectory on Chelsea Embankment.

'He seemed to me,' says Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, 'to have lived his own
books, battled them out and forced them into their living shapes, to
have felt them and been them all.' Hardly all--one feels bound to say.
The