es four in a year,
all very good reading. The rate of production diminished in the last
ten or fifteen years of his life, but the quality never failed.

He published over ninety books under his own name, and a few books for
very young children under the pseudonym "Comus".

For today's taste his books are perhaps a little too religious, and what
we would nowadays call "pi". In part that was the way people wrote in
those days, but more important was the fact that in his days at the Red
River Settlement, in the wilds of Canada, he had been a little
dissolute, and he did not want his young readers to be unmindful of how
they ought to behave, as he felt he had been.

Some of his books were quite short, little over 100 pages. These books
formed a series intended for the children of poorer parents, having less
pocket-money. These books are particularly well-written and researched,
because he wanted that readership to get the very best possible for
their money. They were published as six series, three books in each
series.

Re-created as an e-Text by Nick Hodson, August 2003.

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THE GOLDEN DREAM, BY R.M. BALLANTYNE.

CHAPTER ONE.

ADVENTURES IN THE FAR WEST.

THE CAUSE OF THE WHOLE AFFAIR.

Ned Sinton gazed at the scene before him with indescribable amazement!
He had often witnessed strange things in the course of his short though
chequered life, but he had never seen anything like this. Many a dream
of the most extravagant nature had surrounded his pillow with creatures
of curious form and scenes of magic beauty, but never before, either by
actual observation or in nightly vision, had Ned Sinton beheld a scene
so wonderful as that which now lay spread out before him.

Ned stood in the centre of a cavern of vast dimensions--so vast, and so
full of intense light, that instead of looking on it as a huge cave, he
felt disposed to regard it as a small world. The sides of this cavern
were made of pure gold, and the roof--far above his head--was spangled
all over with glittering points, like a starry sky. The ground, too,
and, in short, everything within the cave, was made of the same precious
metal. Thousands of stalactites hung from the roof like golden icicles.
Millions of delicate threads of the same material also depended from
the star-spangled vault, each thread having a golden ball at the end of
it, which, strange to say, was tran