rse of travel I
recommend and the prescriptions I conjoin with that course fail you,
let me know; and though I would fain close my days in this land, I
will come to you. I love you as my son. I will tend your wife as my
daughter."

Foreign travel! The idea smiled on me. Julius Faber's companionship,
sympathy, matchless skill! The very thought seemed as a raft to a
drowning mariner. I now read more attentively the earlier portions of
his letter. They described, in glowing colours, the wondrous country in
which he had fixed his home; the joyous elasticity of its atmosphere;
the freshness of its primitive, pastoral life; the strangeness of its
scenery, with a Flora and a Fauna which have no similitudes in the
ransacked quarters of the Old World. And the strong impulse seized me to
transfer to the solitudes of that blithesome and hardy Nature a spirit
no longer at home in the civilized haunts of men, and household gods
that shrank from all social eyes, and would fain have found a wilderness
for the desolate hearth, on which they had ceased to be sacred if
unveiled. As if to give practical excuse and reason for the idea that
seized me, Julius Faber mentioned, incidentally, that the house and
property of a wealthy speculator in his immediate neighbourhood were on
sale at a price which seemed to me alluringly trivial, and, according to
his judgment, far below the value they would soon reach in the hands of
a more patient capitalist. He wrote at the period of the agricultural
panic in the colony which preceded the discovery of its earliest
gold-fields. But his geological science had convinced him that strata
within and around the property now for sale were auriferous, and
his intelligence enabled him to predict how inevitably man would be
attracted towards the gold, and how surely the gold would fertilize the
soil and enrich its owners. He described the house thus to be sold--in
case I might know of a purchaser. It had been built at a cost unusual
in those early times, and by one who clung to English tastes amidst
Australian wilds, so that in this purchase a settler would escape the
hardships he had then ordinarily to encounter; it was, in short, a home
to which a man more luxurious than I might bear a bride with wants less
simple than those which now sufficed for my darling Lilian.

This communication dwelt on my mind through the avocations of the day
on which I received it, and in the evening I read all, ex