the barbarous
desert, was a link between me and the Cities of Europe. All else might
break down under me. The love I had dreamed of was blotted out from the
world, and might never be restored; my heart might be lonely, my life be
an exile's. My reason might, at last, give way before the spectres which
awed my senses, or the sorrow which stormed my heart. But here at least
was a monument of my rational thoughtful Me,--of my individualized
identity in multiform creation. And my mind, in the noon of its force,
would shed its light on the earth when my form was resolved to its
elements. Alas! in this very yearning for the Hereafter, though but the
Hereafter of a Name, could I see only the craving of Mind, and hear not
the whisper of Soul!

The avocation of a colonist, usually so active, had little interest for
me. This vast territorial lordship, in which, could I have endeared its
possession by the hopes that animate a Founder, I should have felt all
the zest and the pride of ownership, was but the run of a common to the
passing emigrant, who would leave no son to inherit the tardy products
of his labour. I was not goaded to industry by the stimulus of need.
I could only be ruined if I risked all my capital in the attempt to
improve. I lived, therefore, amongst my fertile pastures, as careless of
culture as the English occupant of the Highland moor, which he rents for
the range of its solitudes.

I knew, indeed, that if ever I became avaricious, I might swell my
modest affluence into absolute wealth. I had revisited the spot in which
I had discovered the nugget of gold, and had found the precious metal
in rich abundance just under the first coverings of the alluvial soil.
I concealed my discovery from all. I knew that, did I proclaim it, the
charm of my bush-life would be gone. My fields would be infested by all
the wild adventurers who gather to gold as the vultures of prey round
a carcass; my servants would desert me, my very flocks would be
shepherdless!

Months again rolled on months. I had just approached the close of my
beloved Work, when it was again suspended, and by an anguish keener than
all which I had previously known.

Lilian became alarmingly ill. Her state of health, long gradually
declining, had hitherto admitted checkered intervals of improvement, and
exhibited no symptoms of actual danger. But now she was seized with a
kind of chronic fever, attended with absolute privation of sleep,
an aversion to ev