such wonderful rapidity. The sporting papers took him up. He was matched at some public-house to row against somebody else for some money. He won it, but there was a dispute about it, and the sporting papers had leading articles thereon. But the more famous Reuben became, the more my father's face clouded when he spoke of him.

That birthday night I was sleepily going up to bed, when my father stopped me by saying, "Old man, you and me must have a talk," whereupon my mother departed. "Jim," said he as soon

as she was gone, "did you ever hear anything about your cousin Reuben's father?"

I said quickly, "No; but I had often thought it curious that we had never heard anything of him."

The time is come, my boy, when you must know as much as I do. It is a bitter thing to have to tell you; but you are old enough to share the family troubles. And I heard the following story:

Samuel Burton had been a distant cousin of my father's. When about twelve years old, he had expressed a wish to go into service, and his friends had got for him a place as page or steward-room boy, in the family of an opulent gentleman.

At the time of his going there the heir of the house was a mere infant. As time went on, his father, anxious for him to escape the contaminations of a public school, sent him to a highly expensive private tutor; and the boy selected Samuel Burton, his favourite, to accompany him as his valet.

The father had been anxious that his boy should escape the contamination of a public school-the more so, because, at the age of thirteen, he was a very difficult and somewhat vicious boy. The father took the greatest care, and made every possible inquiry. The Rev. Mr. Easy was a man of high classical attainments, and unblemished character. There were only two other pupils, both of the most respectable rank in lifeone, the son and heir of Sir James Mottesfont; the other, son of the great

city man, Mr. Peters. Nothing could be more satisfactory. Alas! the poor father in avoiding Charybdis had run against Scylla. In avoiding the diluted vice of a public school, he had sent his son into a perfectly undiluted atmosphere of it. Young Mottesfont was an irreclaimable vicious idiot, and Peters had been sent away from a public school for drunkenness. In four years' time our young gentleman was finished,' and was sent to travel with a tutor, keeping his old servant, Samuel Burton (who had learned something also), and began a career of reckless debauchery of all kinds. After two years he was angrily recalled by his father. Not very long after his return Samuel Burton married (here my father's face grew darker still). Hitherto his character, through all his master's excesses, had been most blameless. The young gentleman's father had conceived a great respect for the young man, and was glad that his wild son should have so staid and respectablea servant willing to stay with him.

A year after Samuel was married a grand crash came. The young gentleman, still a minor, was found to be awfully in debt, to have been raising money most recklessly, to have been buying jewellery and selling it again. His creditors, banding themselves together, refused to accept the plea of minority; two of their number threatened to prosecute for swindling if their claims were not settled in full. An arrangement was come to for six thousand pounds, and the young gentleman was allowanced with two hundred a year and sent abroad.

Samuel Burton, seeing that an end was come to a system of plunder which he had carried on at his young master's expense, came out in his true colours. He robbed the house of money and valuables to the amount of thirteen hundred pounds, and disappearedutterly and entirely disappeared-leaving his wife and child to the mercy of my father.

This was my father's account of his disappearance. He concealed from me the fact that Samuel Burton had been

arrested and transported for fourteen years.

The poor mother exerted herself as well as she was able; but she had been brought up soft-handed and could do but little. When Reuben was about ten she died; my father took the boy home, and ultimately apprenticed him to a waterman.

"And now, my boy, you see why I am anxious about Reuben's coming to live with us. He comes of bad blood on both sides; and his father is, for aught I know, still alive. Reuben ain't going on as I could wish. I don't say anything against those as row races, or run races, or ride races; I only know it ain't my way, and I don't want it to be. There's too much pot'us about it for our sort, my boy; so you see I don't want him and his lot here on that account. And then he is a dapper little chap; and our Emma is very pretty and sweet, and there may be mischief there again. Still, I can't refuse him. I thought I was doing a kind thing to a fatherless lad in calling him cousin, but I almost wish I hadn't now. So I say to you, keep him at a distance. Don't let him get too intimate in our part of the house. Good night, old man."

"Where are you going to put him, father 1"

"As far off as I can," said my father. "In the big room at the top of the house."

"In the ghost's room?" said I. And I went to bed, and dreamt of Reuben being woke in the night by a little old lady in grey shot silk and black mittens, who came and sat on his bed and knitted at him. For, when my mother was confined with Fred, Mrs. Quickly was in attendance and told us of such an old lady in the attic aloft there, and had confirmed her story by an appeal to Miss Tearsheet, then in seclusion, in consequence of a man having been beaten to death by Mr. Pistol and others. We were very few doors from Alsatia in those times!

CHAPTER IV.

THE COLONIAL SECRETARY SEES SNAKES AND OTHER VERMIN.

Ir was a hard hit in a tender place for the Colonial Secretary. He had started in life as the younger son of a Worcestershire squire, and had fought his way, inch by inch, up to fame, honour, and wealth. He was shrewd, careful enough of the main chance, and very ambitious; but, besides this, he was a good-hearted affectionate fellow; and one of his objects of ambition had been to have a quiet and refined home, wherein he might end his days in honour, presided over by a wife who was in every way worthy of him. Perhaps he had been too much engaged in moneymaking, perhaps he had plunged too fiercely into politics, perhaps he had never found a woman who exactly suited him; but so it was-he had postponed his domestic scheme to his other schemes, until he was two-and-forty, and might have postponed it longer, had he not met Agnes Neville, at a geological picnic, in the crater of Necnicabarla. Here was everything to be wished for: beauty, high breeding, sweet temper, and the highest connexion. Four of her beautiful sisters had married before her, every one of them to one of the best-bred and richest squatters in that wealthy colony. Mrs. Morton of Jip Jip, Mrs. Hill of Macandemdah, the Honourable Mrs. Packenham of Langi Cal Cal; and lastly, the beautiful and witty Mrs. Somerton of Lal Lal and Pywheitjork. He fell in love with Miss Neville at once; their marriage was delayed, principally on account of troublesome political reasons, for six months, and in that time he had got to love, like a brother, her little sister, Gerty Neville, and the last and most beautiful of the six beautiful sisters. Even before he was married, he and Agnes had laid out all sorts of plans for her future settlement. He had even a scheme for

1 One would not dare to invent these names. They are all real.

taking her to Paris, getting her properly dressed there, and pitching her into the London season, under the auspices of his mother, as a gauntlet to English beauty.

It was a hard hit for him. He had always been so especially hard on a certain kind of young English gentleman, who has sailed too close to the wind at home, and who comes to the colony to be whitewashed. He had fulminated against that sort of thing so strongly. From his place in the House he had denounced it time after time. That his colony, his own colony, which he had helped to make, was to become a sewer or sink for all the rubbish of the old country! How he had protested against and denounced that principle, whether applied to male or female emigrants; and now Gerty was proposing to marry a man, whom he was very much inclined to quote as one of the most offensive examples of it.

And another provoking part of the business was, that he would have little or no sympathy. The colony would The colony would say that the youngest Miss Neville had made a great catch, and married better than any of her sisters. The fellow would be a baronet with 10,000l. a year. There was a certain consolation in that a considerable deal of consolation; if it had not been that the Secretary loved her, that might have made him tolerably contented with her lot. But he loved her; and the man, were he fifty baronets, was a low fellow of loose character; and it was very hot; and so the Secretary was discontented.

Very hot. The tide out, leaving a band of burning sand, a quarter of a mile broad, between sea and shore. Where he had struck the sea first, at Wooriallock Point, the current, pouring seaward off the spit of sand, had knocked up a trifling surf, which chafed and leaped in tiny waves, and looked crisp, and cool, and aerated. But, now he was in the lone bight of the bay, the sea was perfectly smooth and oily, deadly silent and calm, under the blazing sun. The water did not break upon the sand, but only now and then sneaked up a

few feet with a lazy whisper. Before him for twelve miles or more were the long level yellow sands, without one single break as far as the eye could reach; on his right the glassy sea, gleaming under the background of a heavy slow-sailing thunder cloud; and on his left the low wall of dark evergreen shrubs, which grew densely to the looser and drier sands that lay piled in wind-heaps beyond the reach of the surf.

Once his horse shied; it was at a black snake, which had crept down to bathe, and which raised its horrible wicked head from out its coils and hissed at him as he went by. Another time he heard a strange rippling noise, coming from the glassy surfless sea on his right. It was made by a shark, which, coming swiftly, to all appearance, from under the dark thunder-cloud, headed shoreward, making the spray fly in a tiny fountain from his back-fin, which was visible above the surface. As he came on, the smaller fish, snappers and such like, hurled themselves out of water in hundreds, making the sea alive for one instant; but after that the shark, and the invisible fish he was in pursuit of, sped seaward again; the ripple they had made died out on the face of the water, and the water in the bay was calm, still, and desolate once more.

Intolerably lonely. He pushed his horse into a canter, to make a breeze for himself which the heavens denied him. Still only the long weary stretch of sand, the sea on the right, and the low evergreens on the left.

But now far, far ahead, a solitary dot upon the edge of the gleaming water, which, as the good horse threw the ground behind him, grew larger and larger. Yes, it was a man who toiled steadily on in the same direction the Secretary was going-a man who had his trousers off, and was walking barelegged on the edge of the sea to cool his feet; a man who looked round from time to time, as if to see who was the horseman behind him.

The Secretary reined up beside him with a cheery "Good day," and the man respectfully returned the salutation.

The Secretary recognised his man in an instant, but held his tongue.

He was a tall narrow-shouldered man, who might have been forty or might have been sixty; as with most other convicts, his age was a profound mystery. You could see that he had been originally what some people, hasty observers, would call a good-looking young man, and was even now what those same hasty observers would call a good-looking middle-aged man. His hair was grey, and he had that wonderfully clear dark-brown complexion. which one sees so continually among old convicts who have been much in the bush. His forehead was high and bald, and his nose was very long, delicate, and aquiline-so much was in his favour; but then-why, all the lower part of his face, upper lip, mouth, lower lip and all, were pinched up in a heap under the long nose. When I read "Little Dorrit," I was pleased to find that Mr. Dickens was describing in the person of M. Rigaud one of our commonest types of convict face, but Frenchified and wearing a moustache, and was pleased also to see that, with his wonderfully close observation, he had not committed the mistake of making his man a brave and violent villain, but merely a cunning one.

The Secretary looked down on the bald head and the Satanic eyebrows, which ran down from high above the level of the man's ears and nearly met above his great transparent hook nose, and said to himself, "Well, you are a more ill-looking scoundrel than I thought you the other day, though you did look a tolerable rogue then."

The man saw that the Secretary had recognised him, and the Secretary saw that he saw it; but they both ignored the fact. It was so lonely on these long sands, that the Secretary looked on this particular scoundrel as if he were a rather interesting book which he had picked up, and which would beguile

"By Jove," said the Secretary, "don't apologise, my man. I rather envy you.

But look out for the snakes. I have seen two on the edge of the salt water; you must be careful with your bare feet."

"I saw the two you speak of, sir, a hundred yards off. I have a singularly quick eye. It is possible, your honour, that if I had been transported a dozen years earlier I might have made a good bushman. I was too effeminately bred also, Mr. Secretary. I was spoilt too young by your class, Mr. Secretary, or I might have developed into a bolder and more terrible rogue than I am."

"What a clever dog it is!" thought the Secretary. "Knowing that he can't take me in, and yet trying to do it through a mere instinct of deceit, which has become part of his nature. And his instinct shows him that this careless frankness was the most likely dodge to me, who know everything, and more. By gad, it is a wonderful rogue!"

He thought this, but he said: "Fiddlededee about terrible rogues. You are clear now; why don't you mend your ways, man? Confound it, why don't you mend your ways?"

"I am going to," said the other. "Not, Mr. Colonial Secretary, because I am a bit a less rogue than before, but because it will pay. Catch me tripping again, Mr. Oxton, and hang me."

"I say," said the Secretary; "you mus'n't commit yourself, you know."

"Commit myself!" said the man, with a sneer; "commit myself to you! Haven't I been confidential with you? Don't I know that every word I have said to you in confidence is sacred? Don't I know that what you choose to call your honour will prevent your

using one word of any private conversation against me? Haven't I been brought up among such as you? Haven't I been debauched and ruined by such as you? Commit myself! I know and despise your class too well to commit myself. You daren't use one word I have said against me. Such as I have the pull of you there. You daren't, for your honour's sake."

And, as he turned his angry face upon the Secretary, he looked so much more fiendish than the snake, and so much, more savage than the shark, that the Secretary rode on, saying, "Well, my man, I am sorry I said anything to offend you ;" and, as he rode on, leaving the solitary figure toiling on behind him, he thought somewhat like this:

"Curious cattle, these convicts! Even the most refined of them get at times defiant and insolent, in their way. What a terrible rogue this fellow is! He saw I recognised him from the first. I hate a convict who turns Queen's evidence. I wonder where he is going. I wish I could turn him over the border. I hate having convicts loose in my little colony. It is an infernal nuisance being so close to a penal settlement; but there is no help for it. I wonder where that rogue is making for; I wish he would make for Sydney. Where can he be going?"

One cannot help wondering what the Secretary would have said had he known, as we do, that this desperate rogue was bound on exactly the same errand as himself. That is to say, to foregather with Mr. George Hillyar, the man who was to be a baronet, and have 10,000l. a year, and who, God help us, was to marry Gerty Neville.

"Let me see," said the Secretary. "That fellow's real name came out on his trial. What was it? Those things are worth remembering. Samuel Barker— no, it wasn't Barker, because that's the name of the Cape Wilberforce people. Rippon, that was the name; no, it wasn't. What is his name? Ah! Rippon and-Rippon and Burton. Ah! for the man's name was Samuel Burton."

CHAPTER V.

JAMES BURTON'S STORY: THE GHOST'S ROOM IS INVADED, AND JAMES PUTS HIS FOOT THROUGH THE FLOOR.

IN due time-that is to say, a fortnight after my fifteenth birthday-we moved into the new house. It was eight o'clock on a bright summer's morning when my father got the key from Mr. Long, unlocked the gate in the broken palings which surrounded the house, and passed into the yard, surrounded by his whole awe-stricken family.

There was no discovery made in the yard. It was commonplace. A square flagged space, with a broken waterbutt in one corner under an old-fashioned leaden gargoyle. There was also a grindstone, and some odd bits of timber which lay about near the pump, which was nearly grown up with nettles and rye-grass. In front of me as I stood in the yard the great house rose, flushed with the red blaze of the morning sun; behind were the family, Joe leaning on his crutch, with his great eyes staring out of his head in eager curiosity; after him the group of children, clustered round Emma, who carried in her arms my brother Fred, a large-headed stolid child of two, who was chronically black and blue in every available part of his person with accidents, and who was, even now, evidently waiting for an opportunity to distinguish himself in that line.

Joe had not long before made acquaintance with kind old Mr. Faulkner, who had coached him up in antiquities of the house; and Joe had told me everything. We boys fully expected to find Lord Essex's helmet lying on the stairs, or Queen Elizabeth's glove in the passage. So, when father opened the great paneled door, and went into the dark entry, we pushed in after him, staring in all directions, expecting to see something or another strange; in which we were disappointed. There was nothing more strange than a large entrance hall, a broad staircase, with