On the following morning, therefore, after a breakfast worthy of the glorious supper which he long afterwards recalled, horses and riders in exuberant spirits, they set forth for the easy concluding stage. The household turned out to witness their departure. ‘It puts me and my good man in mind of old times,’ said the aged hostess, ‘to have a gentleman stay the night and see horses like them in the stable again. Not as I like that chestnut willin.’ (Ben Bolt, by the way, had nearly settled George Walton’s career in life, permanently if not brilliantly, as he unguardedly approached the ‘irreconcilable.’) ’It’s done us all good, sir, and I hope you won’t forget to give us a call when you’re leaving town.’ ‘It has done _us_ good, I can vouch for,’ said Ernest heartily, as he observed his follower’s bold eyes fixed upon Carry’s features with unmistakable admiration. ‘I shall always think of you all as my earliest friends in Australia. Good-bye, George; good-bye, Carry—we must pay you another visit when we start back, after our holiday is up.’ ‘That’s something like a place to stop at,’ observed Mr. Windsor, in a tone of deep appreciation, as they passed cheerfully onward, after a mile or two’s silence. ‘Real nice people, ain’t they, sir? What a house they must have kept in the old coaching days! One thing, they wouldn’t have had time to have waited much on us then, with the up coach leaving and the down one just coming in, and the whole place full of hungry passengers. How did you ever come to find the old place out, sir?’ ‘It was the first inn I saw in Australia that took my fancy, Jack. I had had many a cruise on foot in England; gentlemen often take a walking tour there for the fun of the thing; you know the distances are not so great, the weather is cooler, and there is every inducement for young strong men to ramble about the green hills and dales of old England, where you may sit under the walls of a ruined castle a thousand years old, or watch the same sort of trout in the brook by the monastery that the monks loved on their fast days centuries ago.’ ‘That must be jolly enough for a gentleman with his purse full of money and his head chock-full of learning, knowing all the names of the people as lived and died there before he was born. But for one of us chaps, as can’t see nothing but a heap of old stones and a lot of out-and-out green feed, why, there’s no particular pull in it.’ ‘But there’s nothing to hinder a man like you from knowing as much as other people in a general way, if you can read. Books are cheap, and plentiful, Heaven knows.’ ‘Well, sir, it does seem hard for a fellow like me to know very little more than a black fellow, as one might say; that’s how lots of us takes to drink, just for want of something to think about. Sometimes it’s easy to do a chap good.’ ‘But it always ruins a man in the long run, perhaps kills him right out.’