‘Stock,’ said the old man, ‘will keep on falling in price. Many stockholders will be ruined, including Selmore, if he does not clear out Gammon Downs to a——’ ‘A black hat,’ laughed Ernest. ‘I shall remember that joke. It came near, as our American fellow-passenger would say, costing me five thousand pounds.’ ‘But they won’t be all ruined,’ continued Mr. Frankston; ‘and what I strongly advise you to do is this—you’ve left your money, for a year certain, in the Bank of New Holland, for which you’ll get tidy interest, and it’s as safe as the Bank of England—you go, where I give you this letter of introduction, to Forrester, who is a good fellow and knows me, and it’s a good station, Garrandilla; that’s a great matter, as you will find. There you will be treated like a gentleman. It will cost you nothing but your clothes. There you’ll learn all that can be learnt about stock. In a couple of years, say (here Mr. Neuchamp winced), or perhaps eighteen months, you’ll be fit to look after a station, and able to buy one for yourself.’ ‘Don’t you think a year’s experience,’ pleaded Mr. Neuchamp, ‘might——’ ‘No, I don’t,’ stoutly asserted the senior; ‘and in two years it’s my belief that your five thousand pounds will buy as large a station as ten thousand would now.’ The following morning saw Mr. Neuchamp, who had risen early and made all his arrangements, fully prepared for the momentous plunge into real life. He had attired himself in an old tourist’s suit of rough serviceable tweed, and donned a pair of thick-soled lace-up boots fitted for climbing mountain sides, and the roughest pedestrian work that might occur. He had filled his knapsack with the requisites that a gentleman cannot dispense with, even in the lightest marching order, and had adopted a brown wide-awake hat, which he trusted would relieve him henceforward from any injurious sobriquet. Thus armed at all points, he awaited breakfast and the arrival of Antonia Frankston, to whom he felt inclined to bid a more heartfelt farewell than he had thought any young lady in the southern hemisphere would have earned the right to receive. Let me not be understood to assume for a moment that Mr. Neuchamp was wholly insensible to the tender passion. But he was fully possessed and occupied for the present by the ‘enterprise of great pith and moment’ which he contemplated. And the boy-god found the tenement of his heart for the time so thoroughly filled by busy, unsympathetic ideas, that he was fain to hover like a bird round a populous dovecote, vainly seeking a single unoccupied pigeon-hole.