There were the huts, here the great blocks of stone which they had hewn and raised from the quarry; there had been the triangles where, pah! the contumacious or luckless convict had the flesh cut from his back or much bemarked at least by that high official the government flogger. How wondrous grand the view, at morn and eve, before the eye of hopeless God-forsaken men, who in deliberate wrath and unendurable misery, cursed therefrom the day and the night, the moon and stars, the country, and every official from the gaoler to the governor. He gazed at the glorious cataract where the lonely water gathers its stray threads to fall like the lace tracery of a veil over the sullen spur. He saw the rock battlements and pinnacles, bright in the morning sun, against the rifted water-washed bases of which in long past ages the billows of an ancient sea had rolled and dashed. He saw the huge promontories which frowningly reared themselves on the verge of measureless abysses or obtruded their vast proportions and dizzy height into the boundless ocean of pale foliage which stretched, alternating but with sandstone peaks and masses, to the farthest horizon. From time to time he encountered men in charge of droves of horses and of cattle. These of necessity pursued the old and rugged road, not caring to use the swifter, costlier trainage. At first Mr. Neuchamp used to stand in the middle of the road, until he was warned by the fierce eyes and glancing horns of the cattle, and the extremely unreserved language of the accompanying stockmen, that he was violating etiquette and incurring danger. Ever and anon he would halt as the warning steam-whistle heralded the approach of a locomotive, and marvel and muse as he saw the long train wind swiftly and securely adown or up the graded mountain side. He saw the half-advancing, half-receding series of approaches which at length land the travellers and the merchandise of the coast upon the pinnacles of the Australian Mont Cenis, and he thanked God, who had made him of one kindred with the men who had conquered nature, both in the land of his fathers which he had left and in the new land, a void and voiceless primeval forest but yesterday. Much reflecting upon the overflowing _pabulum mentis_ which had been spread before him on that day, Ernest was as grateful as a philosopher could be when he saw at the rather chilly approach of eve the outline of a building, faulty as a work of primitive art, as a specimen of any known order of architecture beneath contempt. It was the humble abode of one of the innkeepers of a former _régime_, who had retained his lodgment upon the keen mountain plateau, and still smoked his pipe beside the roaring log fire in frosty winter nights. He now gathered russet pippins in his orchard, with an increasing sense of solvency, long after the last of the coaches had rattled away from his door to face the awful grades of the midnight mountain stage.