They were now going at a good journeying pace, not far from five miles an hour, through an open, thinly-timbered, well-grassed country. The grass was long, rather dry looking, and of a grayish green. The road was perfectly smooth, without stone, rut, or inequality of any kind. The day had become insensibly warmer, but the air was wonderfully clear, pure, and dry. Mr. Neuchamp felt sensibly exhilarated by the atmospheric tone. ‘What a grand climate,’ he thought, as Mr. Smith had subsided into rather an abstracted silence. ‘Here we have a combination of sufficient warmth for comfort and high spirits, with that bracing cold of night and early morning necessary to ensure appetite and energy. And there are months upon months of this weather. Once bring a man or woman here, with a sound and unworn constitution, and they might live for ever. No wonder the general tendency of the features of the country-born people is towards the Greek type. The vales and groves of Hellas had no brighter sky than this deep azure, no purer air, no softer whispering breeze.’ After this slight æsthetical reverie Mr. Neuchamp fell a wondering as to the precise social status of his preoccupied but accommodating companion. Rendered wary by previous mistakes, he bestowed great care and caution upon his analysis, and after a most judicial summing-up, decided in his own mind that Mr. Smith was a working overseer, with aspirations superior to his present position, which, from his economical habits and self-denying principles, he would at some distant period realise. ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Neuchamp to himself, ‘I shall see him some day with a nice little station of his own and four or five thousand sheep. He will of course be able to work up from that. But how pleasant it will be to visit him some day and behold his honest pride at having successfully surmounted all his difficulties and triumphantly landed himself upon his own property! How we shall laugh over to-day’s salads and wise saws.’ Here Ernest woke up from his Alnaschar musings by which the deserved greatness was to be bestowed upon Mr. Smith. That individual, all unconscious apparently of his imminent and triumphant pastoral profits, called out— ‘Do you see that rise with the plain beyond? Well, Nubba’s about a mile the other side. I’m going forty miles farther, so I must have something to eat before we start. Come and have dinner, or whatever you call it, with me.’