From the moment that the coach cleared the forest parks which skirted the plains, Ernest found himself embarked upon a ‘measureless prairie,’ where the tall green grass waved far as eye could see in the summer breeze. A millennium of peace and plenty had apparently arrived for all manner of graminivorous creatures. How different was the aspect of these ‘happy hunting grounds,’ velvet-green of hue, flower-bespangled, brook-traversed, with the forgotten sound of falling waters ever and anon breaking on the ear, with hum of bee and carol blithe of bird, as the sleek-coated, high-conditioned coach-horses rattled the light drag merrily over the long long road! What a wondrous transformation! Would Augusta, _la belle cousine_, have believed that all this glorious natural beauty had been born, grown, and developed ‘since the rain came’? When at length the journey was over, and the proprietor of Rainbar and Mildool was deposited, with his portmanteau, at the garden gate of the former station, Mr. Neuchamp was constrained to confess that he hardly knew his own place. There had been much growth and greenery when he left with the fat cattle; but the riotous extravagance of nature in that direction could not have been credited by him without actual eye-witness. Around the buildings, the garden fence, the stockyard, the cowshed, was a growth of giant herbage, composed of wild oats, wild barley, marsh-mallows, clover, and fodder plants unnamed, that almost smothered these humble buildings and enclosures. A few milch cows fed lazily, looking as if they had been employed in testing the comparative merits of oilcake and Thorley’s cattle-food, for an agricultural experiment. The river-flats below the house were knee-deep in clover and meadow grasses, causing Mr. Neuchamp to wonder whether or no it would be worth while to go in for a mowing-machine and a few horse-rakes, for the easy conversion of a fraction of it into a few hundred tons of meadow hay, to be stored against the next, ‘dry year.’ The mixed grasses, as he had tested in a small way, made excellent hay. But how far off looked such a calamity! Thus ever with ‘youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm’ do we lightly measure the future, recking neither of stormy sky nor of the ravening deep.