By night, as Mr. Neuchamp awoke in his cottage, which was built upon an elevation said by tradition to be above the reach of floods, the ‘remorseless dash of billows’ sounded distinctly, unpleasantly close in the darkness. On the following day, the flood still continuing to rise, Piambook was despatched to the Back Lake to report, and upon his return stated that ‘water yan along that one picaninny blind creek like it Murray, make haste longer Outer Lake.’ Full of hope and expectant of triumph, Mr. Neuchamp started out for ‘Lake country,’ accompanied by Mr. Banks. When they arrived at the first lake the unusual fulness and volume of the water in that reservoir showed that the main stream must have been forced outwards along the course of the ancient, natural channel, by which in years of exceptional high floods—and in those years only—the lake had been filled. Now, thought Mr. Neuchamp, the hour, long delayed, long doubted, has surely come. Who could have dreamed but a few short months since, when our very souls were adust and athirst with perennial famine, that our eyes should behold the sight which I see now? How should it teach us to hoard the garnered gold of truth, the ‘eternal verity’ in our heart of hearts! ‘My lord delayeth his coming.’ Was that held to be a reason, an excuse for the unfaithful, self-indulgent? Truly this would seem to some as great a miracle as the leaping water which followed the stroke of the prophet’s staff in that other desert of which we read of old. And now his eyes did actually behold the first trickling, wondrous motion of the brimming reservoir to advance, gravitation-led, along the narrow path to its far-distant sister lake. Slowly the full waters rose to the very lip of the vast natural cup or vase, and then, first saturating the entrance, poured down the narrow outlet which the forecasting mind of man had prepared for it. It trickled, it flowed, it ran, it coursed, foaming and rushing, along the cutting, of which the fall at first exceeded that of the general passage. It was done! It was over! A proud success! Charley Banks threw up his hat. Together they rode recklessly onward to the Outer Lake, and there Ernest Neuchamp enjoyed silently the deep satisfaction—then known but to the projector and inventor—of witnessing the waters of the Inner Lake, for the first time since the sea had ceased to murmur over these boundless levels, flow fast and flashing forward, driven by the pressure of the immense body behind, into the vast, deep, grass-clothed basin of the Outer Lake. This was a triumph truly. For this alone it was worth while to have journeyed across the long long ocean tide, to have toiled and suffered, waited and watched, to have eaten his heart with fear and sickening dread of the gaunt destroyer ‘Ruin,’ ever stalking nearer and nearer. This was true life—real adventure—the hazard and the triumph which alone constitute true manhood.