Sad, pathetic even, is the death of a day! Its circling hours have known peace, joy, loving regard, social glee, charity, justice, mercy, repose. The allotted task has been done. The parent’s smile, the wife’s love, the babe’s prattle, have all glorified earth during its short season. And now the day is done! its tiny term is over, lost in the shoreless sea of past immensities! The brightly inconstant orb shines tenderly on the new-born stranger, full of joyous hope or dread expectancy. Who can tell what this, the new and garish day, may bring forth? Let us weep for the loved, fast-fading Child of Time, in whose golden tresses, at least, twined no cypress wreath. Then, heralded by calm and cloudless hours, did the wondrous unit, the Day of Days, dawn for Ernest Neuchamp. Rarely—even in that matchless clime, where the too ardent sun alone may be blamed by the husbandman, rarely by the citizen or the tourist—did a more perfect, unrivalled, wondrous day steal rosy through the ocean mists, the folded vapours, to change into fretted gold and Tyrian dyes the tender tints of flushed dawn. All nature visibly, audibly rejoiced. The tiny wavelets murmured on the milk-white sands of the Morahmee beach, that their darling—she who loved them and talked with them in many a hushed eve, in many a solemn starry midnight—was this day to be wed. The strange foreign pines and flower trees of the Morahmee plantation, brought from many a distant land to please the lady of the mansion, echoed the sound as they waved to and fro with oriental languor and tropical mystery. The flowerets she daily tended turned imperceptibly their delicately various sheen of petals to each other and sighed the tender secret. With how many secrets are not the flowers entrusted? Have they not been sworn to silence since those days of the great dead empires, when the vows and pleadings, songs and laughter, beneath the rose-chaplets were sacred evermore? Her gems, of which Antonia had great store—for there was more difficulty in preventing Paul from overlading her caskets than of replenishing them—even they knew it. They flashed and glittered, and reddened, and sent out green and purple light, for they are envious, hard, and remorseless of nature, as they noted the arrival of a bediamonded necklace, and a brooch outshining in splendour any of their rich and rare and very exclusive ‘set.’ The pensioners, her dependants, of the house, among the humble, and the very poor, knew it and raised for her welfare the brief unstudied prayer which comes from a thankful heart. The poor, in ordinary acceptation, are, and have always been, in Australia, difficult to discover and to distinguish. But to the earnest quest of the unaffectedly charitable, anxious to do good to soul or body, to succour the tempted, to help the needy, to save him that is ready to perish, worthy occasions of ministration have never been absent from the outskirts of every large city.