Hardy Baldacre accumulated a very large fortune, but was prevented, in middle life, from proving the exact amount of coin and property which may be amassed by the consistent practice of grinding parsimony, combined with an elimination of all the literary, artistic, social, and sympathetic tendencies. He habitually condemned the entire section, under the fatal _affiche_ of ‘don’t pay.’ To the surprise—we cannot with accuracy affirm, to the regret—of the general public, this very extensive proprietor fell a victim to a fit of _delirium tremens_, supervening upon the practice of irregular and excessive alcoholism. Into this vice of barren minds, the pitiless economist, guilty of so few other recreations, was gradually but irresistibly drawn. The _White Falcon_ fled far and fast with the fugitive noble, whose debts added the keenest edge among his late friends and creditors to the memory of his treasons. He escaped, with his usual good fortune, the civil and criminal tentacula in which the dread octopus of the law would speedily have enveloped him. He laughed at British and Australian warrants. But passing into one of the Dutch Indian settlements, he was sufficiently imprudent to pursue there also the same career of reckless expenditure. By an accident his character was disclosed, and his arrest effected at the moment of premeditated flight. A severe logic, learned in the strict commercial schools of Holland, where debt meets with no favour, guards the commerce of her intertropical colonies. The _White Falcon_ was promptly seized and sold to satisfy a small portion of the princely liabilities of the owner, while for long years, in a dreary dungeon, like another and a better sea-rover, Albert von Schätterheims was doomed to eat his heart in the darksome solitude of an ignoble and hopeless captivity. The Freeman family prospered in a general sense. Abraham Freeman settled down upon a comfortable but not over-fertile farm in the neighbourhood of Bowning. The thickness of the timber, and the conversion of much of it into fencing-rails, served to provide him with occupation, and therefore with good principles, as Tottie saucily observed, to his life’s end. That high-spirited damsel grieved much at first over the slowness and general fuss about trifles, which, after her extended experience, seemed to her to characterise the whole district, but was eventually persuaded by a thriving young miller that there were worse places to reside in. He was resolute, however, in forbidding the carrying of bags of flour, and as she was provided with a smart buggy and unlimited bonnets, her taste for adventurous excitement became modified in time, and the black ambling mare was handed over to the boys. William and Joe Freeman made much money by nomadic agrarianism. After years passed in arduously constructing sham improvements and ‘carrying out the residence clause,’ with no intention of residing, they found themselves able to purchase a station.