Mr. Hardy Baldacre had managed to come to town, however, without such anxieties of a pecuniary nature as interfered with his amusements. Of these he partook of as full measure of every kind and description as he could procure cheaply. He had early developed a taste for pleasure, controlled only by considerations of caution and economy. Those who knew him well disliked him thoroughly, and with cause. Those who met him occasionally, as did Mr. Neuchamp and Paul Frankston, saw in him a well-dressed, good-looking man, with an affectation of good-humour and liberality by no means without attraction. Paul _had_ heard assertions made to his disadvantage, but not having bestowed much thought upon the matter, had not gone the length of excluding him from his invitation list; on this occasion he had been rather glad to fill up his table. Mr. Jermyn Croker, as usual, had constituted himself an exception to ordinary humanity by remaining at his club during the terrible season which sent the most ardent lovers of the metropolis to their distant duties. In explanation he stated that either the whole country would be ruined or it would not. He frankly admitted that he inclined to the first belief. If the former state of matters prevailed, what was the use of living in the desert till the last camel died and the last well was choked? No human effort could avert the final simoom, which was evidently on its way to engulf pastoral Australia. Now, here at the club (though the wines were beastly, as usual, and the committee ought to be sacked) there would be a little claret and ice available to the last. He should remain and perish, where, at least, a club waiter could see to your interment. Such was Mr. Jermyn Croker’s faith, openly professed in club and counting-house. But those who knew him averred that he took good care to have one of the best overseers in the country at his head station, whose management he kept up to the mark by weekly letters of so consistently depreciatory a nature that nobody expected _he_ would survive the season, whatever the issue to others. ‘Died of a bad season and Jermyn Croker’ had, indeed, been an epitaph written in advance and forwarded to him by a provincial humorist.