till the cry of “victory” is once more heard, or till the fight is lost beyond mortal hope.‘ So, sadly yet steadfastly, Ernest Neuchamp turned himself to the monotonous tasks which, like those of sailors on a desert island, or of the crew of a slowly-sailing ship, were yet carried on with daily, hopeless regularity. Still the ashen-gray pastures became more withered and deathlike. Still the sad, staggering lines of cattle paced in along the well-worn dusty trails to their watering-places, and paced back like bovine processions after witnessing the funeral obsequies of individuals of their race, which experience, in truth, was daily theirs. Then the diet, once not distasteful to the much-enduring palate of youth, became wellnigh intolerable: the flaccid unfed meat, the daily bread with never a condiment, the milkless tea, the utter absence of all fruit, vegetable, herb, or esculent. Truly, as in those ancient days when a pastoral people record their sorrowful chronicles of the dry and thirsty region where no water is, ‘the famine was sore in the land.’ At this time, so dreary, so endless, so crushing in its isolated, unchanging, helpless misery, Ernest was unutterably thankful for the hope and consolation which his studious habits afforded him. His library, the day’s work done, filled up his lonely evening as could no other employment possible under the circumstances. He ransacked his moderate references for records of similar calamities in all lands which, unlike the ‘happy isles’ of Britain, are from time to time invaded with drought, the chief agent in all the recorded wholesale destruction of animal life. He noted with painstaking and laborious accuracy the duration, the signs, the consequences, the termination of such dread seasons. From old books of Australian exploration he learned, almost by heart, the sad experiences of the pioneers of the land when they stood face to face with what to them were new and terrible foes. ‘It is hard,’ said he to himself, as he paced his room at midnight, after long hours of close application to such studies, ‘it is hard and depressing to me, and to many a wretched colonist who has worked longer and has more on the hazard than I, to see the fruit of our labours slowly, pitilessly absorbed by this remorseless season. But what, after all, is a calamity which can be measured, like this, by a money standard, compared to one which, like this latest famine in Hindostan, counts its _human_ victims by tens of thousands, by millions? See the dry record of a food failure, which comprehends the teeming human herds which cover the soil more thickly than even our poor starving flocks!