The autumn had commenced, a peerless season in all respects save in the vitally indispensable condition of moisture. The mornings were crisp, with a suggestive tinge of frost, the nights absolutely cold, the days, as usual, cloudless, bright, and warm. If there was any variation it was in the direction of a lowering, overcast, cloudy interval, when the bleak winds moaned bodingly, but led to no other effect than to sweep the dead leaves and dry sticks, which had so long passed for earth’s usual covering, into heaps and eddying circular lines. The roughening coats on the feeble frames of the stock, now enduring the slow torture of the cold in the lengthening nights, told a tale of coming collapse, of consummated, unquestioned ruin. Daily did Ernest Neuchamp dread to rise, to pass hours of hopeless despondency among these perishing forms, dying creatures roaming over a dead earth during their brief term of survival! Daily did he almost come to loathe the sight of the unpitying sun, which, like a remorseless enemy, spared not one beam of his burning rays, veiled not one glare of his deadly glance. He had an occasional reminiscence of the steady, reassuring tones, the unwavering purpose of which abode with the very presence of Abstinens Levison. But for these he felt at times as though he could have distrusted the justice of an overruling Power, have cursed the hour of his birth, and delivered himself over to despair and reprobation. While Mr. Neuchamp was not far removed from this most unusual and decidedly unphilosophical state of mind, it so chanced on a certain afternoon (it was that of Wednesday, the eighteenth day of May, as was long after remembered) that he and Jack Windsor were out together, a few miles from home, upon the ironical but necessary mission of procuring a ‘fat beast.’ This form of speech may be thought to have savoured too much of the wildly improbable. The real quest was, of course, for an animal in such a state of comparative emaciation as should not preclude his carcass for being converted into human food. The meat was not palatable, but it supported life in the hardy Anglo-Saxon frame. It was all they had, and they were constrained to make the best of it. ‘Look at these poor devils of cattle,’ said Jack, pointing to a number of hide-bearing anatomies moving their jaws mechanically over the imperceptible pasture. ‘They have water, but what the deuce they find to eat I can’t see. There’s that white steer, that red cow, and one or two more, with their jaws swelled up. There’s plenty of ’em like that.’ ‘From what cause?’ asked Mr. Neuchamp. ‘Cancer is not becoming epidemic, I hope.’