The gale has abated, the courses are clewed up, topsails thrown aback, and the starry flag flies half-mast high, as they “commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption; looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead.” A sudden, shooting plunge into the sparkling water, and Francis Drury’s place on earth will know him no more. Gone is the gallant spirit, stilled the eager heart for ever, and Leslie’s tears fall thick and heavy—no one there deeming them shame to his manhood—as the bellying canvas urges the ship swiftly onward on her course. * * * * * Only a Quandong stone, of rather unusual size, covered with little silver knobs or studs, and to one end of which was attached a stout silver chain. Leslie, as he turned it over and over in his hand, thinking sadly enough of its late owner, wondering much what he had been about to communicate when Death so relentlessly stepped in. The value of the thing as an ornament was but a trifle, and, try as he might, Leslie could find no indication that there was aught but met the eye: a simple Australian wild-peach stone converted into a trifle, rather ugly than otherwise, as is the case with so many so-called _curios_. Still, as his friend’s last thought and charge, it was sacred in his sight; and putting it carefully away, he determined on landing at Melbourne, now so near, to make it his first care to find out Drury’s mother and his sister. * * * * * “Drury, Drury! Let me see! Yes of course. Mother and daughter brother too sometimes; rather a wild young fellow; always ‘on the go’ some where or other, you know. Yes; they used to live here; but they’ve been gone this long time; and where to, no more than I can tell you; or I think anybody else about here either.” So spake the present tenant of “Acacia Cottage, St. Kilda.” in response to Leslie’s inquiries at the address, to obtain which he had overhauled the effecs of the dead man, finding it at the commencement of a two-year-old letter from his mother, directed to “Algoa Bay;” finding, besides, some receipts of diamonds sold at Cape Town, and a letter of credit on a Melbourne bank for five hundred pounds; probably, so Leslie thought to himself, that “measured smile” of which the poor fellow had laughingly spoken to him in the earlier days of their brief companionship. The above was the sum-total of the information he could ever—after many persistent efforts, including a fruitless trip to Hobart—obtain of the family or their whereabouts; so, depositing the five hundred pounds at one of the principal banking institutions, and inserting an advertisement in the _Age_ and _Argus_, Leslie having but little spare cash, and his own fortune lying still in deepest shadow, reluctantly, for a time at least, as he promised himself, abandoned the quest. * * * * *