Kaloola was one of the prettiest pastoral homesteads in the north-western districts of Victoria; and its owner, as one evening he sat in the broad veranda, and saw on every side, far as the eye could reach, land and stock all calling him master, felt that the years that had passed since the old _Decatur_ dropped her anchor in Port Phillip had not passed away altogether in vain; and although ominous wrinkles began to appear about the corners of John Leslie’s eyes, and gray hairs about his temples, the man’s heart was fresh and unseared as when, on a certain day twelve long years ago, he had shed bitter tears over the ocean grave of his friend. Vainly throughout these latter years had he endeavored to find some traces of the Drurys. The deposit in the Bank of Australasia had remained untouched, and had by now swollen to a very respectable sum indeed. Advertisements in nearly every metropolitan and provincial newspaper were equally without result; even “private inquiry” agents, employed at no small cost, confessed themselves at fault. Many a hard fight with fortune had John Leslie encountered before he achieved success; but through it all, good times and bad, he had never forgotten the dying bequest left to him on that dark and stormy morning in the Southern Ocean; and now, as rising and going to his desk he took out the Quandong stone, and turning it over and over, as though trying once again to finish those last dying words left unfinished so many years ago, his thoughts fled back along memory’s unforgotten vale, and a strong presentiment seemed to impel him not to leave the trinket behind, for the successful squatter was on the eve of a trip to “the Old Country,” and this was his last day at Kaloola; so, detaching the stone from its chain, he screwed it securely to his watch-guard, and in a few hours more had bidden adieu to Kaloola for some time to come. * * * * * It was evening on the Marine Parade at Brighton, and a crowd of fashionably dressed people were walking up and down, or sitting listening to the music of the band. Amongst these latter was our old friend John Leslie, who had been in England some three or four months, and who now seemed absorbed in the sweet strains of Ulrich’s _Goodnight, my Love_, with which the musicians were closing their evening’s selection; but in reality his thoughts were far away across the ocean, in the land of his adoption; and few dreamed that the sun-browned, long-bearded, middle-aged gentleman, clothed more in accordance with ideas of comfort than of fashion, and who sat there so quietly every evening, could, had it so pleased him, have bought up half the gay loungers who passed and repassed him with many a quizzical glance at the loose attire, in such striking contrast to the British fashion of the day.