Abe bent tenderly over his prostrate companion. He could see that he was very white, and breathing with difficulty. “Cheer up, old Boss,” he murmured. “Hullo! my stars!” The last two exclamations were shot out of the honest miner’s bosom as if they were impelled by some irresistible force, and he took a couple of steps backward in sheer amazement. There at the other side of the fallen man, and half shrouded in the darkness, stood what appeared to Abe’s simple soul to be the most beautiful vision that ever had appeared upon earth. To eyes accustomed to rest upon nothing more captivating than the ruddy faces and rough beards of the miners in the Sluice, it seemed that that fair, delicate countenance must belong to a wanderer from some better world. Abe gazed at it with a wondering reverence, oblivious for the moment even of his injured friend upon the ground. “Oh, papa,” said the apparition, in great distress, “he is hurt, the gentleman is hurt;” and with a quick feminine gesture of sympathy, she bent her lithe figure over Boss Morgan’s prostrate figure. “Why, it’s Abe Durton and his partner,” said the driver of the buggy, coming forward and disclosing the grizzled features of Mr. Joshua Sinclair, the assayer to the mines. “I don’t know how to thank you, boys. The infernal brute got the bit between his teeth, and I should have had to have thrown Carrie out and chanced it in another minute. That’s right,” he continued, as Morgan staggered to his feet. “Not much hurt, I hope.” “I can get up to the hut now,” said the young man, steadying himself upon his partner’s shoulder. “How are you going to get Miss Sinclair home?” “Oh, we can walk!” said that young lady, shaking off the effects of her fright with all the elasticity of youth. “We can drive and take the road round the bank so as to avoid the ford,” said her father. “The horse seems cowed enough now; you need not be afraid of it, Carrie. I hope we shall see you at the house, both of you. Neither of us can easily forget this night’s work.” Miss Carrie said nothing, but she managed to shoot a little demure glance of gratitude from under her long lashes, to have won which honest Abe felt that he would have cheerfully undertaken to stop a runaway locomotive. There was a cheery shout of “Good-night,” a crack of the whip, and the buggy rattled away in the darkness. “You told me the men were rough and nasty, pa,” said Miss Carrie Sinclair, after a long silence, when the two dark shadows had died away in the distance, and the carriage was speeding along by the turbulent stream. “I don’t think so. I think they are very nice.” And Carrie was unusually quiet for the remainder of her journey, and seemed more reconciled to the hardship of leaving her dear friend Amelia in the far-off boarding school at Melbourne. That did not prevent her from writing a full, true, and particular account of their little adventure to the same young lady upon that very night.