you; I'm dashed if I do." The time was rapidly growing shorter; the sandbank contracting its area. The boatman gesticulated. The alligators, presumably, were expectant. It was no time for overstrained ceremony. One of the squatters stepped in, and the frail craft swirled into the eddying current. It returned in time, and the _Greytown Herald_ missed a sensational paragraph. That was in other respects an exciting trip. Mr. Lang found himself, when at Panama, relegated to a huge dormitory, crowded like a sixpenny boarding-house. Comforting himself with the reflection that it was but for a night, he invoked Somnus, all vainly. The groans of a sick man on the next couch forbade repose. "What's the matter with him?" he inquired at length of his nearest "strange bedfellow." "Only Isthmus fever," was the answer. My friend shuddered, knowing how the railway labourers were even then being decimated. "And why is the bed between you and me vacant?" he went on to inquire. "They buried a cholera patient out of it this morning. You don't happen to have a cigar, do you?" It was too late to retreat. The streets were none too safe. But it may well be believed that the ex-owner of Lyne wished himself back among the blackwood trees, or even in the stock-yard, were the day ever so dusty, and what delicately constituted persons term oppressive. And when the red sun aroused him from the troubled slumber which ended the night's unrest, he naturally doubted whether cholera or "the fever" would first lay upon him a fatal grasp. Mr. Nowlan, an experienced manager, after Captain Carr's departure "worked" Lyne pretty vigorously, selling the original herd as they became fit for market, and putting on store cattle to the full carrying capacity of the run. The gold discovery of course transmuted profits magically. At the first onset of the revolution, cattle stations reaped most of the benefit, so much less labour being required than on sheep stations. Within a few years not only had large profits been realised for the partnership, but the value of the property had quintupled. An estate of freehold land had been purchased at Melton, near Melbourne, from the profits of fat stock. A thousand head of cattle more than the station had been purchased with were now depastured. At the post-auriferous prices then obtaining, Lyne, with 3000 head of cattle, was a very different property from that which Captain Carr had originally purchased. At this stage a plenipotentiary from Captain Carr arrived in the person of Baron von Loesecke, a jolly, blue-eyed, fair-bearded Teuton, who had married his only daughter and heiress. He prudently concluded to sell. Lyne and the Melton property were accordingly, "on a future day, of which," etc., put up to auction by, I think, Messrs. Kaye and Butchart.