Unhappily for Mr. Lowther the regiment did not go to India; but he and his captain, with a detachment of seventy rank and file, embarked at Deptford on a misty morning in October, in charge of 450 convicts bound for Hobart Town. At the time of which I write the ensign had been nearly a twelvemonth in Van Diemen’s Land, and before him lay the prospect of another dreary year which must elapse before there was much chance of his seeing a change of quarters. There are some people who take their troubles with a cheerful countenance and make the best of a bad bargain; but Mr. Lowther was not one of them. He had begun to grumble before the convict ship left Deptford; and he had gone on complaining, with very little intermission, until to-day, and was likely so to continue until the end of the chapter. Napoleon at St. Helena could scarcely have felt his exile more keenly; nor could that fallen hero have more bitterly resented the injustice of his fate than Harcourt Osborne Lowther, who believed that there must be something radically wrong in a universe in which there was no provision of 40,000_l._ or so a year for an elegant young man with a perfect aquiline nose, a clear ringing touch upon the piano, a trumpet tone on the flute, a talent for taking pen-and-ink portraits that were equal to anything of Count D’Orsay’s, and an irreproachable taste in waistcoats. He went out now in very tolerable spirits; first, because he had worked himself into a good temper by grumbling to himself and Tredethlyn all day; secondly, because he was going to have a good dinner and some rare old tawny port, which was the boast of Mr. Corbett the magistrate; and thirdly, because he was going to be admired; and in a Tasmanian settlement even the worship of a young lady with bony fingers and drab-coloured eyes and hair is not altogether a despicable tribute. “When I hear ‘Kinloch of Kinloch’ tortured out of all semblance of himself upon that wretched piano, I let myself go somehow or other,” thought the ensign, “and I fancy myself standing behind Maude Hillary’s Broadwood in the long drawing-room at Twickenham. Twickenham! Shall I ever see Twickenham again, and Maude Hillary, and the twinkling light upon the river, and the low branches of the chestnuts, the sedgy banks, the lazy boats, the lights up at the ‘Star and Garter’ glimmering across the dusky valley? Shall I ever see that fair civilised land again? or shall I die in this condemned and accursed hole?--die, forgotten and unlamented, before I have made any mark in the world?” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II. THE MAN.