The best account he gave of his travels to Lord Carrick, perhaps the best account he could give, was that he had been "knocking about." Luck had not been with him, he said; and there really did seem to have been a good deal in that. To hear him tell of his adventures was something rich; not consecutively as a history, he never did that: but these chance recollections were so frequent and diffuse, that a history of his career at Natal might have been compiled from them. The Earl would hold his sides, laughing at Roland's lamentations for the failure and sacrifice of his frying-pans, and at the reminiscences in general. A life of adventure one week, a life of starvation the next. Roland said he had tried all kinds of things. He had served in stores; at bars where liquor was dispensed; he had been a hired waiter at half the hotels in Natal; he had worked on the shore with the half-naked Zulu Kaffirs at lading and unlading boats; once, for a whole week, when he was very hard up, or perhaps very low _down_, he had cried hot potatoes in the streets. He had been a farmer's labourer and driven a waggon, pigs, and cattle. He had been sub-editor in a newspaper office, _The Natal Mercury_, and one unlucky day sent the journal out with its letters printed upside down. He had hired himself out as chemist's assistant, and half ruined his master by his hopeless inability to distinguish between senna and tincture of laudanum, so that the antidotes obliged to be supplied to the hapless customers who came rushing for them, quite outweighed the profits. Occasionally he met with friends who assisted him, and then Roland was at ease--for his propensity to live as a gentleman was for ever cropping up. Up and down; down and up; now fortune smiling a little, but for the most part showing herself very grim, and frowning terribly. Roland had gone (as he called it) up the country, and amidst other agreeable incidents came to a fight with the Kaffirs. He took out a licence, the cost thirty shillings, and opened a retail store for pickled pork, candles, and native leeches, the only articles he could get supplied him on trust. His fine personal appearance, ready address, evident scholarship, and hearty frank manners, obtained for him a clerkship in the Commercial and Agricultural Bank, recently opened, and he got into so hopeless a maze with the books and cash by the week's end, that he was turned off without pay. Architecture was tried next. Roland sent in a graphic plan as competitor for the erection of a public building; and the drawing--which he had copied from a model, just as he used to copy cribs in the college school at Helstonleigh--looked so well upon paper that the arbitrators were struck with admiration at the constructive talent displayed, until one of them made the abrupt discovery that there were no staircases and no room left to build any. So, that hope was abandoned for a less exalted one; and Roland was