glad to become young man at a general store, where the work was light: alternating between dispensing herrings and treacle (called there golden syrup) to customers over the counter, and taking out parcels in a wheelbarrow. But there was good in Roland. And a great deal of it too, in spite of his ill-luck and his careless improvidence. The very fact of his remaining away four years, striving manfully with this unsatisfactory life of toil and semi-starvation, proved it. The brown bread and pea-soup Mr. Galloway had foreseen he would be reduced to live on, was often hungered for by Roland in vain. He put up with it all; and not until every chance seemed to have failed, would he go home to tax his uncle's pocket, and to disappoint his mother. A sense of shame, of keen, stinging mortification, no doubt lay at the bottom of this feeling against return. He had been so sanguine, as some of my readers may remember; and as he, sitting one day on a roadside stone in the sand, towards the close of his stay in Natal, recalled; so full of hopeful, glowing visions in the old home, that his mother, the Lady Augusta Yorke, had caught their reflection. Roland's castles in the air cannot have slipped yet out of people's memory. He had represented to his mother; aye, and believed it too; that Port Natal was a kind of Spanish El Dorado, where energetic young men might line their pockets in a short while, and come home millionaires for life. He had indulged large visions and made magnificent promises on the strength of them, beginning with a case of diamonds to his mother, and ending--nobody but Roland could have any conception where. Old debts were to be paid, friends benefited, enemies made to eat humble-pie. Mr. Galloway was to be passed in the street by Mr. Roland Yorke, the millionaire; the Reverend William Yorke to have the cold shoulder turned upon him. Arthur Channing was to be honoured; Jenkins, the hard-working clerk, who had thought nothing of doing Roland's work as well as his own, to be largely patronised; within three months after his arrival in Port Natal, funds were to be dispatched home to settle claims that might be standing against Roland in Helstonleigh. That there could be the slightest doubt he should come back "worth millions," Roland never supposed; he had talked of it everywhere--and talked faithfully. Poor Jenkins had long gone where worldly patronage and gifts could not follow him, but others had not. Roland remembered how his confident anticipations had so won upon his mother, that she went to bed and dreamt of driving about a charming city, whose streets were paved with Malachite marble.