“Then he said—‘Look here, doctor, I’m blest if the fellow didn’t turn into bilin’ water and then into steam and then into nothin’ at all, and while I was wonderin’ what in the mischief war the matter with me back he comes again, fust steam, and then bilin’ water, and then an ugly tawny-looking beggar, neither nigger nor white man, and makes another grab at me. So I said, Man or devil, have at you again, and I gave him the contents of another barrel, and I’m blest if he didn’t go of in a bile again and I took to my heels and ran as I never ran before until I got back to the darkies’ camp.’ That was his story,” said the physician, “and it appears that he was picked up some months later on the headwaters of the Oakover River by some explorers, and so he got round to Adelaide, and thence to Sydney, and so found his way to the asylum.” In answer to further questions the physician said, “I told the superintendent of the asylum that the man was quite sane, or at least sane enough for the purposes of life; that he was no doubt under some strange delusion, but that I had observed that people who had been much among the blacks were liable to such delusions, and that in my opinion he was quite harmless and that it was cruel to keep him shut up in an asylum, and I made a memorandum in the visitors’ book to that effect.” I told this story to Jack that night and we went off the very next day to Tarban Creek to look for the man. He had been discharged and was now working as a clerk on a station on the Murrumbidgee. So the superintendent of the asylum told us. We hurried off to the Murrumbidgee and found the station where he had been employed. It was somewhere near Balranald. But he had gone away to America about six months before, and we could find no means of tracing him. This affair unsettled us again and was indirectly the cause of our letting the negotiation in which we were engaged drift away from us. But it is now quite a year since we have made a clean breast of it and committed our story to paper, although we have not at the moment of writing made up our minds about its publication. And the effect upon us both has been decidedly good. Jack says we have done better than the Ancient Mariner, for he had to tell his tale over and over again whenever he met a man whose doom it was to hear him; but we have just told our tale once for all and let the doomed ones read it. And now we have actually settled down to business and have become part owners of a station in Queensland and have our homes within ten miles of each other; that is to say we are quite next door neighbours, and I may as well finish by giving you the details of a conversation which passed between myself and Jack only a few months ago.