“Now his watch,” continued Mr. Teesdale, “has hardly ever left my pocket—save to go under my pillow—since he put it in my hands on July 3, 1851. Here's the date and our initials inside the case; but you've seen them before. Ay, but there are few who came out in '51—and stopped out—who have done as poorly as me. The day after we dropped anchor in Hobson's Bay there wasn't a living soul aboard our ship; captain, mates, passengers and crew, all gone to the diggings. Every man Jack but me! It was just before you were born, John William, and I wasn't going. It may have been a mistake, but the Lord knows best. To be sure, we had our hard times when the diggers were coming into Melbourne and shoeing their horses with gold, and filling buckets with champagne, and standing by with a pannikin to make everybody drink that passed; if you wouldn't, you'd got to take off your coat and show why. I remember one of them offering me a hundred pounds for this very watch, and precious hard up I was, but I wouldn't take it, not I, though I didn't refuse a sovereign for telling him the time. Ay, sovereigns were the pennies of them days; not that I fingered many; but I never got so poor as to part with Mr. Oliver's watch, and you never must either, John William, when it's yours. Ay, ay,” chuckled Mr. Teesdale, as he snapped-to the case and replaced the watch in his pocket, “and it's gone like a book for over thirty years, with nothing worse than a cleaning the whole time.” “You must mind and tell that to Miriam, father,” said Arabella, smiling. “I must so. Ah, my dear, I shall have two daughters, not one, and you'll have a sister while Miriam is here.” “That depends what Miriam is like,” said John William, getting up from the sofa with a Hugh and going back idly to the little room and his cleaned gun. “I know what she will be like,” said Arabella, placing the group in front of her on the table. “She will be delicate and fair, and rather small; and I shall have to show her everything, and take tremendous care of her.” “I wonder if she'll have her mother's hazel eyes and gentle voice?” mused the farmer aloud, with his eyes on their way back to the Dandenong Ranges. “I should like her to take after her mother; she was one of the gentlest little women that ever I knew, was Mrs. Oliver, and I never clapped eyes——” The speaker suddenly turned his head; there had been a step in the verandah, and some person had passed the window too quick for recognition. “Who was that?” said Mr. Teesdale. “I hardly saw,” said Arabella, pushing back her chair. “It was a woman.” “And now she's knocking! Run and see who it is, my dear.” Arabella rose and ran. Then followed such an outcry in the passage that Mr. Teesdale rose also. He was on his legs in time to see the door flung wide open, and the excited eyes of Arabella reaching over the shoulder of the tall young woman whom she was pushing into the room.