utside world he was as ignorant
as a child, as indeed were most of the men with whom for many years he
had associated. But there was nothing despicable in his ignorance;
and when as time went on, and his improved circumstances threw him in
contact with men and women of refinement and culture, he was quick to
take advantage of such opportunities; but the honest, simple nature of
the man always remained the same.

Before he was thirty, Harrington was known as one of the most
experienced and fortunate over-lander drovers in Australia, and he
became as familiar with the long and lonely stock-route from the
stations on the Gulf of Carpentaria to Sydney and Melbourne, in his many
journeys, as if it were a main road in an English county.

At the conclusion of one of these tedious drives of seven months'
duration, the brown-faced, quiet drover was asked by an acquaintance
with whom he had business transactions, to spend the evening with him at
his house. He went, and there met Myra Lyndon. He was attracted by her
bright manner and smiling face, and when she questioned him about his
life in the Far North, his adventures among the blacks, and the many
perils of a drover's existence, he thought her the fairest and
sweetest woman in the world. And Miss Myra Lyndon encouraged him in his
admiration. Not that she cared for him in the least She had not reached
eight-and-twenty years of age to throw herself away on a man who had
no other ambition than to become a squatter and live amongst a lot of
"horrid bellowing cattle." But he was nice to talk to, though terribly
stupid about some things, and so she did not mind writing to him once
or twice--it would reward him for the horse he had one day sent to her
father with a lamely worded note, saying that it was one of a mob he had
just bought at the saleyards, and as he had no use for a lady's hack,
he thought that perhaps Miss Lyndon would be so kind as to accept it Mr.
Lyndon smiled as he read the note, he knew that drovers did not usually
buy ladies' hacks; but being a man harassed to death with an expensive
family, he was not disposed to discourage Harrington's attentions to
Myra; though, having a conscience, he felt that Jack Harrington was too
good a man for such a useless, empty-brained, and selfish creature as
his eldest daughter.

So Harrington went back to his "bellowing bullocks," and then, having
saved enough money, bought the very run he had so often wished he
could buy; and