proposing a picnic, for it was the
winter before last that I met the Deanes, and therefore our midsummer,
and a precious hot one too I can tell you, so that all the ripe fruit,
bottled beer, champagne, and everything else that was cool and slaking
was at a premium.

Mr. Deane was not altogether unacquainted with Sydney. He had been for
some time in the colony, and had done a good thing in cattle agency. "I
landed a pretty fair commission out of one lot that I had out beyond
Gomaree Flats," he said to me, "a wild lot they were too, and I bought
them on spec and sold them three weeks after with my own brand upon
them."

"You don't mean to say that they were at Goobong station and branded D,"
said I.

"Just so, have you seen any of 'em?"

"Why I _helped_ brand them," I cried; "I was on the station and rode out
after a bull that had gone away. I must have been within a couple of
miles of your place if you were at Gomaree; and--was Miss Deane with
you?"

"Mary was with me, Tom Grantley," says Mr. Deane, "and I don't think you
used to say 'Miss' in the old time when I knew your father."

"No; but then you see Mary wouldn't even come to say 'good-bye,'" I
replied; and, as I looked, I saw the girl--she _is_ a lovely girl,
Bessie, though she's now Mrs. Grantley--blush like a rose, and actually,
I think, a tear stood in her eye, though she laughed again when putting
her hand in mine. She said, "Forgive me, Tom; for if you and uncle are
to continue friends, _I_ must be friendly with you too; so I make the
first overture of reconciliation."

I felt I was a "gone coon" if I let this sort of thing go on; so I asked
them what they were doing in Sydney, dined with them the same evening,
and by that day week we had made up a picnic to Parramatta, where we
could have the pleasure of a boat on the salt-water creek that people
there call the Parramatta River, and could have a pleasant country
ramble and a dinner out in the sunshine, with the thermometer at 85 deg. in
the shade, or thereabout--capital weather for plum-pudding; but we _had_
plum-pudding and roast-beef, too, with iced champagne; the plum-pudding
made beforehand and heated over a fire made of sticks in an iron
skillet; the roast-beef cold, with Sydney pickle, and bottled beer from
England, rather dearer than champagne, and, what was better than either,
some Australian wine, made from the Reisling grape, and about as good as
most of the hock we ever get in London.