trouble came, he was unmoved: he might
have said with Singleton, "I told you so"; he was content with thinking,
"just as I expected." On the fall of these last thunderbolts, he bore
himself like a person only distantly interested in the event; pocketed
the money and the reproaches, obeyed orders punctually; took ship and
came to Sydney. Some men are still lads at twenty-five; and so it was
with Norris. Eighteen days after he landed, his quarter's allowance was
all gone, and with the light-hearted hopefulness of strangers in what
is called a new country, he began to besiege offices and apply for all
manner of incongruous situations. Everywhere, and last of all from his
lodgings, he was bowed out; and found himself reduced, in a very elegant
suit of summer tweeds, to herd and camp with the degraded outcasts of
the city.

In this strait, he had recourse to the lawyer who paid him his
allowance.

"Try to remember that my time is valuable, Mr. Carthew," said the
lawyer. "It is quite unnecessary you should enlarge on the peculiar
position in which you stand. Remittance men, as we call them here, are
not so rare in my experience; and in such cases I act upon a system. I
make you a present of a sovereign; here it is. Every day you choose to
call, my clerk will advance you a shilling; on Saturday, since my office
is closed on Sunday, he will advance you half a crown. My conditions are
these: that you do not come to me, but to my clerk; that you do not come
here the worse of liquor; and you go away the moment you are paid and
have signed a receipt. I wish you a good-morning."

"I have to thank you, I suppose," said Carthew. "My position is so
wretched that I cannot even refuse this starvation allowance."

"Starvation!" said the lawyer, smiling. "No man will starve here on a
shilling a day. I had on my hands another young gentleman, who remained
continuously intoxicated for six years on the same allowance." And he
once more busied himself with his papers.

In the time that followed, the image of the smiling lawyer haunted
Carthew's memory. "That three minutes' talk was all the education I
ever had worth talking of," says he. "It was all life in a nut-shell.
Confound it! I thought, have I got to the point of envying that ancient
fossil?"

Every morning for the next two or three weeks, the stroke of ten found
Norris, unkempt and haggard, at the lawyer's door. The long day and
longer night he spent in the Domain, now on a ben