ut
forty. There is not a wrinkle in that honest forehead, and the eyes
beam upon you as kindly and pleasantly as ever they did; and when,
after playing to the surgeon, he looks up and laughs, one sees that he
is just the same old Sam that used to lie, as a lad, dreaming in the
verandah at Garoopna. No trouble has left its shadow there. Alice,
whose face is pressed against his, is now a calm, young matron of three
or four-and-thirty, if it were possible, more beautiful than ever, only
she has grown from a Hebe into a Juno. The boy, the son and heir, is
much such a stripling as I can remember his father at the same age, but
handsomer. And while we look, another face comes peering over his
shoulder; the laughing face of a lovely girl, with bright sunny hair,
and soft blue eyes; the face of Maud Buckley, Sam's daughter.

They are going home to England. Sam--what between his New England runs,
where there are now, under Tom Troubridge's care, 118,000 sheep, and
his land speculations at Melbourne, which have turned him out somewhere
about 1,000 per cent. since the gold discovery--Sam, I say, is one of
the richest of her Majesty's subjects in the Southern hemisphere. I
would give 200,000L. for Sam, and make a large fortune in the surplus.
"And so," I suppose you say, "he is going home to buy Clere." Not at
all, my dear sir. Clere is bought, and Sam is going home to take
possession. "Marry, how?" Thus,--

Does any one of my readers remember that our dear old friend, Agnes
Buckley's maiden name was Talbot, and that her father owned the
property adjoining Clere? "We do not remember," you say; "or at least,
if we do, we are not bound to; you have not mentioned the circumstance
since the very beginning of this excessively wearisome book, forty
years ago." Allow me to say, that I have purposely avoided mentioning
them all along, in order that, at this very point, I might come down on
you like a thunderbolt with this piece of information; namely:--That
Talbot of Beaulieu Castle, the towers of which were visible from Clere
Terrace, had died without male issue. That Marian and Gertrude Talbot,
the two pretty girls, Agnes Buckley's eldest sisters, who used to come
in and see old Marmaduke when James was campaigning, had never married.
That Marian was dead. That Gertrude, a broken old maid, was sole owner
of Beaulieu Castle, with eight thousand a-year; and, that Agnes
Buckley, her sister, and consequently, Sam as next in succession, was