advised as to take up
arms. There was a short campaign, lasting only one morning,--a decisive
battle,--and Mrs. Barker was compelled to sue for peace. "Had Mr.
Troubridge been true to himself," she said, "she would never have
submitted;" but, having given Tom warning, and Tom, in a moment of
irritation, having told her, without hesitation or disguise, to go to
the devil (no less), she bowed to the circumstances, and yielded.

Agnes Buckley encouraged Dr. Mulhaus, too, in his legal affairs, and, I
fear, was the first person who proposed the prosecution for perjury
against the sawyer: a prosecution, however, which failed, in
consequence of his mate and another friend, who was present at the
affair, coming forward to the sawyer's rescue, and getting into such a
labyrinth and mist of perjury, that the Bench (this happened just after
quarter sessions) positively refused to hear anything more on either
side. Altogether, Agnes Buckley made herself so agreeable, and kept
them all so alive, that Tom wondered how he had got on so long without
her.

At the end of three weeks Mary was convalescent; and one day, when she
was moved into the verandah, Mrs. Buckley beside her, Tom and the
Doctor sitting on the step smoking, and Charles sleepily reading aloud
"Hamlet," with a degree of listlessness and want of appreciation
unequalled, I should say, by any reader before; at such time, I say,
there entered suddenly to them a little-cattle dealer, as brimful of
news as an egg of meat. Little Burnside it was: a man about eight stone
nothing, who always wore top-boots and other people's clothes. As he
came in, Charles recognised on his legs a pair of cord breeches of his
own, with a particular grease patch on the thigh: a pair of breeches he
had lent Burnside, and which Burnside had immediately got altered to
his own size. A good singer was Burnside. A man who could finish his
bottle of brandy, and not go to bed in his boots. A man universally
liked and trusted. An honest, hearty, little fellow, yet, one who
always lent or spent his money as fast as he got it, and was as poor as
Job. The greatest vehicle of news in the district, too. "Snowy river
Times," he used to be called.

After the usual greetings, Tom, seeing he was bursting with something,
asked him, "What's the news?"

Burnside was in the habit of saying that he was like the Lord Mayor's
fool--fond of everything that was good. But his greatest pleasure, the
one to which he woul