ver had even thought of looking for his father's will;
and was quite surprised when I told him that there ought to be a fair
sum--eight hundred or a thousand, perhaps, to come in to him, if the
stock and business were properly disposed of. So he went off to London
by the evening mail, and told me to address him to the post-office in
some street off the Strand. Queer business, sir, isn't it?"

John Briggs did not reappear till a few minutes before his father's
funeral, witnessed the ceremony evidently with great sorrow, bowed off
silently all who attempted to speak to him, and returned to London
by the next coach--leaving matter for much babble among all Whitbury
gossips. One thing at least was plain, that he wished to be forgotten
in his native town; and forgotten he was, in due course of time.

Tom Thurnall stayed his month at home, and then went to America;
whence he wrote home, in about six months, a letter, of which only one
paragraph need interest us,

"Tell Mark I have no need for his dollars. I have done the deed; and,
thanks to the underground railway, done it nearly gratis; which was
both cheaper than buying her, and infinitely better for me; so that
she has all poor Wyse's dollars to start with afresh in Canada. I
write this from New York. I could accompany her no farther; for I must
get back to the South in time for the Mexican expedition."

Then came a long and anxious silence; and then a letter, not from
Mexico but from California,--one out of several which had been posted;
and then letters, more regularly from Australia. Sickened with
Californian life, he had crossed the Pacific once more, and was hard
at work in the diggings, doctoring and gold-finding by turns.

"A rolling stone gathers no moss," said his father.

"He has the pluck of a hound, and the cunning of a fox," said Mark;
"and he'll be a credit to you yet."

And Mary prayed every morning and night for her old playfellow; and so
the years slipped on till the autumn of 1853.

As no one has heard of Tom now for eight months and more (the pulse of
Australian postage being of a somewhat intermittent type), we may as
well go and look for him.

A sheet of dark rolling ground, quarried into a gigantic rabbit
burrow, with hundreds of tents and huts dotted about among the heaps
of rubbish; dark evergreen forests in the distance, and, above all,
the great volcanic mountain of Buninyong towering far aloft--these are
the "Black Hills of Ballarat;"