er wet decks shone in the morning sunlight. From her
bulwarks peered bearded and eager faces, looking with astonishment at
this burning boat and its haggard company, alone on that barren and
stormy ocean.

Frere, with Sylvia in his arms, waited for her.

END OF BOOK THE SECOND

BOOK III.--PORT ARTHUR. 1838.

CHAPTER I. A LABOURER IN THE VINEYARD.

"Society in Hobart Town, in this year of grace 1838, is, my dear lord,
composed of very curious elements." So ran a passage in the sparkling
letter which the Rev. Mr. Meekin, newly-appointed chaplain, and
seven-days' resident in Van Diemen's Land, was carrying to the post
office, for the delectation of his patron in England. As the reverend
gentleman tripped daintily down the summer street that lay between the
blue river and the purple mountain, he cast his mild eyes hither and
thither upon human nature, and the sentence he had just penned recurred
to him with pleasurable appositeness. Elbowed by well-dressed officers
of garrison, bowing sweetly to well-dressed ladies, shrinking from
ill-dressed, ill-odoured ticket-of-leave men, or hastening across a
street to avoid being run down by the hand-carts that, driven by little
gangs of grey-clothed convicts, rattled and jangled at him unexpectedly
from behind corners, he certainly felt that the society through which he
moved was composed of curious elements. Now passed, with haughty nose in
the air, a newly-imported government official, relaxing for an instant
his rigidity of demeanour to smile languidly at the chaplain whom
Governor Sir John Franklin delighted to honour; now swaggered, with
coarse defiance of gentility and patronage, a wealthy ex-prisoner, grown
fat on the profits of rum. The population that was abroad on that sunny
December afternoon had certainly an incongruous appearance to a dapper
clergyman lately arrived from London, and missing, for the first time
in his sleek, easy-going life, those social screens which in London
civilization decorously conceal the frailties and vices of human nature.
Clad in glossy black, of the most fashionable clerical cut, with dandy
boots, and gloves of lightest lavender--a white silk overcoat hinting
that its wearer was not wholly free from sensitiveness to sun and
heat--the Reverend Meekin tripped daintily to the post office, and
deposited his letter. Two ladies met him as he turned.

"Mr. Meekin!"

Mr. Meekin's elegant hat was raised from his intellec