ere long.

"Your sincerely-attached friend,

"Edward Sinton."

At the time Tom Collins was reading the above letter to Lizette, in a
broken, husky voice, our hero was seated on the taffrail of the ship
that bore him swiftly over the sea, gazing wistfully at the receding
shore, and bidding a final adieu to California and all his golden
dreams.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE.

OUR STORY COMES TO AN END.

Home! What a host of old and deep and heart-stirring associations arise
in every human breast at the sound of that old familiar word! How well
we know it--how vividly it recalls certain scenes and faces--how
pleasantly it falls on the ear, and slips from the tongue--yet how
little do we appreciate home until we have left it, and longed for it,
perhaps, for many years.

Our hero, Ned Sinton, is home at last. He sits in his old place beside
the fire, with his feet on the fender. Opposite to him sits old Mr
Shirley, with a bland smile on his kind, wrinkled visage, and two pair
of spectacles on his brow. Mr Shirley, as we formerly stated,
regularly loses one pair of spectacles, and always searches for them in
vain, in consequence of his having pushed them too far up on his bald
head; he, therefore, is frequently compelled to put on his second pair,
and hence makes a spectacle, to some extent, of himself. Exactly
between the uncle and the nephew, on a low stool, sits the cat--the cat,
_par excellence_--Mr Shirley's cat, a creature which he has always been
passionately fond of since it was a kitten, and to which, after Ned's
departure for California, he had devoted himself so tenderly, that he
felt half-ashamed of himself, and would not like to have been asked how
much he loved it.

Yes, the cat sits there, looking neither at old Mr Shirley nor at young
Mr Sinton, but bestowing its undivided attentions and affections on the
fire, which it enjoys extremely, if we may judge from the placid manner
in which it winks and purrs.

Ned has been a week at home, and he has just reached that point of
experience at which the wild life of the diggings through which he has
passed begins to seem like a vivid dream rather than reality.

Breakfast had just been concluded, although the cloth had not yet been
removed.

"Do you know, uncle," remarked Ned, settling his bulky frame more
comfortably in the easy-chair, and twirling his watch-key, "I find it
more difficult every day to believe that the events of the last few
months of