interested in the event; pocketed the money and the reproaches, obeyed orders punctually; took ship and came to Sydney.  Some men are still lads at twenty-five; and so it was with Norris.  Eighteen days after he landed, his quarter’s allowance was all gone, and with the light-hearted hopefulness of strangers in what is called a new country, he began to besiege offices and apply for all manner of incongruous situations.  Everywhere, and last of all from his lodgings, he was bowed out; and found himself reduced, in a very elegant suit of summer tweeds, to herd and camp with the degraded outcasts of the city.

In this strait, he had recourse to the lawyer who paid him his allowance.

“Try to remember that my time is valuable, Mr. Carthew,” said the lawyer.  “It is quite unnecessary you should enlarge on the peculiar position in which you stand.  Remittance men, as we call them here, are not so rare in my experience; and in such cases I act upon a system.  I make you a present of a sovereign; here it is.  Every day you choose to call, my clerk will advance you a shilling; on Saturday, since my office is closed on Sunday, he will advance you half a crown.  My conditions are these:  that you do not come to me, but to my clerk; that you do not come here the worse of liquor; and you go away the moment you are paid and have signed a receipt.  I wish you a good-morning.”

“I have to thank you, I suppose,” said Carthew.  “My position is so wretched that I cannot even refuse this starvation allowance.”

“Starvation!” said the lawyer, smiling.  “No man will starve here on a shilling a day.  I had on my hands another young gentleman, who remained continuously intoxicated for six years on the same allowance.”  And he once more busied himself with his papers.

In the time that followed, the image of the smiling lawyer haunted Carthew’s memory.  “That three minutes’ talk was all the education I ever had worth talking of,” says he.  “It was all life in a nut-shell.  Confound it!  I thought, have I got to the point of envying that ancient fossil?”

Every morning for the next two or three weeks, the stroke of ten found Norris, unkempt and haggard, at the lawyer’s door.  The long day and longer night he spent in the Domain, now on a bench, now on the grass under a Norfolk Island pine, the companion of perhaps the lowest class on earth, the Larrikins of Sydney.  Morning after morning, the dawn behind the lighthouse recalled him from slumber; and he would stand and gaze upon the changing east, the fading lenses, the smokeless city, and the many-armed and many-masted harbour growing slowly clear under his eyes.  His bed-fellows (so to call them) were less active; they lay sprawled upon the grass and benches, the dingy men, the frowsy women, prolonging their late repose; and Carthew wandered among the sleeping bodies alone, and cursed the incurable stupidity of his behaviour.  Day brought a new society of nursery-maids