to the best of his ability.  But fathers and mothers are sometimes apt to think that more should be done for their own children than a friend’s best ability can afford.  These people, however, were reasonable.  ‘Poor Dick!’ ‘Isn’t it sad?’ ’I suppose when he’s quite far away in the bush like that he can’t get it,’—­by which last miserable shred of security the poor mother allowed herself to be in some degree comforted.

‘Now I want you to tell me,’ said the father, when they were alone together on the first evening, ‘what is really his condition?’

‘He was a shepherd when I last heard about him.’

’He wrote to his mother by the last mail, asking whether something cannot be done for him.  He was a shepherd then.  What is a shepherd?’

’A man who goes about with the sheep all day, and brings them up to a camp at night.  He may probably be a week without seeing a human being, That is the worst of it.’

‘How is he fed?’

’Food is brought out to his hut,—­perhaps once a week, perhaps once a fortnight,—­so much meat, so much flour, so much tea, and so much sugar.  And he has thirty or thirty-five pounds a-year besides.’

‘Paid weekly?’

’No;—­perhaps quarterly, perhaps half-yearly.  He can do nothing with his money as long as he is there.  If he wants a pair of boots or a new shirt, they send it out to him from the store, and his employer charges him with the price.  It is a poor life, sir.’

‘Very poor.  Now tell me, what can we do for him?’

‘It is an affair of money.’

’But is it an affair of money, Mr. Caldigate?  Is it not rather an affair of drink?  He has had his money,—­more than his share; more than he ought to have had.  But even though I were able to send him more, what good would it do him?’

This was a question very difficult to answer.  Caldigate had been forced to answer it to himself in reference to his own conduct.  He had sent money to his former friend, and could without much damage to himself have sent more.  Latterly he had been in that condition as to money in which a man thinks nothing of fifty pounds,—­that condition which induces one man to shoe his horse with gold, and another to chuck his bank-notes about like half-crowns.  The condition is altogether opposed to the regulated prudence of confirmed wealth.  Caldigate had stayed his hand in regard to Dick Shand simply because the affair had been one not of money but of drink.  ’I suppose a man may be cured by the absence of liquor?’

‘By the enforced absence?’

’No doubt they often break out again.  I hardly know what to say, sir.  If you think that money will do good,—­money, that is, in moderation,—­I will advance it.  He and I started together, and I am sometimes aghast with myself when I think of the small matter which, like the point on a railway, sent me running rapidly on to prosperity,—­while the same point, turned wrong, hurried him to ruin.  I have taken my glass of grog, too, my two glasses,—­or perhaps more.  But that which would elate him into some fury of action would not move me.  It was something nature did for me rather than virtue.  I am a rich man, and he is a shepherd, because something was put into my stomach capable of digesting bad brandy, which was not put into his.’