’Our aspect of penitence won upon Sir Hussey.  “If you had not bolted,” he added after the lecture, “I’m not sure that I should have felt it necessary to summon you before me.  But, frankly, I could not stand the notion that any of my officers should run away from me.”  There the matter amiably closed, and it was not till afterwards that I had an idea, which might have appealed to Sir Hussey’s gift of humour.

’I should have advanced to him the plea that, at least, we ran away alone, not in better company.  A twinkle would have shone in his eyes, for he eloped with the young lady who became his wife.  He got her out of her home at Bath, through a window, and they were happy ever after.’  To end a day happily was a maxim with Sir George, since it meant wisdom for the morrow.

V SOUTHWARD HO!

Now, the morrow called Sir George Grey, as it calls most, whether they hear it or no.

In him, boyish meditation had ever been braided by melancholy, a legacy of the shock with which his father’s death burst upon his mother.  As he grew up, this became a deep-seated pity for the suffering, wide and bitter, among the common people.  His mother’s care, his step-father’s converse, fostered that feeling, and the service in Ireland, with its lurid emphasis of the misery he had seen in England, determined him in quite a definite way.  A valley of despair moaned in his ear.

‘Can nothing,’ he reflected with himself, ’be done for this canker, this wretchedness?  Not much, from the inside, it may be, for the evil has too firm a grip.  But down there, in the far south, is a new world!  Surely it has the secret of sweeter, freer homes; surely in those new countries lie better possibilities?  Yes, there the future has its supreme chance, there is the field for a happier state of existence!  All can be given a chance, and in the spacious view, it will be planting posts of an Anglo-Saxon fence which shall prevent the development of the New World from being interfered with by the Old World.’

It was an abounding moment at which to be taken into partnership for the carrying forward of the universe.  Half the globe, as we are intimate with it to-day, was then unknown, and North-West Australia was a no-man’s land, saving to the Aborigines.  It was believed by geographers that a big river, artery to an immense area of Australia, must here drain into the sea.  A Government expedition, as head of which Sir George Grey was selected, should determine this, and familiarise the Aborigines with the British name and character.

‘It’s odd,’ Sir George said, ’to reflect that in the latitudes, for which we were bound, human beings were everywhere eating one another.  There was a patch of settled civilisation at the Cape, a lighthouse beaming into those seas, and that was about all, The full glow had to arrive from the north, seeing that south of a line, drawn from the Cape to Australia and New Zealand, there was only the Antarctic wilderness.