In the morning all seemed like a dream, for Dora had vanished, leaving no trace but her black bag; but while I was dressing a tremendous cackling among my bantams caused me to look out, when I beheld them scurrying right and left at sight of the kangaroo leaping after the three strangers, and my cat on the top of the garden wall on tiptoe, with arched back, bristling tail, and glassy eyes, viewing the beast as the vengeful apotheosis of all the rats and mice she had slaughtered in her time.

>From the stairs I heard Dora scouting her brother’s orders to tidy herself for breakfast, adding that Harry never did, to which he merely replied, “I shall now.  Come.”

There was a sound of hoisting, that gave me warning rather fortunately, for he came striding upstairs with that great well-grown girl of eight perched on his shoulder as if she had been a baby, and would have run me down if I had not avoided into the nook on the landing.

All that day and the next those three were out; I never saw them but at meals, when they came in full of eager questions and comments on their discoveries in farming and other matters.  These were the early bright days of spring, and they were out till after dark, only returning to eat and go to bed.  I found the fascination of Harold’s presence was on all the servants and dependents, except perhaps our bailiff Bullock, who disliked him from the first.  All the others declared that they had no doubt about staying on, now that they saw what the young squire really was.  It made a great impression on them that, when in some farmyard arrangements there was a moment’s danger of a faggot pile falling, he put his shoulder against it and propped the whole weight without effort.  His manhood, strength, and knowledge of work delighted them, and they declared already that he would be a good friend to the poor.

I confess that here lay what alarmed me.  He was always given to few words, but I could see that he was shocked at the contrast between our poor and the Australian settlers, where food and space were plenty and the wages high.  I was somewhat hurt at his way of viewing what had always seemed to me perfection, at least all that could be reasonably expected for the poor—­our pet school, our old women, our civil dependents in tidy cottages, our picturesque lodges; and I did not half like his trenchant questions, which seemed to imply censure on all that I had hitherto thought unquestionable, and perhaps I told him somewhat impatiently that, when he had been a little longer here, he would understand our ways and fall naturally into them.

“That’s just what I don’t want,” he said.

“Not want?” I exclaimed.

“Yes; I want to see clearly before I get used to things.”

And as, perhaps, I seemed to wonder at this way of beginning, he opened a little, and said, “It is my father.  He told me that if ever I came here I was to mind and do his work.”