Eight thousand servants, fed and half clothed at their master’s expense, have put by for forty years, and yet not even by aid of interest and compound interest and perquisites and commissions squeezed out of little tradesmen and other time-honored embezzlements, have reached the rubicon of four figures.  Five thousand little shopkeepers, active, intelligent and greedy, have bought wholesale and sold retail, yet never mounted so high as this above rent, housekeeping, bad debts and casualties.  Many a writer of genius has charmed his nation and adorned her language, yet never held a thousand pounds in his hand even for a day.  Many a great painter has written the world-wide language of form and color, and attained to European fame, but not to a thousand pounds sterling English.

Among all these aspirants and a million more George Fielding now made one, urged and possessed by as keen an incentive as ever spurred a man.

George’s materials were five hundred sheep, twenty cows, ten bullocks, two large sheep-dogs and Carlo.  It was a keen clear, frosty day in July when he drove his herd to his own pasture.  His heart beat high that morning.  He left Abner, his shepherd, a white native of the colony, to drive the slow cattle.  He strode out in advance, and scarce felt the ground beneath his feet.  The thermometer was at 28 degrees, yet his coat was only tied round his neck by the sleeves as he swept along all health, fire, manhood, love and hope.  He marched this day like dear Smollett’s lines, whose thoughts, though he had never heard them, fired his heart.

“Thy spirit, Independence, let me share,
Lord of the lion heart and eagle eye;
Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,
Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.”

He was on the ground long before Abner, and set to work building a roofless hut on the west side of some thick bushes, and hard by the only water near at hand.  And here he fixed his headquarters, stretched a blanket across the hut for a roof, and slept his own master.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

AT the end of six months George Fielding’s stock had varied thus.  Four hundred lambs, ten calves, fifteen cows, four hundred sheep.  He had lost some sheep in lambing, and one cow in calving, but these casualties every feeder counts on; he had been lucky on the whole.  He had sold about eighty sheep, and eaten a few but not many, and of his hundred pounds only five pounds were gone; against which and the decline in cows were to be placed the calves and lambs.