"and he'll be a credit to you yet."

And Mary prayed every morning and night for her old playfellow; and so
the years slipped on till the autumn of 1853.

As no one has heard of Tom now for eight months and more (the pulse of
Australian postage being of a somewhat intermittent type), we may as
well go and look for him.

A sheet of dark rolling ground, quarried into a gigantic rabbit
burrow, with hundreds of tents and huts dotted about among the heaps
of rubbish; dark evergreen forests in the distance, and, above all,
the great volcanic mountain of Buninyong towering far aloft--these are
the "Black Hills of Ballarat;" and that windlass at that shaft's mouth
belongs in part to Thomas Thurnall.

At the windlass are standing two men, whom we may have seen in
past years, self-satisfied in countenance, and spotless in array,
sauntering down Piccadilly any July afternoon, or lounging in Haggis's
stable-yard at Cambridge any autumn morning. Alas! how changed from
the fast young undergraduates, with powers of enjoyment only equalled
by their powers of running into debt, are those two black-bearded and
mud-bespattered ruffians, who once were Smith and Brown of Trinity.
Yet who need pity them, as long as they have stouter limbs, healthier
stomachs, and clearer consciences, than they have had since they left
Eton at seventeen? Would Smith have been a happier man as a briefless
barrister in a dingy Inn of Law, peeping now and then into third-rate
London society, and scribbling for the daily press! Would Brown have
been a happier man had he been forced into those holy orders for which
he never felt the least vocation, to pay off his college debts out