To add to his troubles he was scarcely well of the fever when he caught a touch of rheumatism; and the stalwart young fellow limped along by Robinson’s side, and instead of his distancing Jacky as he used in better days, Jacky rattled on ahead and having got on the trail of an opossum announced his intention of hunting it down and then following the human trail.  “Me catch you before the sun go, and bring opossum—­then we eat a good deal.”  And off glided Jacky after his opossum.

The pair plodded and limped on in gloomy silence, for at a part of the road where they emerged from green meadows on rocks and broken ground Robinson’s tongue had suddenly ceased.

They plodded on, one sad and stiff, the other thoughtful.  Any one meeting the pair would have pitied them.  Ill-success was stamped on them.  Their features were so good, their fortunes so unkind.  Their clothes were sadly worn, their beards neglected, their looks thoughtful and sad.  The convert to honesty stole more than one look at the noble figure that limped beside him and the handsome face in which gentle, uncomplaining sorrow seemed to be a tenant for life; and to the credit of our nature be it said that his eyes filled and his heart yearned.  “Oh, Honesty!” said he, “you are ill-paid here.  I have been well paid for my little bit of you, but here is a life of honesty and a life of ill-luck and bitter disappointment.  Poor George! poor, dear George!  Leave you? never while I have hands to work and a brain to devise!”

They now began slowly to mount a gentle slope that ended in a long black snakelike hill.  “When we get to that hill we shall see my new pasture,” said George.  “New or old, I doubt ’twill be all the same.”

And he sighed and relapsed into silence.  Meantime Jacky had killed his opossum and was now following their trail at an easy trot.

Leaving the two sad ones with worn clothes and heavy hearts plodding slowly and stiffly up the long rough slope, our story runs on before and gains the rocky platform they are making for and looks both ways—­back toward the sad ones and forward over a grand, long, sweeping valley.  This pasture is rich in proportion as it recedes from this huge backbone of rock that comes from the stony mountains and pierces and divides the meadows as a cape the sea.  In the foreground the grass suffers from its stern neighbor, is cut up here and there by the channels of defunct torrents, and dotted with fragments of rock, some of which seem to have pierced the bosom of the soil from below, others have been detached at different epochs from the parent rock and rolled into the valley.  But these wounds are only discovered on inspection; at a general glance from the rocky road into the dale the prospect is large, rich and laughing; fairer pastures are to be found in that favored land, but this sparkles at you like an emerald roughly set, and where the backbone of rock gives a sudden twist bursts out all