thing had passed from her existence, she grew in time of serener temper, and could not help feeling pleasure in the beauty of Rothescamp scenery, and in the happiness which her father's return and her own gave to Doctor Septimus Tachbrook. The old gentleman, while he had borne his solitude well through all those years, consoling himself probably by the thought that he was doing a weighty work in the world, while his son was merely producing money and a daughter, could not well be otherwise than pleased with the daughter, though caring nothing about the money. For Miranda was both gentle and sprightly, both duteous and vivacious; and the old Doctor saw in her character a proof that the life of the Tachbrook race was not extinct.

VOL. I.

N

CHAPTER XVII.

VOYAGERS AT HOME.

"How many a weary traveller, soiled with dust,
After long miles beneath a pitiless sun

On white monotonous roads, catches a glimpse

Of the remote blue ocean, all alive

With yachts and trawlers-a great war-ship spreading
Canvas like snow on masts like mighty trees,

And thinks, Ah! surely on the sea is rest!

Toil on the mainland, rest upon the main !"

A TRILLION is defined by Dr Johnson as "a million of millions of millions." A mathematician might more conveniently describe it as the number whose common logarithm is 18. It would be a remarkably pleasant amount to possess in sovereigns, if only there were gold enough in the world to coin it. The trillionaire might turn patriot, and pay the National Debt without feeling it, much to the relief of the over-burdened taxpayers. Fancy the sensation in the House if the

Right Honourable Robert Lowe could get up and announce that Sir Theophilus Trillion, Baronet, had sent him a cheque on Drummond's for what the French call a milliard; so that taxation would cease to be necessary for the present. Nobody would begrudge the generous trillionaire a peerage and a statue.

It

People who have lived much at sea find the land unpleasant in certain respects. is noisy; it is infested by tramps, and taxgatherers, and telegraph posts; it is monotonous in its fixity. Day after day you see the same place and go through the same routine. If one had the inexhaustible trillion, right pleasant would it be to launch a yacht that resembled a floating island. There might be gardens on deck, and groves of trees; and why not a Rotten Row for equestrian exercise? We do not, as yet, utilise the sea. Byron has made two false statements in a breath in one of his weakest, and therefore most admired, passages. us that

He tells

"Man marks the earth with ruin; his control
Stops with the shore."

To mark the earth with ruin can hardly be deemed a primary function of the race which builds cities and plants gardens, while it is quite certain that the sea has been controlled ever since Noah launched his ark on the maddened and tormented waters-ever since Jason led forth his band of wanderers. Still our control might be carried further. Build vaster ships-sail on great circles-calculate cyclones-then the sea may become a habitable country.

Miranda quite pined for the sea. She felt imprisoned at Rothescamp-in-the-Valley. She longed to wander over the interminable waste of ocean in search of Tom Jones, whom she felt certain she should meet again, notwithstanding his strange disappearance. Fain would she have persuaded her father to start in search of her lost lover, but it was not to be expected that he should desert the Doctor

in his old age. So Miranda perforce re

mained at Rothescamp, and waited, with a firm belief, strengthened by her grandfather's superstition, that Tom would return in time.

Doctor Tachbrook had by this time wholly relinquished his practice-seldom, indeed,

went beyond the limits of the quaint old garden behind his house. It was his delight to wander there on fine afternoons, and to hear his son spin yarns interminable. He had lived all his long life at home; he liked to follow in imagination Harold's wild adventures in the world's remotest seas.

Harold, on the other hand, was eager to hear whether anything further was discoverable concerning Mary Fane. Edith's last thoughts rested on this girl; and though so many years had passed, Harold was loyal to his lost wife, and longed to find the school friend whom she loved so well.

"She is untraceable," said Doctor Septi

mus.

"I shall make another trial, for all that," quoth Harold; "I will find her, if she lives."

Meanwhile Gilbert Tachbrook, better known as the Troglodyte, made himself known to Messrs Sherwood and Sherwood, hereditary solicitors to the estate, who were almost the only people who knew anything about the present baronet, and their knowledge was limited. Though Rothescamp rumour placed him in a lunatic asylum, and though he was well quali