"Exactly! Divide it with me, if you please, and we'll increase it four-fold e'er a year in the golden land."
"But I don't like the idea of going to Australia!" pursued Gilbert.
"Neither do I, very well," answered Jack; "but when folks can't do as they will, they must do as they can, I've heard say."
Thus we leave our Australian adventurers and return to the land from which they are so rapidly receding. We didn't know what else to do here in the eighth chapter, reader, unless we capped the climax, cleared the stage, and scattered the characters; for we were quite as tired of them as you were, and wanted to get them off our hands in some way.
A few people think "Effie Afton" can tell stories tolerably well. But she can't, reader! We speak candidly, for we know "a heap" more about her than you do. There may be those in the wide world who hug themselves in the belief that she can tell little fibs and large fibs pretty flippantly. Well, let them continue thus to believe, if they choose! We shall not pause to say ay, yes, or nay; and we also entertain a private opinion, now publicly expressed, that there are people within the limited circle of our acquaintance who can not only give utterance to little and large fibs, but make their whole lives and actions play the lie to their thoughts and feelings. But as to "Effie's" telling long magazine tales,—pshaw! she is the most unsystematic creature in the world. She just humps down in a big rocking-chair, with one sort of foolscap in her hand, and another sort on her head, with an old music-book to lay the sheets on, a lead-pencil for a pen, and thus equipped, writes chapter one, and dashes in medias res at once, without an idea as to how, where, or when the story thus commenced is to find its terminus or end. This is the way she does, reader; for we have seen her time and again. Well, she scratches on "like mad" till her old lead-pencil is "used up." Then she sharpens the point, and rushes on wilder than before. She don't eat much, and if any one calls her to dinner, never heeds them; but when she conceives herself arrived at a suitable stopping-place, drops her paper, runs to the pantry, snatches a piece of gingerbread, and back to her scribbling again, munching it as she writes.
This is precisely the way she brings her "stories" into existence; but, lest we write her out of favor too rapidly, we'll leave the subject, and back to our tale again, recommencing with a new chapter, which is—
CHAPTER IX.
"And there are haunts in that far land—
O, who shall dream or tell
Of all the shaded loveliness