“What makes you so hot-foot all of a sudden to go back to England?” demanded Dandy. “A great, strapping, very strapping young fellow like you to leave the grand field of enterprise to go back to England?”
Longman sighed and asked in his turn:
“What brought you here, Dandy?”
“Well, I s’pose it was the goold.”
“Ay, man, the gold—the gold fever. I have nothing to say against it, because it has, on the whole, enriched and blessed the world; or, at least, I hope and believe so. But you, to come out here to the gold country at forty years of age, and to spend twenty years of life as hard as the life of a convict, in the pursuit of an ignis-fatuus that always eluded you, still under the delusion that the next stroke of your pick may discover a vein, is to have lost so much of your life! Think of what I have said, Dandy, and redeem and enjoy the rest.”
“I’ll think of it, Maister Longman. But ye hevn’t answered my question. What brought yerself out? Not the goold fever, I’ll be bound. I hev never seed ye handle a pick or shool.”
“No, not the gold fever. I was never fond of digging or delving, or any sort of hard work. That was my ruin, Dandy,” said Longman with a deep sigh.
“Ruin!” exclaimed old Andrew, looking at the speaker from head to foot. “Well, then, ye are the foinest spacimin of a well-presarved ruin as ever I seed in my loife.”
“My hatred of steady work made me an outcast from my home and an exile from my country, Dandy,” gravely replied the hunter.
“A great, tall, strong fellow like you to be lazy!” exclaimed Dandy.