Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/496

66 "When?" said Uriah.

"Well," said Robinson, pausing a little, "not before you and I meet again, so I may leave that answer to another opportunity ; " and with a nod and very knowing look he stalked on.

"Odd fellow!" said my brother Uriah. "He is very jocose for a ruined man. What is one to think?" and he waded on. After making a considerable circuit, and actually losing himself in the wood somewhere about where the Reverend Mr. Morrison's chapel now stands in Collins Street, he again came across Robinson who stood at the door of a considerable erection of wattle-and-dab, that is, a building of boughs wattled on stakes, and dabbed over with mud; then not uncommon in Melbourne, and still common enough in the bush. It stood on the hill-side with a swift muddy torrent produced by the rains rushing down the valley below it, toward the river, as it has often done since it bore the name of Swanston Street.

"Here, Tattenhall! here is a pretty go!" shouted Robinson;" a fellow has cut with bag and baggage tonight who owes me four thousand pounds, and has left me a lot more houses and land. That's the way every day. But look, here is a house ready for you. You can't have a better, and you can pay me any trifle you like—something is better than nothing."

He led Uriah in. The house was thoroughly and comfortably furnished; though, of course, very simply, with beds and everything. Uriah, in less than a week, was safely established there, and had time to ramble about with his boys, and learn more fully the condition of the colony. It was melancholy beyond description. Wild, reckless speculation brought to a sudden close by the cessation of immigration, had gone like a hurricane over the place, and had left nothing but ruin and paralysis behind it. No words that Robinson had used, or that any man could use, could overpaint the real condition of prostration and of misery. Two hundred and eighty insolvencies in a population of ten thousand, told the tale of awful reality. Uriah was overwhelmed with consternation at the step he had taken. Oh! how pleasant seemed that Trumpington Cottage, Peckham, and that comfortable warehouse in the old Jewry, as he viewed them from the Antipodes in the midst of rain and ruin.