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Canning had paid one visit to Dursley, under the auspices of its Omnigerentual Agent, and that while there he had contrived, with Mr. Perkins's assistance no doubt, 'to make that little town fairly hum. We talked in this strain for some time, and then Mr.
I decided to add to it until I had completed my fourth year; and, meantime, made inquiries about the passage to England. From this point on I made no secret of my intentions, and a very kindly reply came from Mrs. Perkins in Dursley to the letter in which I told her of my plan. At a venture I addressed a letter to Ted, my old friend of Livorno days; but it brought no answer.
What a pity it is that one cannot always, later in life, obtain the same secure and confident feeling by virtue of possessing twenty pounds! This meant that I had spent less than four pounds in the year. But no; Mr. Perkins gave me ten shillings, and Mrs. Perkins five shillings, at Christmas time. Also, I won ten shillings as a prize in a competition arranged by the Dursley Chronicle.
The celerity, the extraordinary swiftness of the whole business left me almost breathless. 'Yesterday, I told myself, as one recounting a miracle, 'I was planting out young tomatoes in Mr. Perkins's garden in Dursley. Only a few minutes ago I was still in the train. And now now I'm a lodger, and this is my room, and I'm a lodger!
There had been two blows, I believe; and, if so, the second must really have been a work of supererogation, for I was conscious only of the one crash. In one illuminating instant I recalled my visit to the bank, my two hundred and forty-seven pounds ten shillings, my intended visit to the shipping-office, the approaching end and climax of my work in Sydney and Dursley six years of it.
Worth, if a penny, seventy thousand pounds. Ha! ha! ho! ho!" "Then you have really parted with that enormous sum of money without having had the title to the estate professionally examined?" Fiddlestick! I looked over the deeds myself. Besides, haven't I told you the ancestors of Dursley, from whose executors Palliser purchased the estate, were in possession of it for centuries.
It was on a Sunday morning of delicious brightness and virginal freshness that I reached the irregularly spreading outskirts of Dursley, a pretty little town in Gloucester county, the appearance of which, as I approached it from the highest point of the long ridge upon whose lower slopes it lay, appealed to me most strongly. Though still small Dursley is an old town, for Australia.
George, commanded by lord Dursley, struck upon the rocks, but a wave set her afloat again. The admiral's body being cast ashore, was stripped and buried in the sand; but afterwards discovered and brought into Plymouth, from whence it was conveyed to London, and interred in Westminster-abbey.
But looking back now upon my Dursley period, and the four years spent in Sydney and, indeed, my stay in the Orphanage, and my life with my father in Livorno Bay it appears to me that my growth, education, development, whatever it may be called, came at intervals, jerkily, in sudden leaps forward.
I saw comparatively little of him, of course, owing to his preoccupation with business, his own and that of Dursley and most of its inhabitants; but we were excellent good friends, and it was rarely that he missed his Sunday morning walk round the whole place with me, when my week's work would be passed in more or less humorous review, and the programme for the next week discussed.
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