it appears, in years long since gone by, performed some great service for Mrs. Callender’s father and mother—that identical young couple who had begun their housekeeping in the old kitchen. Precisely the nature of it, Mrs. Callender had never clearly understood; but it had been of the very first importance, and had decisively influenced a supreme crisis in the family fortunes, which had gone on steadily, if modestly, improving ever since. The benefactor’s own fortunes, unhappily, had just as steadily pursued the opposite direction; until now, in his friendless old age, he was reduced to a most forlorn “bachelorising” existence in a one-roomed hut near Hakawai. It was in vain that, time after time, Mrs. Callender had entreated him to take up his quarters on the farm, and let her, in tardy return for that essential succour long ago, make his declining days as comfortable as she could. No! he always refused, gratefully, but with decision; he had work to do, he said, for which absolute solitude was a necessity.
But when, at length, he and his wharé grew infirm together; when sinister mention began to be made of the Old Men’s Refuge; then, Mrs. Callender could stand on ceremony no longer. If Mr. Miller himself did not know what was due to the saviour of her father and mother, she did; and accordingly, one fresh and beautiful October morning, when the headland was all soft greens and purples with springing grass and sailing cloud-shadows, she harnessed steady Twinkle into the buggy, and drove off; returning, that same afternoon, with a—small, spare, bespectacled man upon the seat beside her, and a quantity of well-packed butter-boxes and
