Читать книгу The Last Chance: A Tale of the Golden West онлайн

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What a miracle it seems! What a superhuman effort must the first days of sobriety require! How does it put to shame the better born, the better instructed, whose every-day resolutions they are often so powerless to abide by!

But it is a time-bargain with the fiend, alas! in so many—in by far the majority of instances. In ‘an hour that he knoweth not,’ the Enemy of man asserts his power, and the victim falls—to be cast into the outer darkness of despair—of hopeless surrender—to a ruined life, an unhonoured death.

A fortnight’s rest and good living set up the returned prospector to such an extent that his former comrades hardly recognised him in the neatly dressed, alert personage, who gave out that he was open to invest in a ‘show,’ but wasn’t up to any more prospecting for a while. ‘Not good enough,’ and so on. Thought he’d take a trip to Melbourne to see a friend. This resolve he carried out rather ssss1 suddenly, it having been so arranged, the partners not holding it expedient that they should leave in company, or that it should be matter for general information that they were bound upon a joint mining speculation. As to the tempting local ventures, then common among all classes on a large goldfield, Mr.Banneret had always studiously abstained from the slightest connection with them.