Page:Catherine Carmichael; Or Three Years Running.pdf/1

The Christmas Number of

CATHERINE CARMICHAEL; OR, THREE YEARS RUNNING. BY ANTHONY TROLLOPE.

CHAPTER I. CHRISTMAS DAY. NO. 1.

CATHERINE CARMICHAEL, whose name is prefixed to this story, was very early in her life made acquainted with trouble. That name became hers when she was married, but the reader must first know her as Catherine Baird. Her father was a Scotchman of good birth, and had once been possessed of fair means. But the world had gone against him, and he had taken his family out to New Zealand when Catherine was as yet but ten years old. Of Mr. Baird and his misfortunes little need be said, except that for nearly a dozen years he followed the precarious and demoralizing trade of a gold-digger at Hokitika. Sometimes there was money in plenty, sometimes there was none. Food there was, always plenty, though food of the roughest. Drink there was, generally, much more than plenty. Everything around the young Bairds was rough. Frequently changing their residence from one shanty to another, the last shanty inhabited by them would always be the roughest. As for the common decencies of life, they seemed to become ever scarcer and more scarce with them, although the females among them had a taste for decency, and although they lived in a region which then seemed to be running over with gold. The mother was ever decent in language, in manners, and in morals, and strove gallantly for her children. That they could read and write, and had some taste for such pursuits, was due to her; for the father, as years passed over him, and as he became more and more hardened to the rough usages of a digger's life, fell gradually into the habits of a mere miner. A year before his death no one would have thought he had been the son of Fergus Baird, Esq., of Killach, and that when he had married the daughter of a neighbouring laird, things had smiled pleasantly on him and his young wife.

Then his wife died, and he followed her within one year. Of the horrors of that twelve months it is useless now to tell. A man's passion for drink, if he be not wholly bad, may be moderated by a wife, and then pass all bounds when she is no longer there to restrain him. So it was with him; and for a while there was danger that it should be so with his boys also. Catherine was the eldest daughter, and was then twenty-two. There was a brother older, then four younger, and after them three other girls. That year to Catherine was very hard ,—too hard, almost, for endurance. But there came among them at the diggings, where they were still dwelling, a young man whose name was John Carmichael, whose presence there gave something of grace to her days. He, too, had come for gold and had joined himself to the Bairds in consequence of some distant family friendship.

Within twelve months the father of the family had followed the mother, and the eight children were left without protection and without anything in the world worthy of the name of property. The sons could fight for themselves, and were left to do so. The three younger children were carried back to Scotland, a sister of their mother's having undertaken to maintain them; but Catherine was left. When the time came in which the three younger sisters were sent, it was found that a home presented itself for Catherine; and as the burden of providing for even the younger orphans was very great, it was thought proper that Catherine should avail herself of the home which was offered her.

John Carmichael, when he came among the diggers at Hokitika,—on the western coast of the southern of the two New Zealand islands,—had done so chiefly because he had quarrelled with his cousin, Peter Carmichael, a squatter settled across tho mountains in the Canterbury Province, with whom he had been living for the last three or four