To endeavour to create a paradise in such a Pandemonium required all the energies of a Crinkett.

Whether or not he had been successful depended of course on his own idiosyncrasies.

He had a wife who, it is to be hoped, liked her residence.

They had no children, and he spent the greater part of his time away in other mining districts in which he had ventures.

When thus absent, he would live as Jack Brien and his friends were living at Mrs.Henniker's, and was supposed to enjoy the ease of his inn more thoroughly than he did the constraint of his grand establishment.
At the present moment he was at home, and was standing at the gate of his domain all alone, with a pipe in his mouth,--perhaps listening, as the man had said, to the noise of his own crushing-machine.