Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III The result of a broken resolution—The world's playground—Some errors corrected—A glimpse of home life—New Zealand of today and a moonlight ride. I Have often wondered if that cup of tea I had in Chapter II. was the cause of my subsequent wanderings, was, in fact, the turning-point of my career of drift, or if that tempting Eve, with her brown eyes and her invitation to the tennis-party, started me on a course I had no intention whatever of following when I left the fogs of London to try my luck under the Southern Cross. I know what my grandmother would have said had she been alive. She would have condemned those brown eyes at once, and, with unerring precision, would have traced all my future failings (or crimes, she would have called them) back to that one act. She would have shown me how, if I had only gone straight to Mr. Framlin's, instead of leading him to suppose I had not the railway fare, and42 CAUSE AND EFFECT had begun work as the boys in the Sunday-school books do, I would now be a wealthy squatter with six children and Miss Framlin as my wife. The line she would have mapped out for me would, no doubt, have been the correct one ; but in real life who follows the correct line ? and personally I enjoyed that cup of tea and its results. They were certainly interesting, though at times harrowing ; but, on looking back, I cannot say that I regret my little act of deception, or that I hanker after those six children and their mamma. Halstead, I found, was a most amusing companion, and he soon taught me the tricks of the trade, and how to entice unsuspecting people to insure their lives. In the morning we would start out about eleven o'clock and spend two hours calling on likely people and explaining to them the benefits of life insurance. Like all agen... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.