knowing the man who spoke to me to be of great veracity, and hearing him repeat his information, I flew on deck, on which I had barely set my feet when the cry of "another sail" struck on my astonished ears. Confounded by a thousand ideas which arose in my mind in an instant, I sprang upon the barricado, and plainly descried two ships of considerable size standing in for the mouth of the bay. By this time the alarm had become general, and everyone appeared lost in conjecture. Now they were Dutchmen sent to dispossess us, and, the moment after, storeships from England with supplies for the settlement. It was by Governor Phillip that this mystery was at length unravelled, and the cause of the alarm pronounced to be two French ships, which, it was now recollected, were on a voyage of discovery in the Southern Hemisphere.'
There is now probably no hour in the twenty-four when a vessel is not passing over the same spot as that where the Frenchmen were sighted.
Among the notorious prisoners who arrived in Phillip's time was Barrington, the pickpocket—a sort of Brummel in his profession. Tench writes of him thus:—
'But before I bade adieu to Rose Hill, in all probability for the last time of my life, it struck me that there yet remained one object of consideration not to be slighted. Barrington had been in the settlement between two and three months, and I had not seen
