most by the colony becoming a penal settlement, and, on finding himself a rich man, he visited England for the purpose of assisting his relations at home, and brought back with him to Western Australia fourteen of them in the same ship in which he was a cabin passenger.
As we sat upon the steps of his verandah one hot night, talking of farm labour and of farming lads in England, he gave us a sketch of his own early history, commencing with the assertion that the colonial boys knew nothing of real hardship. Then he told us how he had begun life as a poor child, earning half-a-crown a week by cutting turnips for sheep, and how, in the winter, his feet were so covered with chilblains that he could scarcely pull on his boots in the morning, or do anything but "hobble and cry" for the first quarter of a mile after starting to go to his work—and how eagerly he listened towards evening for the sound of the wheels of the once famous coach 'Defiance,' the punctual passing of which was as good as a clock to the labourers in the turnip field, in announcing the hour, as it rolled by, which brought the day's toil to an end. How, when he was seventeen he took it into his head that he would go to Australia, and how he paid a farewell visit to his old master, who gave him sixpence as a parting present, accompanied with the time-honoured advice "to keep it always in his pocket, so that he might never want money"; and how when he sowed his first bit of land his wife did the bird-scaring with a decrepit gun, of which the cock was missing, so that she had to hit the cap with a hammer each time she fired.
From the windows of his house we now looked over a tract of more than five hundred acres of cleared land, all
