farm produce to the stores, where goods only are given in exchange for it, unless the would-be seller is content to take much less than its value. At the nearest store therefore, which was seven miles off, being unwilling to take payment in kind twice in one day, he was fain to accept one shilling for sixteen eggs, instead of for eleven; but this was so disheartening that he tried hawking the remainder at private houses, and having thus disposed of some few dozen eggs on rather better terms, and broken a good part in the frequent shiftings, he ended by clearing fifteen shillings, and thinking that he had not made a bad day's work.
Perhaps a sort of payment even more mortifying than the last was one that I heard of from a woman who, in place of eleven shillings that were due to her, received a certain quantity of melons and almonds—an arrangement to which she agreed, like the man who took the eggs, because no better mode of settling her claim was forthcoming, but which rendered long hours of laborious needlework as unprofitable to her as if their sole object had been that of supplying her family with sweetmeats.
I adverted a few pages back to some of the social disabilities which the ticket-of-leave holders found so galling, but they had this one advantage over men who boasted conditional pardons, that the former were admitted into hospital without any difficulty, whereas the latter, if received as patients at all, were expected to pay five shillings a week, unless the charge was specially remitted through a representation to the stipendiary magistrate from the medical officer.
In nothing did the true character of the colony as a vast
