Crichton, and revered him accordingly. I was very glad when he 'followed the rush' to Port Phillip in 1842, and gave the Hammonds, Howards, myself, and a few other ex-Sydney College boys our last year's teaching. We ought to have made the most of it, for, as none of us got any more, we had to rely upon those early years of conscientious grounding for the foundation of any edifice of learning we should elect to place thereon. It has proved extremely useful to all of us, and it was no one's fault but our own if we did not imbibe every form of useful knowledge short of what university training alone could have supplied.
Besides these gentlemen we had drawing and French masters. Mr. Rodius was a German artist, a painter in water-colours and a limner of likenesses in crayon. Many of the early celebrities will owe whatever immortality they may secure, to his industrious pencil. Still linger in old colonial mansions a few portraits, not obtruded perhaps, but too life-like to be lost sight of, bearing the signature 'C. Rodius.' In our family scrap-album several water-colour sketches are to be seen, showing perhaps more than the portraits—which were necessary 'pot-boilers' in that material age—the true artistic touch. He used to scold us, his pupils, for our indifference and inattention: 'Ven I was yong I did rone a whole mile every day so as to be in dime vor my bainding lezzon; I belief you would all rone a mile do esgabe it.' I don't know that he succeeded in forming artists of that generation, but possibly we may have been rendered more appreciative of the paintings which most of us were to behold in the Galleries of Europe. Mr. Stanley, our French master, knew his Paris intimately, I doubt not. He had the Parisian accent, too, very different in quality from the provincial French which, when spoken fluently, enables so many professors of the language to pass muster. He was a man of distinguished bearing and 'club' form, resembling curiously in appearance, and in some other ways, a late fashionable celebrity. Why he had come to live in a colony and teach French at a boarding-school we might wonder, but had no means of ascertaining. His life, doubtless, contained one of the romances of which Australia was at that time full. He was generous to all his pupils. No unkind word was ever said regarding him. He imparted to us a thorough comprehension of the genius of the language; and
