hearted, she is every one's friend upon the island. High-minded and earnest in her Christian profession, she has set herself to work to do good in her generation. From the pure love of those around her, she daily gathers together the children of the sealers, and does her best to impart to them the rudiments both of secular and religious knowledge."
A Launceston newspaper of January 1867 adds some further information concerning the family of the worthy Lucy. Her father, it would appear, assumed the name of Beadon, but was connected with a highly respectable family in England, and for a number of years was in the receipt of a handsome allowance, transmitted through a colonial firm. His early career was doubtless a wild and unsatisfactory one. Circumstances led him to adopt the sealer's life about the year 1827. An aboriginal woman bore him several children besides Lucy. Whatever his habits when young, he evidently adopted a better course, and endeavoured to promote the real welfare of his family. Although possessed of means with which he could have comfortably resided in civilized society, he preferred his rocky, storm-girt home on Badger's Island. His wife and most of his children died before him, and were buried on Gun Carriage Island. In January 1867, he expired at the ripe age of sixty-nine, and was laid, at his own request, beside the remains of the Tasmanian mother of his offspring.
Having to christen a child at one place, the Bishop has given us a notice of the juvenile half-caste. "One of them," he says, "a boy of two years of age, was as magnificent a little fellow as I ever saw. His large, full black eyes, and finely-formed features, would have done honour to any parentage."
He writes with much feeling of his astonishment and pleasure at finding in most of these regions of storm, and among so rough a class, the observances of religion, and those of his own Church. In that ramble of 1854 he visited Gun Carriage Island, from which the sealers were originally driven by Mr. Robinson for a temporary home of his gathered exiles, and to which, upon the transfer to Flinders, they were permitted to return. There he conducted service, and afterwards tells his tale:—
"It was with a solemn sense of the privilege conferred upon me, that there, in that storm-girt hut, the winds and the waves roaring around me, I, as the first minister of God that had set
