came, which I did to the best of my ability. But the men who had welcomed me so cordially insisted that I must enter the new Parliament. There was work to be done to gratify the highest patriotism or ambition, for here was to be laid the corner stone and foundation of a new empire. I was weary of politics, and would gladly have stood aside for a time. This was not Ireland, but a new country to which I owned no hereditary service or allegiance. But the old passion for public life awoke, and I at length consented. The new constitution required a qualification of £500 a year real property for the Legislative Council or Upper House, and £300 a year for the other Chamber, but the popular party, or substantially my own countrymen, created a fund in a few months, and purchased me a residence and certain other property affording a qualification for either House. I had always refused any favour like this in Ireland, but here it was the retaining fee for services which could not be undertaken without it. The title deeds were presented to me at a public dinner, and the result, representing an immense constituency in upwards of a hundred districts of this colony and New South Wales, which cordially joined in the project, made it a political demonstration of peculiar interest and significance. It was necessary to find a constituency, and at length Villiers and Heytesbury was selected, and I went down to meet the electors. Villiers was a farming county possessing some of the best soil in the colony, notably the Farnham Survey, a district which a syndicate of Irish gentry was enabled to buy under Colonial Office regulations at i an acre, and which was now let at a rent which refunds the purchase money more than once every year. Heytesbury was a squatting constituency, and I had scarcely taken the field when it was announced that Mr. William Rutledge, the owner of the Farnham Survey, at that time, and Mr. John Allen, a squatter from the other county, were candidates for the two seats which the electors were entitled to fill.
A requisition was presented to me containing more signatures, it was said, than there were electors who voted on both sides in the last contest. The attempt of some screech owls in Melbourne to excite sectarian animosity naturally found
