Page:Transportation and colonization.djvu/121

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AND COLONIZATION.
107

Morrison, and Co., of Fore-street. In that employment, however, he reverted to his former practices, and was at length detected in carrying on a most artful and extensive system of embezzlement. He escaped from justice a second time, but was apprehended by a Bow-street runner in Edinburgh, under the assumed name of Williams, and in the disguise of a half-pay officer. Being brought back to London, he was convicted at the Old Bailey in the year 1828, and sentenced to transportation for fourteen years. Shortly after his arrival in New South Wales, he was sent to the penal settlement of Wellington Valley, which had been formed by order of the home government, at the distance of two hundred miles from Sydney, for the reception of educated convicts. By insinuating himself, however, into the good graces of the Scotch superintendant of that settlement, he was very soon allowed to come down to Sydney, where he was recommended from one government-officer to another, till he fell into the hands of the Archdeacon (now Bishop) Broughton, by whom he was employed as a clerk in the ecclesiastical corporation-office, and through whom, if I am not mistaken, he obtained a ticket of leave. On the breaking up of the corporation establishment, his abilities as a book-keeper, and also as a writer of articles for the colonial press, were so well known in Sydney,