siding genius of domestic life, a poor mud-floored-slab-hut may be converted, what myriads are not, into a really comfortable home. Enlightened are the squatters, and well it is for the land where such are patronised. BUSHRANGERS. These are outlaws run-away convicts. The more gentlemanly of them in Van Diemen's Land are there what Robin Hood and Rob Roy were in Britain. They do not find, like Robin Hood, many rich bishops or abbots to despoil of their wealth, but food enough on drays, going from the towns to outstations, and in the settlers' houses, when by necessity they are compelled to enter them. Of these famous robbers, none are so much talked of for their generosity, their invariable respect and tenderness for women and children, as Mike Howe, and more especially Brady. Their life is one of reckless daring, of hourly peril, for they are always liable to be shot or hung; yet out of all this they seem to draw a fearful satisfaction, a stormy pleasure. Year after year they pass in covert warfare with their kind; sometimes flushed with success, in triumph, and halfsatisfied with the dangerous freedom of their mode of existence; then depressed by the narrowest escapes, and with the certainty of eventual capture, that, exhausted with such miserable tension of mind, they are ready to deliver themselves up. Many have done so, wearied out with the war of the many and one, although they knew it was for certain death. Howe had been for many years a most successful bushranger; yet through what circumstances he could first have been a convict and then a run-away, was singular: for, although a robber, his good qualities as a man won him very general respect, At length a magistrate, finding his capture impossible, made a proclamation that on surrendering himself to the magistracy he should have a free pardon. Glad was Mike, and gave himself up but what was his astonishment when he was told that the offer of pardon was not legal,-was without Government sanction, and that he would have to take his trial. Yes, and was tried and sentenced to death; but on Mike's plea of the free pardon seriously and solemnly set forth, the judge decided to defer the execution of Mike's sentence, until his return from Sydney, whither he was bound. Now it happened that the judge's servant was an old friend of the convicted bushranger, and Mike somehow conveyed to him the request that in Sydney, or on the way back to Van Diemen's Land, he would learn from the judge the final decision, and instantly make his appearance before the prison, and wear in his hat a black or white ribbon as the signal of death or deliverance. Mike, like Milton's hero, "Would be at the worst: worst was his port, His harbour, and his ultimate repose." Often as the bushranger had weighed the benefits and blessings of life and death: often as he had decided in favour of, and prayed for the latter; and tormented as he had been by uncertainty, and sick of suspense; and even when on the day of the judge's return he congratulated himself on the indifference he felt as to the result, still he at the same time eagerly found his way to the top of the prison, whence he might more readily read his fate. It was beheld soon enough-the black signal. All at once the wild energy and indomitable spirit of his old life animated him; and it must have been a strong prison indeed that would have held him. Whilst there had been a chance of pardon and of life, he was irresolute-but now energy was the whole man. They looked for Mike Howe in the morning to lead him forth to execution; but the old eagle was winnowing the air with free pinions in the woods again. Our other bushranger was a man remarkable for the manliness of his character, who gathered followers unto him, outcasts like himself, who almost worshipped, yet feared him. He was, as their leader, decisive, fearless, and resolute: he would be obeyed. As their comrade faithful: as their friend, all gentleness. For Brady, hunted like a beast, two or three hundred pounds were offered, and he was at length betrayed-though not by his own followers. He had entered the hut of some person in whom he thought he could trust, was deceived, and secured. Alone in the room with his betrayer, Brady thought of an expedient: they had no water in the hut, and so he complained of being excessively thirsty-begged as a last favour that his keeper would fetch him some. He complied. To the spring it was several hundred yards. There was no time to be lost-it was life or death-so Brady thrust his arms, which were tied together with cords, into the fire. It was a horrible resource, but the only one it succeeded the cords were, with no small portion of his flesh, consumed he sprang through the door, and escaped. Brady's capturer was at first suspected by the authorities to have connived at his escape, but was soon freed from that impu tation. All who knew Brady and the circumstances, advised the man to make the best of his way into some of the other colonies; but he satisfied himself with the secrecy of some outof-the-way place. Anything but treachery in an old friend, and the falsification of hospitable confidence, Brady would have forgiven, but the sense of his wrongs had been burnt into him, and he did not fail, as soon as he could use his hands, to find out his enemy, and shoot him. Mike Howe and Brady, as sooner or later it is the fate of all bushrangers, were at last taken and executed. A BUSH ROBINSON CRUSOE. Others there are that flee from the rigours of penal slavery, not to contend with their fellow-men for a maintenance, better pleased to satisfy the demands of nature by the labour of their own hands, and of this class was Philip Markham. For the space of six years he had concealed himself at the back of Russell's Falls, in Van Diemen's Land, during which space he had seen but one human being, the shepherd of his nearest yet distant neighbour, but was himself unseen. He had in his solitude clothed himself with the skins of animals; had kept goats and poultry of the Dorking breed; had raised vegetables, had grown corn, and had by some means ground it, and made bread. He had, like his famous prototype, his little inclosures, and his snug castle. He was king in his little world-had many comforts about him his retirement was sweetened to him by the remembrance of the bitterest slavery-yet he was not at rest. The sense of solitude weighed heavily upon him. He saw before him, illness without help, and death without burial, and gave himself up. He had three years' additional slavery awarded him for absence without leave. Again in bonds and bitter servitude, Markham indulged in day-dreams of his old sweet freedom, of his castle, his inclosures, his goats, and his other wealth-and sighing for his lonely happiness, tried to escape, but in vain. What a pity that some poor unfortunate runaway like himself did not find out Markham before he delivered himself up, to have served him faithfully as a Man Friday. : MESSRS. GELLIBRAND AND HESSE. Twice in this volume these gentlemen have been mentioned. The murder, supposed, of the former and his discovery, by a skull, noticed by Mr. Hawdon. Now, in 1844, he is murdered over again. Where so many have left the known portion of the district for the unknown, never to return, it is hard to decide; still the annexed, from a Port Phillip paper, may be correct : "It appears that the murderers of Mr. Gellibrand were two men belonging to a very small tribe, then residing near the spot where the murder was committed. The tribe never exceeded seven men in number, and is now reduced to five; but the two principals in the bloody deed are yet alive, and could easily be captured. As a Bill is about being passed to admit the unsworn testimony of the aborigines in certain cases, and the tribe make no secret of the murder, there would be little or no difficulty in securing a conviction; this point should not be lost sight of. Mr. Gellibrand's life, it is believed, was insured for 11,0007, which sum, after an interval of three years from the period of his reported death, the Insurance Company paid to his widow, now a resident in Hobart Town. Mr. Henry Allan, the discoverer of the skeleton, is the son of a deputy-commissary-general, for many years at the head of the Commissariat at Sydney, and has one or two brothers resident in this province. Mr. Allan has been residing on his present station about four years, and heard from the natives the report of a white man having been murdered when he first went to reside there, but placed little or no faith in its truth, till about five weeks ago, when he went to the place pointed out by the natives, and found the skeleton. The way the blacks fixed the date of the murder, was by pointing to a 'picaninny' of about six years of age, and stating it was born on or about the day Mr. Gellibrand first joined the tribe. It will be remembered that no horse was seen by the natives, which can be accounted for by the statement of Mr. Gellibrand that he had. come through twenty miles of country, consisting of ranges and dense scrub. We have since heard from two gentlemen who have passed through this country, and been within a mile of the very spot where the skeleton was found, that it is customary for bushmen, on arriving at this scrub, to hobble their horses and proceed on foot the rest of the journey, as all attempts to penetrate it on horseback have hitherto proved unavailing." COMMISSIONERS OF CROWN LANDS. Of these gentlemen in Port Phillip, who have a great deal of discretionary power and good salaries, there are four. They are magistrates, and in their jurisdiction, under whichever tree they choose to tie up their horses, is a court constituted. It is their vocation to let out locations to squatters, at 107. per annum; to settle disputes amongst the settlers, or to dispute with them, and, in fine, to fine them for being contumacious. If a squatter com plains that a neighbour has sliced one hundred acres from his run, because the neighbour wanted to cultivate it, and the commissioner thinks the squatter's run was large enough before, the lord of Nature's heritage, to quiet the grumbler, fines him 57. If a poor fellow puts up a temporary dwelling in the wild and is caught trespassing thus on Crown land, he is summoned before the monarch of the Gum-tree-court, fined, not in the twenty, but in the mitigated penalty of ten or five, and if, unconscious that he is in a court, he swears a bit to ease his heart, he is fined 57. more for swearing. If a squatter forgets his license day, he is fined 10%., or in the lesser penalty of 57.; and the squatters are a notoriously forgetful race, not knowing the Crown rent-day, or any other day in the year, especially if there be any money to be paid on it. Thus the commissioners are a good deal murmured at, sometimes, it may be, justly; for discretionary power is not always mercifully used. Cowper sung: "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Now, begging dead Cowper's pardon, the very highway into the rumour of oppression and deceit, is the "wilderness and "continuity of shades." An old military gentleman once said that he had been a great deal about the world: to the Cape of Good Hope, to the Indies, East and West, and in Sydney; and it vexed him to see, under countenance of the British flag-the flag which of all others he most respected-that there, petty men, 66 dressed up in a little brief authority," were notoriously despotic. Sir," " continued he, "the good warm blood round John Bull's heart couldn't find its way to warm the extremities; and I was always glad to get back from the outposts to headquarters." 66 "England, with all thy faults, I love thee still." |