256 Terra Incognita. [MARCH, 



governor the always unfortunate Captain Bligli had lately been deposed 

 by military violence, and the rebel government *' reigned in his stead." 

 Not long after our arrival, Governor Macquarrie arrived ; and, during a 

 long administration of twelve years, effected almost all that has been done 

 from that time to the present though, of course, when the plant had 

 taken root in a good soil, it could not but thrive. 



The house in which we were at first domiciliated was one of the best 

 in Sydney, having been built for and, I believe, occupied by Governor 

 Hunter : its situation, too, was one of the finest in the town ; but it was 

 haunted ! Near the spot on which it stood, the first executions had taken 

 place; and tradition said, that some marines, who had been half-hanged 

 for robbing the stores, were buried, half-alive, just where the house was 

 afterwards built; their ghosts had been exorcised, but not laid : I suppose 

 the Red Sea was too far off! I have heard them often, but never saw 

 them though, I am sure, our big house-dog did; for, as soon as ever 

 the house was shut up at night, he would take his station by the cellar- 

 door, and howl so frightfully, that at length, as a common disturber of 

 both the dead and the living he was hanged. At nine o'clock every 

 night, the drums beat off before the barracks, preceded and followed by 

 the bugles. Many a scene of fear and real danger have I passed through 

 since the days I refer to ; but in no one have I ever felt so intensely, as 

 when, in a bleak winter's evening, after having listened, as I lay in bed, 

 to the last long wind of the bugle, followed by a simultaneous cry of 

 " All's well !" from all the sentinels in the town ; and then, when every 

 thing was hushed in darkness and in solemn silence except, perhaps, the 

 whistling of the wind, and the pelting of the rain on the windows I have 

 heard, in the room below me, mysterious noises, as of skeletons tumbling 

 and scampering about the floor, and scratching, with a crackling sound, 

 against the cedar wainscot; and the dismal howl of the tawny dog, 

 couched by the cellar-door under my bed-room window I cannot think 

 of it, even now, without quaking ! 



For the first few months, I could not pass any of the natives in the 

 streets without trepidation, and, in the outskirts of the town, they were 

 to me for some time objects of terror: indeed., though they are as harmless 

 as a fangless serpent, yet neither the one nor the other neither a naked 

 savage, nor a poisonous reptile could be encountered at large, without 

 disagreeable sensations, by a child who had never heard either spoken of 

 but as objects of fear and aversion. 



Alas! for the poor black-fellows!* At that time they ranged the 

 country as they pleased, got drunk whenever they could get the means, 

 and broke each other's heads when and where they pleased ! They car- 

 ried their spears and their waddies with them wherever they went, molested 

 by and molesting no one. Fish and mud-oysters were their staple com- 

 modities, and these they exchanged for bread or rum. Wearing-apparel 

 they would take, but it was merely as an article of merchandize : a shirt 

 or a pair of trowsers might pass through their hands, but seldom rested long 

 on their limbs it would be disposed of, at the earliest opportunity, for 

 rum or bread. It was a custom with the inhabitants of Sydney, parti- 

 cularly, to reserve the coarse sugre-loags, in which sugar is sent from India, 

 to give to the first lot of black-fellows that might pass after it had been 

 emptied, for the pleasure of seeing them get very drunk, and fight ; for, 



* The colonial generic name for the aborigines, 



