400 The Wreck. 



passage home with him if I would accept it, which, however, I 

 declined. As the ship lay in the bay, one, if not two, of the Escort 

 robbers were taken off her. What became of the ill-fated vessel 

 no one ever knew j it is certain she never reached home, and 

 whether she foundered among the icebergs south of the Horn, or 

 was seized by the crew and scuttled (for she had a large cargo of 

 gold on board), is, I believe, a mystery to this day. 



Coming down Melbourne one afternoon, heartily sick of my 

 colonial prospects, I happened to meet a man I had known in the 

 old countr}'-. He had hired this swamp for the purpose of cutting 

 grass, and as he wanted some one to go down for a short time and 

 overlook the work, I gladly accepted the job — more especially as I 

 had heard the duck-shooting there so highly spoken of. 



It was not a bad billet. I had little to do but walk about the 

 swamp with my gun, count the bundles of grass as they were cut, 

 sell them to the draymen, and pay the men who cut them. In 

 fact, I was what we used to call in the old coaching-yards " odd 

 man" on the swamp, and, although I believe I was looked upon by 

 the grass-cutters themselves as a regular" loafer," I had a very jolly life 

 of it. The men who worked for us were principally runaway sailors, 

 who had left their ships in the bay, and were glad enough to lie hid 

 in our tent till the search for them was over and they had earned 

 a few pounds to take them on to the diggings. In fact, any one 

 who wanted an odd job, found his way down to the swamp j and 

 some strange acquaintances I formed there. 



It was the morning after the night I allude to (I think the 28th 

 of October), that I was out on the coast at daybreak, to get a 

 good morning shot at the wild-fowl, which used to assemble and 

 sit in hundreds on the seaweed banks to rest after their night's 

 feeding. The wind was blowing a heavy gale from the south, and 

 the usually quiet bay was a sheet of foam, which came dashing in 

 as wave after wave rolled on to the beach. While walking along 

 the seaweed, I chanced to spy a Dutch cheese, which had been 

 washed up above high-water mark 3 presently anothei, and another^ 



