an energetic and well-principled young man to share his labours and his profits. This was an opening my father highly approved of and which I was eager to embrace.
It was necessary, however, that I should spend a couple of years in England, in order to learn practically the business of farming. An extensive farmer in a neighbouring county, an old schoolfellow of my father, consented to take me as a pupil and teach me his business, for a very moderate premium.
When I had completed my two years' agricultural education, my outfit was provided, and my passage taken in a sailing vessel, belonging to a firm of shipowners, one of the partners in which was an old friend of my father. Brisbane, in Queensland, was the port to which the ship was bound, that being the nearest accessible point to the scene of my future operations.
My father, mother, and brother came up with me to London to see me off, and we had a melancholy parting at Gravesend. My mother wept long and bitterly at this separation from her first-born, and, I believe, her favourite child. My brother, also, was much affected, and a pang shot through my breast on giving him a fond embrace at the thought that he was still to remain in the land I so dearly loved, and to form one of the ministers of that Church which I believed to be the purest and most scriptural of Christian communities, whilst I was doomed to exile from home and country, in order to labour hard among the unpeopled wilds of a colony situated at the other side of the globe, utterly removed from those congenial influences of an old civilisation that surrounded me in England.
