CHAPTER VII.
On board our ship, in the voyage to Western Australia, there had been an intermediate passenger who was returning thither after a few years' residence in England, and whom I often interrogated concerning the natives of the new country to which we were sailing. I was curious to know whether the "aborigines," as they are now styled, whom Captain Cook would in his older time have called "Indians," were capable of being taught and improved, and our shipmate answered that they could learn extremely well, "though it was but labour lost to educate them, as they were no sooner of an age to marry than they would run away from their instructors, and be off again to the bush." He added that the Roman Catholics had done more for the natives, and had obtained a greater influence over them, than had been achieved in their behalf by any other sect of Christians, and that a Roman Catholic bishop, whose sole duty was the care of the natives, and who lived in the bush with his converts, had had considerable success amongst them. I inferred therefore, from what our shipmate said, that this bishop, whose name I did not then learn, had found that to benefit the poor savages it was necessary to adapt himself to their own manner of life, and to take up his abode in the bush with the flock that he desired to convert.
After we had been a short time settled in Barladong, the subject of the natives began to hang heavily upon us. They came and went perpetually, lived all around us, but had no religion, and it did not seem to be anybody's business to teach them one. On making inquiries of our neighbours, we were told that some years previously a school had been carried on in Barladong, under the conduct of a Wesleyan head, with the object of Christianizing, and civilizing the native children, by instructing them both in religion and in the cultivation of the ground, and that a number of pupils, towards whose maintenance the colonial Government granted an allowance of a shilling each daily, had been collected together in a building which still bore the name of the Mission-house. Sickness, however, having soon appeared amongst them, many of the children died, and the remainder ran away.
The illness was said to have been caused by feeding the children too exclusively on rice, a diet which, however suitable for Hindoos, is perhaps as little qualified to be the principal food of an Australian as of an English native. The provision which Nature has given to the former is the flesh of wild animals, and, as I have already shown, her hand has been so niggardly of any other food, that a vegetarian would probably find less in common between himself and an Australian, than with the inhabitants of any other part of the world. The climate itself seems to make the eating of meat a constitutional necessity, especially during the intense heats of summer, when, instead of the appetite for animal food being diminished, meat becomes more than ever palatable, so that in every settler's house it is put upon the table three times a day.
The school broke down, and had come to an end about ten years before we went to live in Barladong. A friend of ours once met a native woman who said that she had been one of the runaways, and held up her fingers eagerly to count upon them the number of children who had died. "Black fellow die—black fellow die," said she, as she touched one finger after another in the reckoning; "me run away—'fraid die too." Having finished her return of deaths, she went on to say "Black fellow sick—white lady fowl sendum—white lady kangaroo sendum—master all self eatum—" but here she paused and made an exception in favour of the matron, expressed by the words "Missis not eatum—missis good fellow."
This was all that we ever learned of the Barladong Wesleyan Mission, and we were never able to find any printed account of it, though we were told that there had been one in a Wesleyan magazine, headed with an engraving of the school side by side with a chapel, which was probably a stock frontispiece to missionary reports in general, for no chapel had ever been attached to the institution. To the conscientiously sincere members of the sect, the failure of this school was so painful, that two of them whom I questioned on the subject told me plainly that they could not bear to think or speak about it.
We next learned that in the southern extremity of the colony, Mrs. Camfield, the wife of the resident magistrate of Albany, a town which is situated on the harbour of King George's Sound, had devoted many years of her life to the education of the native children, and that, after having commenced the good work unaided, she had been enabled to continue it by the help of a yearly grant from Government. The custom of early betrothals that prevails amongst the natives has been a great stumbling-block to their permanent improvement, and it is the necessary fulfilment of these imperative family contracts that has caused that constant disappointment of philanthropic schemes to which our fellow-passenger alluded when he said that as soon as boys and girls were past childhood they would invariably leave those who had brought them up, to run away into the bush.
But the natives, if strict in exacting the fulfilment of a promise to themselves, understand also how to keep one made to others, and Mrs. Camfield's invariable stipulation, in undertaking the charge of a child, is that its parents shall not at any future time demand it back, an agreement which is rendered binding in their opinion by a present of flour, or a small piece of money, as earnest or pledge of the bargain. I was told that she began by adopting one little native girl, and that she afterwards extended her benevolence towards others until, by degrees, she collected round her a school which, when we were in the colony, consisted of some two dozen children.
The institution is on the model of an industrial one at home, all the housework and cookery being performed by the pupils, in addition to which they receive such an education as is usually imparted in National Schools in England. None of the inmates of Mrs. Camfield's home have ever run away from it, the secret of her art in retaining them being that she really loves the natives, and treats their children in all respects like those of white persons as to their clothing, diet, and lodging.
I heard that one day a native, who had lost his wife, came to Mrs. Camfield, bringing in his arms his poor motherless little baby, to entreat her to take charge of it; but, as the child seemed unlikely to live, she would not at first receive it, for several children in the school had lately died, and she feared that her institution might gain an ill name with the natives if any more deaths occurred. The man, however, came a second time, begging so urgently, with tears in his eyes, that she would consent to take the baby, that she found it impossible to refuse him any longer, and, under her care, the child lingered on for two or three months, gradually dwindling away until it died.
Mrs. Camfield's chief difficulty is how to settle her girls in life, for when grown up the inevitable question arises. Whom are they to marry? They cannot, after the training that they have received, take a savage husband; and though I believe two of her pupils have married ticket-of-leave men, yet the prospects held out by such alliances are poor rewards for adopting Christian habits, and but sorry inducements for retaining them.
An attempt has been made to decide the knotty point by the modern panacea of emigration, and a short time before we returned to England a statement appeared in the newspapers, and received no contradiction, to the effect that Mrs. Camfield had received, from a missionary in another Australian colony, photographs of such of his young male converts as might prove eligible matches for the elder girls in her school, and that, the portraits being pronounced satisfactory, several of her pupils had been shipped to that colony and consigned to the missionary's care. At any rate a few of the girls emigrated, and the letters that Mrs. Camfield received from one of them, describing the voyage and its termination, might safely be adduced as satisfying for ever all doubts of the intelligence and capacity of the natives of Australia.
Of this one particular pupil, when a child, mention is made by Mrs. Smythe, in her 'Narrative of a Voyage to the Fiji Islands.' The ship having entered King George's Sound, she and Colonel Smythe paid a visit on the Sunday to Mrs. Camfield's school, and were much struck by the correctness with which this little native repeated the collect for the day. Mrs. Smythe also makes mention of having observed that the hair of some of the children was light-coloured in comparison with their skin, a fact of some importance in the vexed question of race.
Up to the time of our return no school or institution for the benefit of the natives in connection with the Church of England had been established in the colony, with the exception of that at Albany, neither had either of the two great societies, the Church Missionary and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded any stations there. "It looks strange," wrote one of our correspondents, "to see no account of what is doing in Perth in the S. P. G. annual reports, every other colonial diocese being there mentioned."
Since our return to England, however, this neglect of the natives has weighed so heavily on the mind of the Bishop of Perth, that he has been anxious to resign his bishopric in order that he might place himself at the head of an earnest effort to gather in a flock of poor Western Australians, who might be Christianized and civilized in an establishment such as the one with which he was formerly connected at Poonindee in South Australia.
The school at Albany is rapidly dwindling away of late, and contained but fourteen children at the census of 1870. I believe that not only has the Government aid been withdrawn, but that Mrs. Camfield, who was the guiding spirit of the whole, has been unable to continue the good work which she had carried on so long and so well.
To quote the Bishop's words in the letter in which he announced his intention of resigning the see:—"I will mention first then, the great uneasiness of mind which I have always felt with reference to the native population of this colony, and the sanguine hope which I entertain that my removal to Albany may have the effect of not only preserving the native institution there from the extinction which seems now to be impending over it, but I think I may be enabled, under God's blessing, to give it something more than revived activity, and to make it really useful to the rising generation of natives and half-castes in this colony."
The Bishop was begged to withdraw his resignation, and so large a number of the colonists joined in pressing this request upon him that he felt bound to yield, but now that attention has been drawn so strongly to the subject it is to be hoped most earnestly that something may be done at last, commensurate with the duty which lies before the colony, a duty long neglected and but lately even acknowledged.[1]
The Government occasionally distributes a few blankets to the natives at the beginning of the winter, and if a doctor's certificate is given to the effect that a native is helpless and ill, he is allowed weekly "rations" by an order from the magistrate. A prison has also been provided on the Island of Rottnest, for such native criminals as have offended against our laws, where they are employed in agriculture; and in the hope of putting an end to that custom of avenging a death by the slaughter of an unoffending person to which I have before referred, natives who had been convicted of observing it, were occasionally hanged.
What we ourselves could do for the aborigines was very little. Missionary work, to effect any good result, must be a person's sole care and occupation, and could not, in any degree worthy of the name, be carried on by a clergyman in the position of Government chaplain in Western Australia. Besides it was plain that any endeavours of ours to teach the natives must end in failure, situated as we were near a town where about nine men out of ten were of the convict class, and where the character of the hotel tap-rooms was such as might be expected in consequence. We felt no doubt that we could succeed in assembling a school of native children, that is, if we fed and clothed them, but to do this we were not rich enough, even had our other avocations left us sufficient time for the exclusive attention that our pupils would have required. However, we thought that we could take one native child to bring up in our own house, more especially as Khourabene often visited us in company with a little niece, and had once asked us as a favour to let "Mingee" which was her name, signifying drought, remain all night at the parsonage whilst he went elsewhere.
The only drawback to poor Mingee was the existence of her mother, of whom the chief good that could be said was that she had a pretty face, since she was encroaching and tiresome, and required to be kept at arm's length. In the meantime the idea of his niece becoming one of our household gave great satisfaction to Khourabene. He could not imagine that his sister would make any difficulties, and undertook to fetch Mingee himself without delay. Accordingly he presented himself one morning, leading her solemnly by the hand in quite an unaccustomed manner, so that it was plain that he intended to go through a little ceremonial of his own getting up in entrusting her to our care. To make the scene more impressive, he accompanied it with a formal farewell, and, having lectured Mingee in our presence on the necessity of obedience and good behaviour, he took his leave at once, instead of remaining all day as usual, with a promise, however, that his absence should be but of short duration.Reassured by the prospect of soon seeing her uncle again, Mingee seemed well contented to remain with us, and the inaugural ceremony of washing her face being gone through, we hoped that we might have good luck with our little black bargain. A few hours afterwards the dreaded mother appeared. She had answered so long to the name of Sally, that the people for whom she had occasionally fetched water took it rather ill of her that she had lately dubbed herself Annie, and would reply to no other appellation except under protest, and the same persons further objected to her that she called herself a lady, which is, however, a style that I have also known white women to assume on very insufficient grounds.
I saw no reason for taking exception at either of these peculiarities, but a third charge which was urged against her, viz, of greediness after money, proved insuperable on her explaining that she would allow us to keep Mingee on no other terms than that of paying a rather heavy weekly tribute to herself for the favour of feeding, clothing, and teaching her daughter. Thus our first trial dropped through, and two years afterwards poor Mingee was handed over to her betrothed, a middle-aged man with one wife already. This lady, who if she had been white would probably have shown herself an able champion of woman's rights, began to beat the bride two days after the wedding, and Mingee soon bettered herself by running away with a young half-caste of an age to suit her own, an evasion which the elder wife regarded with much complacency, and which was probably the end that she had in view when she first commenced hostilities.
The fugitives had both of them a leaning towards civilized life, and a colonist for whom they sometimes worked was anxious to give them a cottage and a piece of ground for corn, in the hope of inducing the pair to remain with him as his permanent servants. But there were wheels within wheels in their destiny which forbade them to hope for a settled life. Not only might their door, if ever they possessed a house, be darkened by the middle-aged spouse, but the half-caste himself was beset with worse difficulties on his own account. His mother had long ago betrothed him to another native girl, and the fear of being knocked on the head by his nearest relations for contumaciously ignoring the agreement condemned him and the girl of his own selection to an existence as unquiet as that of the Wandering Jew. So complicated are domestic affairs in a society where polygamy is lawful, and where the marriages are arranged solely by the parents.
I have already alluded once or twice to little Binnahan, and I will now relate how it was that she came to live under our roof. Some few months after the disappointment of our plans with respect to Mingee, my husband left home to attend one of the Perth clerical meetings, which were always in January, and Khourabene, according to custom, was deputed to mount guard over our house in its master's absence.
By way of making an imposing demonstration after dark, our sentry paraded in front of the house with a spear; and once when I returned from an evening walk with Rosa, I found that he had possessed himself of the broomstick which we used as a kitchen poker, and was shouldering it in the doorway in a manner that might have reflected credit on a soldier on duty at the Horse Guards. The slightest sound at night sufficed to rouse him; and if I merely opened my door to let in our pet opossum he was awake directly, crying out from his lair of kangaroo skins in the verandah, "Hullo, mother! what's the matter?" His appreciation of being trusted kept him proof against all temptations to drink, and in spite of the vicinity of many public-houses, he never once got drunk when left in a post of responsibility.
Barladong deserved its reputation of a very scorching place in the summer-time, but it had this compensation that the heated granite on the top of Mount Douraking cooling faster after sunset than the ground in the valley, caused a current of air to come sweeping down to us at a certain fixed hour every evening, and made our nights deliciously cool. If, however, there were bush-fires on every side, encircling us in a calm smoky atmosphere, the rocky hill was unable to radiate its heat so quickly, and we were deprived of our evening breeze. On such nights the stars on the horizon shone but very dimly, and an aromatic scent hung in the air from the burning of the great forest trees belonging to the same order as the myrtle.
It was after a day of intense heat, followed by no night breeze, that I summoned up courage to take a walk with Rosa, just as darkness had fallen and a dull red line was all that marked the west. Our way led past the convict depot and the house of the colonial surgeon, below which, on a bank sloping towards the river, often stood one or two lonely huts containing sick natives, who were brought thither by their friends for the benefit of medical assistance. A fire was burning here, betokening the presence of an invalid on this particular evyening, and as Rosa and I leaned over the bridge watching the flicker of the firelight in the dry river bed, a man standing near the wooden piers, who had recognized me, looked up, and told me that a native woman lay very ill in a hut below.
On hearing this Rosa and I turned off the bridge, and went down the bank to see if we could offer her any help. We found, to our regret, that the sick woman was one with whom we were well acquainted, and her evidently hopeless state somewhat surprised us, as poor "Kitty" had called at our house in good health not very long before. Her intelligence was above the average, and a stranger from England, whose impressions of Australian natives had been solely derived from books, would have probably supposed, on seeing her neatly dressed and waiting at table, that she was a West Indian mulatto, excepting for the softness of her hair. I had been so much struck with her appearance on one such occasion as afterwards to feel surprised on receiving a visit from her attired in nothing but the native costume of a long fur mantle over one shoulder and under the other; but I found that, just in the same way as European ladies put on their travelling dresses, natives assume the kangaroo skin when about to make a journey.
I came up to the hut where she was now lying on the ground, and the sight of me appeared to gratify the poor creature, for it was plain that she had something to say to me, and that she might the better do so her husband raised her and supported her in a sitting posture, when with much difficulty she pronounced the words, "Will you take my little girl?" The man completed the sentence for her, by explaining that she knew herself to be dying, and wanted me to take charge of Binnahan, their only child. I said at once that I would do so, feeling inwardly certain of my husband's consent, but she seemed at first almost afraid to believe me; and the man tried to reassure her, by saying in the native language, that I "was not telling lies." However, I did not leave her until I had tranquillized her mind with the repeated assurance that in case of her death her little daughter should live with us.
Now it so happened that at the clerical meeting, amongst other subjects of discussion, the duties of Government chaplains towards the natives had occupied much attention, and my husband, amongst others of the clergy, had expressed an opinion that the natives were sadly neglected, and ought to be so no longer. Poor Kitty's request, which I communicated to him on his return, was a speedier test of sincerity than he had anticipated, although it was one from which he had no thought of flinching; he therefore went immediately to the riverside, and telling her he was come to hear her wishes that he might endeavour to fulfil them, she just gasped out the words, "Take Binnahan—make good." She lingered a day or two longer, but on the following morning a little girl, whose only clothing was a small piece of cotton print pinned round her, peeped timidly and without speaking into the room where I was sitting, to let me know that she had arrived.
She was a very slight little creature, with the thin limbs of her wild race, in fact the natives in general were so slim that I remember Khourabene's ideas of art being much offended by a picture of savages in the 'Illustrated London News,' which had represented them all with large calves to their legs, and he pointed out the defect, perhaps I ought rather to say superfluity, with very great disdain. I supposed that she might be seven years old, but as she had changed all her first teeth, she was evidently older than she looked. Her skin, like that of the children at Albany whom Mrs. Smythe had noticed, was darker than her hair, which was soft and curly, setting off by its lighter colour the line of jet-black eyebrow and the dark expressive eyes below.
She shared the Malay nose and mouth with her countrymen in general, a type of feature which is unfortunately far more commonly found amongst them than fine hair, and which imparts to the countenance a sullen look even when there is no real sullenness in the temper; but nature's even hand makes amends for this by the brilliancy of the teeth and eyes, so that a smile on a native face is like a flash of light. Although she was quite clean, I could not sufficiently divest my mind of home traditions to suppose otherwise than that to wash her must be the first thing to be done, so Rosa and I put her in a bath; but as she had arrived before I had been able to prepare her wardrobe, to dress her on leaving the tub was a matter far more difficult. I had managed, however, by sundown to complete an overall pinafore, in which she immediately started off to exhibit herself to her parents, returning to sleep at our house, which from that day forth became her home.
Two mornings afterwards, just as the sun had risen, a pair of little black cousins appeared at our door; there was no need to ask why they had come so early, as the grief in their faces betrayed their errand, and poor little Binnahan, throwing herself face downwards on Rosa's bed, moaned aloud as though her heart was broken. She went away with the two girls as soon as the first burst of grief was over, and about an hour afterwards some native women came to ask me if I would give them a covering to lay over poor Kitty in her grave. This was the only time that I ever had a similar request, and I sent them away much gratified with a piece of white calico. We had once had a sadder petition preferred to us by some natives; it was for the loan of our wheelbarrow to convey to her grave a woman who had been speared a few hours before, and whom we had seen at our door that morning alive and well, and had noticed as being remarkably handsome.
I went down to the river-side, soon after sending the white covering, that I might see the last of Binnahan's poor mother. I should have known, even at a distance, that there had been a death amongst the natives, from the monotonous wailing noise that is always raised on such occasions until after the funeral, with a view of keeping off the evil spirit Jingy, the official mourner being relieved, when wearied, by others in uninterrupted succession until the grave is closed. A fat old woman, thus enacting the part of exorcist when I got to the place, was doing so with all her might, shaking her hands incessantly from the wrists in a despairing manner, whilst she uttered her cries until the perspiration streamed off her face with heat and fatigue. Altogether she offered as wide a contrast as could be imagined to the mutes who are hired to stand at the doors of the house in a ceremonious English funeral.
The corpse was laid on its side, as if asleep, beneath a bower of green branches, of which the husband, with the tears running down his black cheeks, removed a few, that I might look at his poor dead wife. I should not have known that she was dead as, owing to the dark skin, my unpractised eye could not detect the change in the complexion and appearance caused by death.
It is customary amongst the natives to bury the dead in a sitting posture; the nails of the corpse are also burnt off before burial, and the hands tied together, and Binnahan seemed pleased to tell me that with regard to her mother the ceremony of burning the nails had been omitted; both that and the tying of the hands are said to be measures of precaution lest the deceased should work his or her way up again to the world's surface, and alarm the living not only by "walking," but, if a man, by using his spears (which are always buried with him) upon his former friends. As the funeral follows close upon the death, the practice of burning off the nails must at least possess, one would think, the recommendation of deciding any doubt about life being extinct or merely suspended, and a native whom we heard of as having shouldered himself out of the ground, above which he lived for some time afterwards, may possibly have owed his revival to these last offices of his somewhat hasty friends.
I now did my best to make a proper suit of clothes for Binnahan, preparatory to sending her to the Government school, during which interval she was constantly visited by her cousins and her aunt, the latter giving me to understand, with the air of a person who makes a family arrangement, that the girls should leave off coming as soon as her niece had recovered her spirits, or, as the good lady expressed it, "when Binnahan never more mother thinkum." I was glad, however, to find that this period of forgetfulness did not arrive. The child's grief soon exhausted itself, but so far from forgetting her mother, she never seemed better pleased than to be reminded of her.
I could not help laughing at myself the first time that my new charge started for school. Rosa's two little sisters good-naturedly came to act as convoy, but the black cousins, whom I had not invited, appeared also, and fell into the ranks of the escort. Now the whole party was barefoot, and Binnahan's preference for going to school as the crow flies necessitated a short cut over stubble fields, from which the white feet instinctively shrank, but which seemed good smooth walking to the hard little hoofs of the others.
I had heard so much of the invincible attractions of the bush, and the impossibility of preventing a native from running back to it, that my mind misgave me on the point about which I had least for fear, namely, that she would not return at dinner-time but rather take pot-luck with her relations on some chance dolghite or opossum. Whilst I stood watching in our verandah, with the anxiety of a hen looking after a foster-duckling, the party divided, adding thereby much to my uncertainties; but afternoon arrived, and with it came Binnahan, in a more than contented frame of mind, for she seemed extremely pleased with the step that she had ascended on life's ladder.
She learned to read very rapidly, the quick sight possessed by all natives no doubt much assisting her; in fact, when her father came to see her after she had been with us for a few months, she read aloud to him at such great length, to convince him of her progress, that his face exhibited in succession the three phases of delight, astonishment, and weariness, reminding me of the sensations ascribed by Johnson to the readers of 'Hudibras.'
I wish that I could have said that her energy in learning to sew equalled that shown in her efforts to master the mysteries of reading; her backwardness in needlework being the more provoking as her eye was so correct. She would come in from an hour's play in the garden to exhibit herself to me in a mantle of green leaves, put together in excellent shape with small bits of stick broken to the size of pins, but to construct a piece of dress by making a multitude of neat stitches appeared to require a perseverance in which her disposition was defective. I doubt, however, whether an Anglo-Saxon would have done much better who had spent the first eight or nine years of life without settled occupations or civilized habits.
The same keen sight, that enabled her so quickly to acquire a knowledge of the alphabet, soon made her acquainted with the figures on the clock's face, which at half-past twelve she described as being "cut in two, all same damper" (dampers or bush bread being of a muffin shape), but I found much difficulty in teaching her how to tell the time correctly. I could however always trust to her to bring me an accurate description of the relative positions of the two hands if I wanted to know the hour.
Binnahan's father, being a native shepherd, and therefore not without a few shillings in his pocket, was anxious to commemorate this first visit to his daughter by buying her a present, for which he fancied that nothing could be so appropriate as a pair of shoes. His ideas of fitness, however, did not jump with mine. I had wished, if possible, to keep out of Binnahan's head for a year, at least, all thoughts of either shoes or boots, as they were expensive and unnecessary articles of dress. Even on Sundays many well-dressed children came to school barefoot, the smartness of whose appearance was in no way diminished by their shapely bare legs and feet, whilst those who wore boots, on that day and no other, limped like young colts that have been shod by a clumsy blacksmith.
However, the father was not to be gainsaid, and brought from a store not only a pair of shoes but also of stockings. About an hour afterwards I went into the kitchen and found both him and Binnahan silent and melancholy, as if a life's hopes had been frustrated; the shoes were a misfit, and the store contained none of a proper size; the stockings also were big enough for a woman. I cheered up the desponding pair by representing that the shoes could be exchanged for a frock, and that the stockings might be saved until their owner should grow big enough to fill them, and thus we managed to stave off an artificial want for a while longer, but luxurious habits increasing in Barladong, and Sunday boots becoming general amongst Binnahan's schoolfellows, we would not permit her to be mortified by going to church barefoot, and so sent for the shoemaker. "And please, missis," she said in an eager whisper as I was directing how the boots should be made, "be sure to tell him to put squeak into them." Her delight on first getting the boots was really pretty to see; she flung her arms round me with joy, the boots squeaking as if in sympathy, but they developed a feature that we had scarcely noticed hitherto, and Binnalian's heels now plainly showed themselves to be of a greater length than those of a white person.
The natives of Western Australia are extremely impressionable to religious instruction, but Binnahan's unquestioning faith did not prevent her from occasionally making very quaint observations on what she was taught. As, for instance, she once asked Rosa what angels had to eat in heaven, and receiving for reply that they eat nothing, rather than the more simple answer that nothing had been revealed on the subject, the removal of one difficulty only paved the way for another, and, in much perplexity, the querist said—"Then are they always gorbel mooràt?" (i.e. stomach-full.) Another time she asked if her dead brothers and sisters were gone to heaven, and being told that all innocent children would be there, she remarked, "Little kangaroo do no harm—little kangaroo go too?"
Not very long after our taking Binnahan there came to the parsonage one day another native child, who announced that she was going to live with us, and followed me about from room to room, as if incapable of comprehending the denial which I was forced to give her. It was a friendless little creature, who did not look more than five years old, and who, having no mother, roamed hither and thither in company sometimes of one, sometimes of another of her relations.
The last time that I saw her was in chilly wet weather, and I tied round her poor little waist a petticoat which Binnahan had outgrown, but I almost repented of having done so when I saw at a little distance a native woman, whom she had accompanied, denuding the child's shoulders of its fur cape, the petticoat being considered quite sufficient clothing without other addition. I heard that the child died soon afterwards; but I had also reason to believe that it was not before a kind priest from the Benedictine Mission of New Norcia, an account of which will be found hereafter, had found and taken pity on the poor forlorn little one.
The next occasion of our being asked to adopt a child had a touch of the absurd. The wife of a convict who had been sent to prison for a fresh offence, applied to us for assistance on being thus thrown, of a sudden, upon her own resources, and the second time that she came for relief she brought with her a pretty little girl of two years old, her only child, and gravely requested me to adopt it. She had bestowed upon it, at its christening, so great a variety of fine names that I could not help thinking that she must have cherished from its birth an idea of effecting some such transfer as that which she now proposed to me, and that she had been under the impression that the names of Angelina and Elfrida, which she had given it, would prove as good as a little dowry, and would confer on their possessor a claim to a higher grade of life.
- ↑ By the latest mails we hear that a school is now established for the natives at Perth. (See Appendix.)