indirectly caused the death of another, by first making him excessively drunk, in payment for fetching them a keg of spirits from a cave where it had been hidden, and then leaving him lying in the bush exposed to the full heat of the sun. Late in the night the head warder of the convict depôt aroused my husband, and begged him to return with him to visit the poor creature in the hospital, to which he had just been brought, scorched beyond hope of recovery, although the summer was not fully begun or the heat yet very intense. He was barely able to relate what had occurred, and died in an hour or two afterwards.
In the task of searching for runaway prisoners the police are almost always assisted by native constables, whose keen sight and extraordinary powers of observation are capable of following a track even over the hardest rocks, a circumstance well calculated to excite our wonder, in spite of our knowing that the natives' familiarity with the bare ground dates from the time when it was his nursery floor.
Confirmed runaways, who had given much trouble to the police, were punished by being placed in the chain-gang at the "Establishment"; but there were some men who seemed to be proof against all impediments, and more than one escape, even from this heavily-ironed crew, occurred whilst we were in the colony. The fetters that they carried were of such size and weight that the first time I ever saw the gang I turned my head on its approach to look, as I supposed, at a jingling team of horses coming up behind us. I then perceived that the noise was caused by the irons on the legs and feet of fifty men who were walking, or rather shuffling along, in ranks of four abreast, and dressed in parti-coloured clothes.
