jail more strikingly appear than in the fact that the clergyman of a district had no discretionary power in such cases. A man, for instance, would present himself at the parsonage very ill, and wanting help immediately, but with no means of paying for it—more frequently than not he had journeyed on foot for a long distance—the doctor might be absent, (sent for perhaps to attend an accident a hundred miles away,) and, if the magistrate refused to admit the applicant into the hospital without the normal medical certificate, we either must turn the man away in his suffering condition, or take the course usually pursued by my husband, which was to nurse the man himself at our own home until the doctor's return, when if we succeeded in gaining the benefits of the hospital for the patient, well and good, but in event of the contrary we retained him under our own care.
Close to our house, and within the enclosure of our field, we had an empty cottage in which at different times we lodged several poor sick wayfarers, and though all of them were convicts, we never missed an article from our premises during four out of the five years that we spent in the colony. At the latter end of our stay, when transportation was drawing to a close, and the mother-country was availing itself of the last remaining chance to be rid of its worst criminals, we could not boast of such complete immunity from theft, but I do not believe even then that we were ever injured by any whom we had nursed in illness.
We used occasionally to make jelly for the men in hospital, until the doctor, at whose request we had done so, left the neighbourhood, and was succeeded by another, who begged us to discontinue our cookery, as without the most
