and had not been discovered until her thick leather boot was almost entirely consumed. She appeared to have had her baby of ten weeks old in her arms, and to have dropped it as she fell, for the child was on the floor near the fire, but had rolled itself out of danger. All this had happened in the forenoon, and the evening was now far advanced; much of the intermediate time having been unavoidably lost by the man in procuring the loan of a cart to convey her to the nearest town for help.
We scarcely knew what to do or what to advise; the convict hospital contained no accommodation for women, the reception of whom in such a place had never been contemplated, and, to involve us still further in difficulty, the colonial surgeon, who resided at the depôt, was from home. We followed the man to our slip-rail where he had left the woman lying in the cart, and when we came close to it we heard a low delirious voice talking about a baby, but the darkness of the night prevented our distinguishing the speaker for the first few moments, or perceiving that a good Samaritan was already there before us, in the person of a poor Irishwoman from a cottage over the way, who had previously directed the man to our door, and was now standing beside the cart trying to make the sufferer drink a cup of tea.
My husband decided that we must carry her into our own house, which we immediately did, and laid her in a bed as carefully as possible; both of her feet were burned, and on one leg so large a surface of skin was destroyed that it was but too evident that nothing less than amputation would be of any avail, as proved to be the case a week after, when the leg was taken off considerably above
