replied that she knew of none better than her own, "who sometimes came too drunk to do her work."
The notion that all were equally intemperate was incorrect, but the number of respectable poor women was very small, and, as time passed on, was diminished rather than increased. It was evident to us, after living some time in the colony, that a much greater amount of vice was becoming apparent on the surface than had been the case when we landed, not that we had grown more observant, but that the quick relays of convict ships were fast gorging the place with offenders. Female deterioration was in proportion, and those who, under the invisible restraints of home, might have remained innocent and useful, became such as women only can become whom fate has cast adrift upon a penal settlement.
My husband once performed a marriage where the person who stood proxy for the bride's father, and gave her away, was one who had been transported for cutting his own wife's head off; and the news which reached us, three weeks afterwards, of the bridegroom having been arrested on suspicion of murder, seemed a fitting sequel to such ill-omened nuptials. The newly-married wife came in great distress to acquaint us of the fact, and, under pretence of asking our advice, to beg money for providing her husband with a lawyer. She carried in her arms a baby of a fortnight old, whose wide open eyes might have been supposed, by a fanciful observer, to exhibit astonishment at the sort of society that it had stepped into on the threshold of life.
With the exception of the pensioners' families the population that surrounded us was a very shifting one.
