Nathaniel Hailes,
WHOSE career was marked with more than ordinary vicissitudes, was one of the most prominent of pioneer South Australian colonists. His life may be divided into two parts, the one half spent in England, the other other half in this colony. Born in London in 1802, and dwelling there for thirty-six years, he was so situated as to be acquainted with the circumstances of some of the most remarkable events of his time, and to be on intimate terms with many of the greatest minds of the past generation. He was on sufficiently friendly relations with Lady Byron as to dissuade her from publishing a treatise she wished to issue on female education, and he had the privilege of seeing Mrs. Siddons in the zenith of her popularity as an actress. He was intimately associated with Hazlitt, the well-known critic, the Rev. Rowland Hill, Allan Cunningham, De Quincey, Edward Irving, Dr. Chalmers, Sir Walter Scott, and other celebrities of a by-gone age, and perhaps no one at the antipodes knew more of the great minds which ruled the literary and theological world during the first forty years of the present century. At the close of 1838, Mr. Hailes was appointed superintendent of emigrants by the "Buckinghamshire," which left Portsmouth in that year, and arrived at Holdfast Bay in March, 1839. In his "Personal Recollections of a Septuagenarian," a series of papers contributed to the S. A. Register, he relates how "he beheld the conversion of a wilderness into the abode of an intelligent and prosperous •community," and the record he thus left has supplied a chapter in the history of the colony which would otherwise have been lost. Mr. Hailes carried on the business of an •auctioneer for some* time, and his advertisements rivalled in their eloquence the best literary efforts of the celebrated •George Robbins, of London. He was also a regular con-, tributor to the press under the nom de plume of "Timothy
