for conveying our baggage. The lowest charge for a load was 10. All along the side of the track were strewn baggage and broken conveyances, abandoned in despair by their owners. We stopped at a small public-house to get a little refreshment. For a cup of tea, with brown sugar, bread, and oily butter full of insects, we paid 4s. 6d. each. The butter seemed spread with a thumb."
"Our troubles partly vanished when we reached the beautiful site of Adelaide, where it almost seemed as if a large party of ladies and gentlemen playing at gipsying had encamped. This was the third removal of some who had pitched tents on Kangaroo Island, then built huts in Holdfast Bay, and finally took up their abode in the city of Adelaide. Several times, before the small, bright green, highly ornamented wooden summer house which had been engaged for us, our carriage had like to have been upset over stumps and logs. Every one we met seemed in the highest spirits; and it was more like a walk in Kensington Gardens than in a colony scarcely two years old."
This bit of contemporary description affords a key to much that is singular and contradictory in the early accounts of the foundation of South Australia. Nat Lee, the mad poet, sings—
"There is a joy in madness none but madmen know."
and there was a charm about the gipsy encampment of Adelaide, with its wild speculation, perpetual excitement, liberal hospitality and charity, constant succession of new faces, splendid luxuries, and curious shifts, to which the survivors look back with the feelings of a mariner to the months he spent with jolly companions on a desert island, with plenty of turtles and plenty of rum puncheons—the difference being, that in the one case the shipwreck preceded, and in the other followed, the jollification.
Governor Gawler held a little court, which was graced by the magnificent uniforms of the officers of the volunteer corps, a corps which consisted of some two dozen officers, from a cornet to a brigade-major, and four or five privates. There were courtiers, too, and ladies in plumes and great airs; there were fashionables, and exclusives held to be the crême de la crême; there was an aristocracy composed of the principal officials; there were balls given, to be invited to which great manoeuvres were practised. It was a life like that of one of the little gambling courts and watering-places of Germany, with more heartiness, in consequence of the constant arrival of friends and victims from England. The town lots of Adelaide formed the great rouge-et-noir table. The climate rendered out-of-door life delightful, the imaginary streets swarmed with well-dressed crowds; so much really good society, so many
