their backs.  Knowing how little consideration there is for the unhappy convict in all cases of difference with his taskmaster, and that however unjust or unreasonable the latter’s complaints may be, they are always readily entertained by the subordinate authorities, and carefully recorded against the former to his prejudice, I took care to give him no offence.  To say nothing of his positive orders, I obeyed his every slightest wish with a promptitude and alacrity that left him no shadow of ground to complain of me.  It was a difficult task; but it being for my interest that no complaint of me, just or unjust, should be put on record against me, I bore all with what I must call exemplary patience and fortitude.

I have already said that my new master was a man of the most tyrannical disposition—­cruel, passionate, and vindictive.  He was all this; and his miserable fate—­a fate which overtook him while I was in his employment—­was, in a great measure, the result of his ungovernable and merciless temper.

Some of the wretched natives of the country—­perhaps the most miserable beings on the face of the earth, as they are certainly the lowest in the scale of intellect of all the savage tribes that wander on its surface—­used to come occasionally about our farm, in quest of a morsel of food.  Amongst these were frequently women with infants on their backs.  If my master was out of the way when any of these poor creatures came about the house, his wife, who was a good sort of woman, used to relieve them; and so did we, also, when we had anything in our power.  Their treatment, however, was very different when our master happened to be at home.  The moment he saw any of these poor blacks approaching, he used to run into the house for his rifle, and on several occasions fired at and wounded the unoffending wretches.  At other times he hounded his dogs after them, himself pursuing and hallooing with as much excitement as if he had been engaged in the chase of some wild beasts instead of human beings—­beings as distinctly impressed as himself with the image of his God.

It is true that these poor creatures were mischievous sometimes, and that they would readily steal any article to which they took a fancy.  But in beings so utterly ignorant, and so destitute of all moral perceptions, such offences could hardly be considered as criminal; not one, at any rate, deserving of wounds and death at the caprice of a fellow-creature acting on his own impulses, unchecked by any legal or judicial control.  Besides, it were easy to prevent the depredations of these poor creatures—­easy to drive them off without having recourse to violence.

The humanity and forbearance, however, which such a mode of proceeding with the aborigines would require was not to be found in my master.  Fierce repulsion and retaliation were the only means he would have recourse to in his mode of treating them; and the consequence was, his inspiring the natives with a hatred of him, and a desire of vengeance for his manifold cruelties towards them, which was sure, sooner or later, to end in his destruction.  It did so.  One deed of surpassing cruelty which he perpetrated accomplished his fate.