of what the Government stroke meant, and the knowledge was not worth the expense.  He was in other respects harmless and useless, and, although he had been transported for stealing, I could never find that he stole anything from me.  The disease of larceny seemed somehow to have been worked out of his system; though he used to describe with great pleasure how his misfortunes began by stealing wall-fruit when he was a boy; and although it was to him like the fruit

“Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe.”

it was so sweet that, while telling me about it sixty years afterwards, he smiled and smacked his lips, renewing as it were the delight of its delicious taste.

He always avoided, as much as possible, the danger of dying of hard work, so he is living yet, and is eighty-six years old.  Whenever I see him he gives me his blessing, and says he never worked for any man he liked so well.  A great philosopher says, in order to be happy it is necessary to be beloved, but in order to be beloved we must know how to please, and we can only please by ministering to the happiness of others.  I ministered to the old convict’s happiness by letting him work so lazily, and so I was beloved and happy.

He had formerly been an assigned servant to Mr. Gellibrand, Attorney-General of Tasmania, before that gentleman went with Mr. Hesse on that voyage to Australia Felix from which he never returned.  Some portions of a skeleton were found on the banks of a river, which were supposed to belong to the lost explorer, and that river, and Mount Gellibrand, on which he and Hesse parted company, were named after him.

There was a blackfellow living for many years afterwards in the Colac district who was said to have killed and eaten the lost white man; the first settlers therefore call him Gellibrand, as they considered he had made out a good claim to the name by devouring the flesh.  This blackfellow’s face was made up of hollows and protuberances ugly beyond all aboriginal ugliness.  I was present at an interview between him and senior-constable Hooley, who nearly rivalled the savage in lack of beauty.  Hooley had been a soldier in the Fifth Fusiliers, and had been convicted of the crime of manslaughter, having killed a coloured man near Port Louis, in the Mauritius.  He was sentenced to penal servitude for the offence, and had passed two years of his time in Tasmania.  This incident had produced in his mind an interest in blackfellows generally, and on seeing Gellibrand outside the Colac courthouse, he walked up to him, and looked him steadily in the face, without saying a word or moving a muscle of his countenance.  I never saw a more lovely pair.  The black fellow returned the gaze unflinchingly, his deep-set eyes fixed fiercely on those of the Irishman, his nostrils dilated, and his frowning forehead wrinkled and hard, as if cast in iron.  The two men looked like