of Lands differed and quarrelled, the latter having the money and the former the power of government, and it was soon found that Mr. Stevenson could wield a trenchant pen.  He had been on the “Traveller” branch of the London paper what would be called now a travelling correspondent.  The Governor was replaced by Col.  Gawler, and Mr. Stevenson went on The Register as editor.  Mrs. Stevenson was a clever woman, and could help her husband.  She knew Charles Dickens, and still better, the family of Hogarth, into which he married.  My father and mother were surprised to find so good a paper and so well printed in the infant city.  Then there were A. H. Davis, of the Reedbeds, and Nathaniel Hailes, who wrote under the cognomen of “Timothy Short,” who had been publisher and bookseller.  There was first Samuel Stephens, who came out in the first ship for the South Australian Company, and married a fellow passenger, Charlotte Hudson Beare, and died two years after, and then Edward. manager of the South Australian Bank, and later, John Stephens who founded The Weekly Observer, and afterwards bought The Register.  These all belonged to a literary family.

People came out on the smallest of salaries with big families—­H.  T. H. Beare on 100 pounds a year as architect, for the South Australian Company, and he had 18 children by two wives.  I do not know what salary Mr. William Giles came out on with nine children and a young second wife, but I am sure it was less than 300 pounds.  His family in all counted 21.  But things were bad in the old country before the great lift given by railways, and freetrade, which made England the carrier for the world; and the possibilities of the new country were shown in that first issue of The Register in London in the highest colours.  Not too high by any means in the light of what has been accomplished in 73 years, but there was a long row to hoe first, and few of the pioneers reaped the prizes.  But, in spite of hardships and poverty and struggle, the early colonial life was interesting, and perhaps no city of its size at the time contained as large a population of intelligent and educated people as Adelaide.

Mrs. Oliphant, writing in 1885 at the age of 57, says that reading the “Life of George Eliot” made her think of an autobiography, and this was written at the saddest crisis of her life.  She survived her husband and all her children, and had just lost the youngest, the posthumous boy.  For them and for the family of a brother she had carried on the strenuous literary work—­fiction, biography, criticism, and history—­and when she died at the age of 69 she had not completed the history of a great publishing house—­that of Blackwood.  Her life tallies with mine on many points, but it is not till I have completed my 84 years that her sad narrative impels me to set down what appears noteworthy in a life which was begun in similar circumstances, but which was spent mainly in Australia.  The loss of memory which I see in many who are younger