to another woman.  My second offer was made to me when I was 23 by a man aged 55, with three children.  He was an artist, whose second wife and several children had been murdered by the Maoris near Wanganui during the Maori insurrection of the forties, and he had come to Adelaide with the three survivors.  The massacre of that family was only one of the terrible tragedies of that time, but it was not the less shocking.  The Maoris had never been known to kill a woman, and when the house was attacked, Mr. Gilfillan got out of a back window to call the soldiers to their help.  Though struck on the back of the head and the neck and scarred for life—­owing to which he was always compelled to wear his hair long—­he succeeded in his mission.  His wife put her own two children through the window, and they toddled off hand in hand until they met their father returning with the soldiers.  The eldest daughter, a girl of 13, escaped with a neighbour’s child, a baby in arms.  She was seen by the Maoris, struck on the forehead with a stone axe, and left unconscious.  The crying of the baby roused her, and she went to the cowyard and milked a cow to get milk for the hungry child, and there she was found by the soldiers.  She was queer in her ways and thoughts afterwards, and, it was said, always remained 13 years old.  She died in November last, aged 74.  Her stepmother and the baby and her own brother and sister were murdered one by one as they tried to escape by the same window that had led the rest of the family to safety.  One of the toddling survivors still lives in New Zealand.  Now, these are all the chances of marriage I have had in my life.  Dickens, in “David Copperfield,” speaks of an old maid who keeps the remembrance of some one who might have made her an offer, the shadowy Pidger, in her heart until her death.  I cannot forget these two men.  I am constantly meeting with the children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren of the first.  As for the other, Andrew Murray gave me a fine landscape painted by John A. Gilfillan as a slight acknowledgment of services rendered to his newspaper when he left it to go to Melbourne, and it hangs up in my sitting room for all to see.  Mr. Gilfillan had a commission to paint “The Landing of Capt.  Cook” with the help of Portraits and miniatures of the principal personages, and some sketches of his of Adelaide in 1849 are in the Adelaide Art Gallery.  If the number of lovers has been few, no woman in Australia has been richer in friends.  This narrative will show what good friends—­men as well as women—­have helped me and sympathized in my work and my aims.  I believe that if I had been in love, especially if I had been disappointed in love, my novels would have been stronger and more interesting; but I kept a watch over myself, which I felt I knew I needed, for I was both imaginative and affectionate.  I did not want to give my heart away.  I did not desire a love disappointment, even for the sake of experience.  I was 30 years old before the dark veil of religious despondency was completely lifted from my soul, and by that time I felt myself booked for a single life.  People married young if they married at all in those days.  The single aunts put on caps at 30 as a sort of signal that they accepted their fate; and, although I did not do so, I felt a good deal the same.