Let me add just one more incident of the Henty family, one personal to myself, but in quite a different direction from the above.  Once, on a special occasion, I met the banker, Charles, who had stuck to his profession at Launceston, instead of adventuring across the Straits with his brothers.  Besides his quiet banking vocation, he was, I think, the portliest of the family, which may be the explanation.  The occasion was a public dinner to the Anti-Transportation League delegation, sent from Melbourne, in 1852, to stir up the cause at the Van Diemen’s Land fountain head of the common evil, and of which delegation my lately deceased old friend Lauchlan Mackinnon and myself were regarded as the heads.  Mackinnon, like many another such vigorous Highlander, as he then was, could never take a subject of deep interest to himself quietly.  We had had a sample of him already at Hobart, where the feeling as to our mission was by no means clear, both from the natural touchiness of convict connection or descent, and from that still considerable section of colonial employers and traders who thought that the ledger and its profit and loss account had at least an equal right to be heard in the question as any other so-called higher interest.  The ground, slippery enough at Hobart, was supposed to be still more treacherous at Launceston.  Had not Edward Wilson, of the thoroughly Mackinnonized Melbourne “Argus”, been but a little before nearly mobbed by the furious Anti-Antis of this place, to his utter surprise and astonishment at his own importance, and been only saved, in life or limb perhaps, by old Jock Sinclair, who was timely on the spot, and who dexterously led him, by a roundabout, to safety within the departing steamer for Melbourne?  In short, a row was more than half expected from the Mackinnon speech, and as this was undesirable, for good reasons to all sides of Launceston society, Mr. Henty resolved to prevent it, and did so most successfully by a very adroit but not unworthy trick.  He took occasion to speak just before the Mackinnon avalanche was to come on.  Introducing Mackinnon and commending his straightforward honesty in this matter, and so on, he said that some such people could not take even a good cause in moderation; but that these defects, if he might so call them, were more easily seen than remedied, and that all kindly consideration must be made in the case.  I fear I am not literal as to the identical words, although I heard them, but I have given the purport.  Poor Mackinnon, as he afterwards laughingly pleaded, what could he do under the cold douche of such a wet blanket?  He made the smallest and quietest speech of his life upon a great and stirring subject.

SOME INTERJECTA IN RE BATMAN, PIONEER OF THE PORT PHILLIP SETTLEMENT.