strange land, to rely on himself, and never to complain, however stiff the task, meant everything." "Tis cheap and easy to destroy. But to help the young soul, add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought, but firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.' (R. W. Emerson.) John Bussell, it is plain, drew some spark of that divinity from his home and college. On the shelves of the farmhouse he builded there still stand, as witnesses, his wellused, well-loved books. Homer, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Xenophon, Horace, Quintilian, Lucretius, Juvenal, Plutarch's Lives, Mitford's History of Greece, Hooke's Roman History, Rollin's Ancient History are all there, and with them Malone's Shakespeare, Scott, both the novels and the poems, Byron, Gray, Wordsworth, Noble's Memoirs of Cromwell, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Hume's History of England, and Smollett's, Bunyan's Holy War. Gibbon's Decline and Fall he borrowed from Dr. Collie, and Dickens's novels as they appeared from Colonel Molloy or Eliot of Leschenault. Dibden's Sermons from Eminent Divines shows marks of much wear, as do also the small volumes of The Spectator. Here were sources from which he drew courage and power. Nor did he neglect them. The quotations he bandies with Wells, his college chum, and with the Bishop of South Australia are drawn from Aeschylus and Tacitus. The skinning of his first kangaroo provokes a long citation from the Georgics. The habit may be selfconscious to a degree now distasteful, but by such ties the Oxford scholar reminded himself of a great tradition that was still his, and the more potent because his, in common with men of high calling here and there on the round world, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, but not dismayed.

Once or twice his sisters give way to a shudder at the breaking down of old standards by colonial hardship. 'The poor gentry in this place, Capel, are reduced to work on the roads for support, whilst many of the affluent farmers seem rolling in plenty, so various has been their success.' So writes Mary Bussell to Capel Carter, from Swan River in August '34. Bessie, at Augusta in the same year, notes wistfully that cockatoo feathers which she would make into a broom, would serve as tasty drawingroom decorations, in your land of elegance and ingenuity.' Bessie, too, scribbles a pencil note on the foot of a letter by Fanny to Capel in May '34, de profundis. ‘Let my shoes be made high over the instep. It is so very dusty here in the summer that it is hardly possible to cross from one house to the other without getting dirty for the day, and at Perth it is worse. And the fleas!! Oh, my dear Capel, if you did but know you would wonder there is any of us left.' All complaining, however, was anathema, and the memory of this pardonable lapse tortured Bessie until she was driven to recant: 'I wish I could recall a few lines I added in haste '-to a letter of Fanny's. ' Pray do not any of you dwell on them. It was very silly. I must try and think of them no more!!' Wistfully, too, both Fanny and Bessie think of the things lost, so near their destination, with the wrecked' Cumberland'.

'Mamma cannot manage to forget it at all, but when I think of the escape Mamma had in not coming down in her-as she intended, had not Sir James Stirling stopped her-all regrets almost vanish. Then there is poor Mrs. McDermott left to mourn her husband, expecting daily to be confined with her second child, without a farthing to support them. With this much worse case before us, we have not permitted ourselves to bewail our loss.

But I must own when I look round and remember the things Fanny and I used to calculate on beautifying our little cottage I cannot but feel disappointed, and when they enumerate the number of things sent out to us, I do wish so much we could have had the unpacking of them.' -Bessie B. to Capel Carter, December 1834. Fanny, on the same sad topic: ' All Polly's (Mary's) vanities, dresses, bonnets, etc., etc., have met with a watery grave. Ours were burnt. So you see, Tippoo, the destinies decree that we shall not be the vain family you used to consider us.'

At times the transplanted manners of a pre-Reform drawing-room sound strangely from the aboriginal bush. In circumlocution they outdo the Pickwick Club. Fanny does not decide to pull an aching tooth.' I shall not rest', she tells Capel,' until my rebellious ivory is punished for its refractoriness by external banishment from its parent jaw.' [To Capel Carter, 21st October, 1834.] Where their sisters of a century later' get the breeze up' the Misses Bussell would agonize'. Thus Fanny agonizes' about a letter entrusted to one who turns out to bear a' character of the doubtful order', while Bessie wonders, 'How calmly we now take receiving visitors with little or nothing to set before them but salt pork. At first we used to agonize about it, but now we find people so well pleased to escape the rolling of a ship that they can enjoy anything.'

As strong Tories, they interpreted their faith in Church and State as requiring that they should make the best of everything, except Whiggery. Let us think how much worse it might have been, and thank God it is as it is. No doubt it is all for the best, as all our losses since we have been out have proved to be.'-Bessie B. to Capel, December '34.

This repression of repining on all subjects but one

made it hot, however, for the Whig dogs. From quiet Winchester, Mrs. Bussell had written during the Reform Bill election: I do not like the Whigs. The present ministry are doing as all former of the sort have done, turning the country upside down. If we do not have a revolution I shall wonder.' When Whig ministers pruned expenditure on the new colony, however, dislike warmed into denuuciation. The present administration '—the mother is defending her cubs-' is conducted in a heartless and mean-spirited manner. . . . The withdrawal of the Sulphur' has filled me with dismay. I cannot see '— from Winchester, mark you how the colonial schooner can possibly supply the necessities of the numerous and dispersed settlements. I can only picture my last detachment to Augusta enduring with less bodily strength to overcome difficulty, all the privation and hardship endured by my precious sons. Providence certainly miraculously sustained them in the wilderness. To Him I pray for a merciful dispensation of such trials, and of fortitude in them.'-Mrs. F. L. Bussell to the party at Augusta, 31st December 1832. Recurring in the same letter to the Whig Ministry's economies, she breaks forth: ' But what can you expect from Gully the boxer, Cobbett, Hunt, etc., etc., elected by King People, alias the scum of the earth, whom the Radicals, now that they have gained their ends and made fair England Revolutionary, denominate destructive! Reform in the Church is to be next settled. Alas! alas! Our city has returned Mildmay and Baring.* Mr. Fleming is ousted because he did not vote for Reform. There is certainly nothing to wish to stay in England for. Bessie! Ben is a Rat!!!'

* Winchester. John Fleming of Stoneham Park, sat for Southampton County in the Parliaments elected in 1820, 1826 and 1830.

Charles Bussell, writing to John of some punitive measure taken against the natives, reveals a Tory spirit as faithful, though quieter: ' It did not meet with the entire approbation of the Government, but it was not the less well done on that account.' Such hardihood in calling authority in question evidently shocked the writer himself, for he adds: This is almost the first Whiggish notion to which I ever gave birth.'

Tory principles, however, at no time deterred any of the family from lending a hand in every task that arose. 'I often think, dear Tip', wrote even Mary Bussell to Capel Carter on Christmas Eve 1835, of the horror you always had of us becoming laundresses, when the possibility of our being without a female servant came into your head. Then I look with what ease we get through our office.' Bessie had just before ridden over from Augusta to help the pioneer party at the Vasse.' She is indeed an admirable girl and equal to anything. We hear from the boys that she is working wonders, reducing our savage brothers into some kind of order. I wish we could all have arrived there together. I should have liked to have borne the heat and burden of the day-selfishly perhaps, for I should have liked to have felt that their growing comforts arose from all, not one '—the kind of selfishness that makes good colonists. ' Bessie says your shirting and the working materials arrived in the very nick of time, for all their things were almost past repair. She put on a piece of any kind or colour by way of mending so that in their working costumes her Vasse boys are more like harlequins than anything else.' (See Appendix for Bessie's Journal of the ride over.) A series of character sketches of our five remaining treasures' was drawn from Fanny Bussell's ever-flowing pen by the news of