de the town, as it was called, where he meant to start
sugar-planting.

But the chief task of the crew was the getting up from the hold and
landing of Captain Bedford's goods; and these were so varied and
extensive that the inhabitants came down to the wharf every day to look
on as if it were an exhibition.

Certainly they had some excuse, for the captain had gone to work in
rather a wholesale way, and the ship promised to be certainly a little
lighter when she started on her way to her destination, a port a hundred
miles farther along the coast.

For, setting aside chests and packing-cases sufficient to make quite a
stack which was nightly covered with a great wagon cloth, there were a
wagon and two carts of a light peculiar make, bought from a famous
English manufacturer. Then there were tubs of various sizes, all
heavily laden, bundles of tent and wagon cloths, bales of sacking and
coarse canvas, and crates of agricultural machinery and tools, on all of
which, where they could see them, the little crowd made comments, and at
last began to make offers for different things, evidently imbued with
the idea that they were brought out on speculation.

The refusals, oft repeated, to part with anything, excited at last no
little resentment, one particularly shabby, dirty-looking man, who had
been pointed out as a squatter--though that term ought certainly to have
been applied to the black, who was the most regular and patient of the
watchers--going so far as to say angrily that if stores were brought
there they ought to be for sale.

These heavy goods were the last to be landed, for after making a bargain
with the gentleman whose name appeared in such large letters on the
front of his great wooden shanty, four horses, as many bullocks, all of
colonial breed, bought at Sydney where the vessel touched, half a dozen
pigs, as many sheep, and a couple of cows brought from England, were
landed and driven into an ill-fenced enclosure which Mr Jennings called
his "medder," and regularly fed there, for the landlord's meadow was
marked by an almost entire absence of grass.

Day by day, these various necessaries for a gentleman farmer's home
up-country were landed and stacked on the wharf, the boys, Uncle John,
and Samuel German--"Sourkrout," Norman had christened him--under the
advice of the captain seeing to everything, and toiling away in the hot
sunshine from morning to night.

At last all the captain's belongings were lan