weak and
languid, in the latter case, it was far otherwise. Toil as I might, I
felt no diminution of strength. I went from task to task, some of them
far harder than any I had yet encountered, with unabated vigour, and
accomplished with ease double the work I ever could get through with
when in bondage.

The joint labours of my father and myself, assisted occasionally by
hired service--for he could not endure the idea of having convicts about
him--soon put a new and promising face on the farm.

We cleared, we drained, we enclosed, and we sowed and planted, until we
left ourselves comparatively little to do--I mean in the way of hard
labour--but to await the returns of our industry.

It was some time after we had got things into this state--that is, I
think about three months after I had joined my father--that the latter
received intelligence of a band of bushmen or bushrangers having been
seen in the neighbourhood. He was assured that they were skulking in the
adjoining forest, and that we might every night expect our house to be
attacked, robbed, and ourselves, in all probability, murdered.

This information threw us into a most dreadful state of alarm; these
bushrangers, as the reader probably knows, being runaway convicts, men
of the most desperate characters, who take to the woods, and subsist by
plundering the settlers--a crime to which they do not hesitate to add
murder--many instances of fearful atrocities of this kind having
occurred.

For some time we were quite at a loss what to do; for although we had
firearms and ammunition in the house, there were only four men of us--my
father, myself, and two servant lads--while the bushrangers, as we had
been told, were at least ten or twelve in number. To have thought then
of repelling them by force, was out of the question; it could only have
ended in the murder of us all.

Under these circumstances, my father determined on applying to the
authorities for constabulary or military protection; and with this view
went to Liverpool, where the district magistrate resided.

On stating the case to the latter, he at once gave my father a note to
the commanding officer of the garrison, enjoining him to send a small
party of military along with him,--these to remain with us for our
protection as long as circumstances should render it necessary, and, in
the meanwhile, to employ themselves in scouring the adjoining woods,
with a view to the apprehension of the bushrangers,