u."

It was a great treat to us indeed. The crew were in prison garments, but
all so kind to us. By Convict labor all the public works seemed to be
carried on, and the Gardens were most beautiful. The carved work in
bone, ivory, cocoanuts, shells, etc., was indeed very wonderful. We
bought a few specimens, but the prices were beyond our purse. It was a
strange spectacle--these things of beauty and joy, and beside them the
chained gangs of fierce and savage Convicts, kept down only by bullet
and sword!

Thanking the Governor for his exceeding kindness, I referred to their
Man-of-war about to go to Sydney, and offered to pay full passage money
if they would take me, instead of leaving me to wait for a "trader." He
at once granted my request, and arranged that we should be charged only
at the daily cost for the sailors. At his suggestion, however, I took a
number of things on board with me, and presented them to be used at the
cabin table. We were most generously treated--the Captain giving up his
own room to my wife and myself, as they had no special accommodation for
passengers.

Noumea appeared to me at that time to be wholly given over to
drunkenness and vice, supported as a great Convict Settlement by the
Government of France, and showing every extreme of reckless, worldly
pleasure, and of cruel, slavish toil. When I saw it again,
three-and-twenty years thereafter, it showed no signs of progress for
the better. It there be a God of justice and of love, His blight cannot
but rest on a nation whose pathway is stained with corruption and
steeped in blood, as is undeniably the case with France in the Pacific
Isles.

CHAPTER LVI.
THE GOSPEL AND GUNPOWDER.

Arriving at Sydney, I was at once plunged into a whirlpool of horrors.
H. M. S. _Curacoa_ had just returned from her official trip to the
Islands, in which the Commodore, Sir William Wisenian, had thought it
his duty to inflict punishment on the Natives for murder and robbery of
Traders and others. On these Islands, as in all similar cases, the
Missionaries had acted as interpreters, and of course always used their
influence on the side of mercy, and in the interests of peace. But
Sydney, and indeed Australia and the Christian World, were thrown into a
ferment just a few days before our arrival, by certain articles in a
leading publication there, and by the pictorial illustrations of the
same. They were professedly from an officer on board Her Majesty's ship,