d.
About his being sentenced for life, there was no doubt, for she had a
piece of newspaper which told of his crime,--and a frightful piece of
villany it was,--and after that, the report of his death was so
probable that no one for an instant doubted its truth. Men did not live
long in the chain-gang, in Van Diemen's Land, in those days, brother.
Men would knock out one another's brains in order to get hung, and
escape it. Men would cry aloud to the judge to hang them out of the
way! It was the most terrible punishment known, for it was hopeless.
Penal servitude for life, as it is now, gives the very faintest idea of
what it used to be in old times. With a little trouble I could tell you
the weight of iron carried by each man. I cannot exactly remember, but
it would strike you as being incredible. They were chained two and two
together (a horrible association), to lessen the chances of escape;
there was no chance of mitigation for good conduct; there was hard
mechanical, uninteresting work, out of doors in an inclement climate,
in all weathers: what wonder if men died off like rotten sheep? And
what wonder, too, if sometimes the slightest accident,--such as a blow
from an overseer, returned by a prisoner, produced a sudden rising,
un-preconcerted, objectless, the result of which were half a dozen
murdered men, as many lunatic women, and five or six stations lighting
up the hill-side, night after night, while the whole available force of
the colony was unable to stop the ruin for months?

But to the point. Mary was a widow. When she heard of her husband's
death, she had said to herself, "Thank God!" But when she had gone to
her room, and was sat a-thinking, she seemed to have had another
husband before she was bound up with that desperate, coining, forging
George Hawker--another husband bearing the same name; but surely that
handsome curly-headed young fellow, who used to wait for her so
patiently in the orchard at Drumston, was not the same George Hawker as
this desperate convict? She was glad the convict was dead and out of
the way; there was no doubt of that; but she could still find a corner
in her heart to be sorry for her poor old lover,--her handsome old
lover,--ah me!

But that even was passed now, and George Hawker was as one who had
never lived. Now on this evening we speak of, his memory came back just
an instant, as she heard the boy speak of the father, but it was gone
again directly. She called her servan