the tools with which he was working. Such flagrant
presumption could not, of course, be tolerated; the overseer reported
him to the master; the master laid a charge of insubordination against
him before the magistrate, and he was forthwith visited with the due
punishment of the law, in the shape of fifty lashes; after which, with
his body bleeding and lacerated, he was sent back to his work.

It is impossible to picture, with sufficient force, the horrors and
atrocities of the penal times. We do not consider ourselves adequate to
the task of exposure and condemnation; but, though we do not approve a
life of ease and comfort accorded to condemned felons, we unhesitatingly
affirm, that in most, if not all cases, the cruel treatment which the
convicts underwent, instead of having a penitential influence, only
served to harden them in their iniquities; and while they frequently
became perfectly callous to the infliction of punishment, they were
debased to the incarnation of fiends, merely wanting in the opportunity
to perpetrate the most atrocious villanies in retribution.

If Dick had ever entertained any disposition of a reformatory nature, it
was entirely dissipated by his early experience. He only waited the
auspicious moment when he could follow the steps of hundreds of others
who had been similarly situated, but had escaped to become
"bush-rangers," and the terror of the country. An opportunity was not
long in presenting itself; and he, with a party of six as desperate
ruffians as himself, contrived to elude the vigilance of their masters,
and get into the bush. Their sufferings and privations were extreme;
little short of the hateful servitude from which they fled; but they
preferred anything, even death itself, rather than return to a
repetition of their bondage. Their escape, however, was soon detected,
and they were pursued by a small company of military; who succeeded in
surprising them in the mountains, and upon their attempting to escape,
fired upon them. In this recontre two of the convicts were killed, and
three others were wounded. Of these, Dick was one, for he received a
shot in the knee from which he never thoroughly recovered; while the
muscular contraction that ensued, from the want of surgical treatment,
caused the deformity which gave rise to his appellation.

When he was retaken and brought back to the settlement, he was thrown
back again upon the government, and put into the "chain-gang," where he