owledge of our mutual loss. Mr.
Brown is recovering from ill health and lameness. Mr. Bauer, your
favourite, is still polite and gentle. Mr. Westall wants prudence, or
rather experience, but is good-natured. The two last are well, and have
always remained on good terms with me. Mr. Bell* (* The surgeon.) is
misanthropic and pleases nobody. Elder* (* Flinders' servant.) continues
to be faithful and attentive as before; I like him, and he apparently
likes me. Whitewood I have made a master's mate, and he behaves well.
Charrington is become boatswain, and Jack Wood is now my coxswain. Trim,
like his master, is becoming grey; he is at present fat and frisky, and
takes meat from our forks with his former dexterity. He is commonly my
bedfellow. The master we have in poor Thistle's place* (* John Aken.) is
an easy, good-natured man." In another letter to his wife* (* Flinders'
Papers.) he tells her: "Thou wouldst have been situated as comfortably
here as I hoped and told thee. Two better or more agreeable women than
Mrs. King and Mrs. Paterson are not easily found. These would have been
thy constant friends, and for visiting acquaintances there are five or
six ladies very agreeable for short periods and perhaps longer."

In a previous chapter it was remarked that Flinders and Bass did not meet
again after their separation following on the Norfolk voyage. Bass was
not in Sydney when the Investigator lay there, greatly to Flinders'
disappointment. "Fortune seems determined to give me disappointments," he
wrote to Mrs. Kent; "when I came into Port Jackson all the most esteemed
of my friends were absent. In the case of Bass I have been twice served
this way."* But he left a letter for his friend with Governor King.* (*
Flinders' Papers.) It was the last word which passed between these two
men; and, remembering what they did together, one can hardly read the end
of the letter without feeling the emotion with which it was penned:

"I shall first thank you, my dear Bass, for the two letters left for me
with Bishop, and then say how much I am disappointed that the speculation
is not likely to afford you a competency so soon as we had hoped. This
fishing and pork-carrying may pay your expenses, but the only other
advantage you get by it is experience for a future voyage, and this I
take to be the purport of your Peruvian expedition.

"Although I am so much interested in your success, yet what I say about
it will be like one of Shortla