sped tightly together, and her whole frame trembled with
excitement.

As soon as the clergyman had mounted his horse and ridden off, my father
returned to the dining-room.

'You have made a bitter enemy of a man who can do me much harm,' he
began; but something in my mother's face made him cease from further
reproaches, and he added lightly, that he hoped 'twould soon blow over.

'Charles,' said my mother, who was now herself again, 'it must _not_
blow over. The Governor shall know of this man's doings. And never again
shall I or my children enter the church when he preaches. To-night,
I suppose, he will visit that wretched old man--the victim of his
brutality--and administer "spiritual admonition." Come, children, let us
go to the beach and forget that that dreadful man has been here.'

It was, I think, this practice of 'administering admonition' to convicts
after he had had them sentenced to a severe flogging that first gave my
mother such an utter abhorrence of the man, together with his habit of
confining his sermons to the prisoners to the one subject--their own
criminal natures and the terrors of hell-fire everlasting. Then, too,
his voice was appalling to hear, for he had a way of suddenly dropping
his harsh, metallic tones, and raising his voice to a howl, like to that
of a hungry dingo.{*}

* The native dog of Australia, whose long, accentuated howl
is most distressing to hear.

Often did I, when sitting in our great square pew in that dreadful,
horrible church, press close to my mother's side and bury my face in her
dress, as he lashed himself into a fury and called down the vengeance of
a wrathful God upon the rows of silent, wretched beings clad in yellow,
who were seated on long stools in the back of the church, guarded by
soldiers, who, with loaded muskets, were stationed in the gallery
above. Some of the convicts, it was said, had sworn to murder him if an
opportunity served, and this no doubt made him the more merciless and
vindictive to any one of them who was so unfortunate as to be charged
before him in his capacity of magistrate. By the Regulations he could
not sit alone to deal out punishment, and sometimes had difficulty
in finding a colleague, especially among the military men, who nearly
always protested against his fondness for the cat; but there were always
to be found, in the end, magistrates who would do anything to please
him, for it was known that he had great influence with