were very much attached to each other, and their
cheerful dispositions, good conduct and unceasing industry led to their
being granted many privileges. Both my father and my mother had taken
a strong liking to Trenfield; and so, too, had Ruth Kenna, a young
free female servant of ours. As for we boys, we simply worshipped both
Trenfield and May as heroes who had sailed in the far South Seas and
harpooned and killed the mighty sperm whale, and had fought with the
wild and naked savages of the Pacific Isles.

Ruth Kenna was the daughter of a small farmer in the district, who had
been emancipated by the good Governor. He was a widower, and a rough,
taciturn man, but passionately devoted to Ruth, who was his only child.
He had been transported for having taken part in the disastrous Irish
rebellion of '98,' and his young wife had followed him to share his
exile. The terrors and hardships of the long voyage out killed her, for
she died almost as soon as she landed, without seeing her husband,
and leaving her infant child to the kindly care of the officers of the
detachment of the regiment which had come out in the same ship. By them
the infant girl had been placed in the charge of a respectable female
convict, who, at my mother's expense, had kept her till she was ten
years of age. Then she came to us as a servant, and had remained ever
since.

Very often my father--though he pretended, as became his official
position in a Crown Colony, to have a great dislike to Irish Roman
Catholics--would allow we boys to go to Patrick Kenna's farm to shoot
native bears and opossums, which were very plentiful thereabout, for
the land was very thickly timbered with blue gum, tallow-wood and native
apple. The house itself stood on the margin of a small tidal creek,
whose shallow waters teemed with fish of all descriptions, and in the
winter Kenna would catch great numbers of whiting, bream and sea mullet,
which he salted and dried and sold to the settlers who lived inland.
He lived quite alone, except from Saturday morning till Sunday morning,
when Ruth stayed with him and straightened up the rough house. Sometimes
Ruth would persuade my mother to let my brother Will and myself stay
with them for the night, and dearly did we love going; for her father,
though a silent, cold-mannered man to most people, was always different
to any one of us Egertons, and never even grumbled when we got into
mischief, though he pretended to be very angry. O