ion with the business. I just kept on
selling hams as long as there were any available.

Things were looking up, I thought. If I could only get people to buy a
few legs for tables, and banisters for their staircases, good
old-fashioned four-poster beds, and some of the other goods for which I
was presumably agent, business would look up and a fair start would be
made.

But Nemesis was again after me. I received a visit one morning from a
gentleman I knew quite well. He was, as a matter of fact, one of the
senior Customs officers. He was very nice, but he advised me to give up
selling hams. It appeared that these very good hams were all being
smuggled, and found their way up to my offices by all manner of means,
sometimes in cabs, sometimes in sacks on wheelbarrows, and that
consequently I was taking part in a transaction which duly qualified me
for a heavy fine, in addition to a somewhat healthy term of imprisonment.
So my friend the Customs House officer, who was quite aware that I was
innocent of fraud and had no knowledge of what was going on, had come
round to warn me. He hoped, he said, very soon to get hold of the kind
gentleman who had been good enough to introduce the business to me. Well,
there was nothing to be done but "Hands off hams," and as I had been a
commission agent then for some six weeks, and the only merchandise I had
sold was "the hams," I considered it high time to close the business, in
case I might let myself in for something more serious.

Just about this time the notorious bushranger, Ned Kelly, who had been
captured close to Benalla, Victoria, was sentenced to death, and he was
to be hanged at the Melbourne Jail at eight o'clock one morning.

I felt a certain amount of curiosity. I thought it would be an unique
experience to witness his execution. I was a personal friend of the chief
magistrate of the city, and besides, having arranged with one or two New
Zealand papers to communicate to them any matters which might be of
interest during my stay in Australia, I could obtain permission to be
present at the execution as a representative of the Press. The White Hart
Hotel was not far distant from the jail.

I did not feel in the least happy the afternoon before the morning of the
execution, when a permit to be present was handed to me by a police
officer. My dinner that night seemed to disagree with me, and I went to
my bed feeling that I was about to witness a scene that was more than
like