rom the possibility of bringing children into the world
with so little chance of eternal salvation, so I said. "No" to a very
clever young man, with whom I had argued on many points, and with whom,
if I had married him, I should have argued till one of us died! I was
17, and had just begun to earn money. I told him why I had refused him,
and that it was final. In six weeks he was engaged to another woman. My
second offer was made to me when I was 23 by a man aged 55, with three
children. He was an artist, whose second wife and several children had
been murdered by the Maoris near Wanganui during the Maori insurrection
of the forties, and he had come to Adelaide with the three survivors.
The massacre of that family was only one of the terrible tragedies of
that time, but it was not the less shocking. The Maoris had never been
known to kill a woman, and when the house was attacked, Mr. Gilfillan
got out of a back window to call the soldiers to their help. Though
struck on the back of the head and the neck and scarred for life--owing
to which he was always compelled to wear his hair long--he succeeded in
his mission. His wife put her own two children through the window, and
they toddled off hand in hand until they met their father returning
with the soldiers. The eldest daughter, a girl of 13, escaped with a
neighbour's child, a baby in arms. She was seen by the Maoris, struck
on the forehead with a stone axe, and left unconscious. The crying of
the baby roused her, and she went to the cowyard and milked a cow to
get milk for the hungry child, and there she was found by the soldiers.
She was queer in her ways and thoughts afterwards, and, it was said,
always remained 13 years old. She died in November last, aged 74. Her
stepmother and the baby and her own brother and sister were murdered
one by one as they tried to escape by the same window that had led the
rest of the family to safety. One of the toddling survivors still lives
in New Zealand. Now, these are all the chances of marriage I have had
in my life. Dickens, in "David Copperfield," speaks of an old maid who
keeps the remembrance of some one who might have made her an offer, the
shadowy Pidger, in her heart until her death. I cannot forget these two
men. I am constantly meeting with the children, grandchildren, and even
great-grandchildren of the first. As for the other, Andrew Murray gave
me a fine landscape painted by John A. Gilfillan as a slight
acknowledgment of