voyage. One of them, whose hair when she came on board was cropped suspiciously short, accounted for it by saying that her sister-in-law used to pull it out when they had a quarrel; but she was not the only one who might have been supposed to have been under the hands of the prison barber, for several others were in a similar predicament as to the paucity, or rather brevity, of their locks.
There were perpetual complaints throughout the voyage, caused by the petty thefts committed upon one another by these damsels, such as purloining the steel from each other's crinolines, appropriating articles of clothing, little brooches, and such-like; but the favourite objects of cupidity were the photographs of other people's sweet-hearts, the abstraction of which was an act of aggression which seemed to demand the taking of some especial precautions for the general security, and accordingly the girls came one morning in a body to the captain, bringing with them a pile of likenesses, of which they solemnly requested him to take charge until the ship should reach Fremantle. The first of these girls whom I addressed when we joined the ship at Gravesend was, I noticed, eating eagerly, and she told me, in reply to my questions, that she had been much weakened and pulled down through the want of food which she had endured during the cotton famine at Manchester. Her face then bore witness to her story, for it was quite thin and wrinkled, though she was, she told me, but three-and-twenty. When we had been at sea a few weeks she had grown quite fat and young-looking, and, in company with her saucy, good-for-nothing companions, was seen pitching her allowance into the sea on pretence that the meat was bad,
