This page has been validated.
82
THE AUSTRALIAN EMIGRANT.
"But where are you going?"
"Any where to avoid falling into the hands of those who know me. Whatever may become of me," he said, lifting his skull-cap, "I shall ever remember the sympathy and kindness I have experienced at your hands. God bless you for it." As he spoke he moved away, and his figure was soon lost amongst the trees.
"I declare," said Slinger, as they commenced their day's journey, "I had no idea bushrangers were such confidential, penitential, and highly respectable characters. I fancy our acquaintance must be an exception to the general rule; but that won't save him—if taken he will not be spared."
"I fear not," said Hugh; "I have heard that colonial authorities know but of one remedy for crime—hanging."[1]
- ↑ An old colonist informed me that a chaplain of the Hobarton Jail, on one occasion, whilst scrutinising a gallows upon which ten bushrangers were to be executed, very coolly remarked, "Well, the beam appears to be rather short—nine men could hang there comfortably, but the tenth would crowd it." The storekeeper who had the contract for supplying the prisons, frequently used to be waited upon by the last functionary of the law, with an order something in this way, "rop and sop for sem;" Reduced to plain English, it meant, "rope and soap for seven."
In 184— there was an unfortunate native executed for a murder, the committal of which he firmly denied to the last. He was an ignorant savage, made by law a British subject, and amenable to that law of which he had never heard, (still less understood,) condemned to he strangled. The law, when too late, provided him a chaplain to administer spiritual consolation in a language he could not understand, for he was from a tribe who lived far in the interior—many miles beyond where the Black Protectors ever penetrated, and speaking a dialect they had seldom heard. 'Twas well, perhaps, that the Bible was a sealed book to him, or he would have recoiled in disgust at the horrible mockery to the lessons of mercy and justice contained in its pages, presented in the punishment he was about to suffer. The end is soon told: the rev. chaplain attended him to the scaffold. When the prisoner reached the platform, he looked up and saw the awful preparations: the consoler was by his side. Whilst in gaol, the black having learned some broken English, the following specimen of gallows oratory took place:—
