Melbourne to the Peake, which I sold here, and my means of transit from thence was with pack-horses. After a rather prolonged sojourn at the Peake, where I received great hospitality from Mr. Blood, of the Telegraph Department, and from Messrs. Bagot, the owners, and Mr. Conway, the manager, we departed for the Charlotte.
My little black boy Dick, or, as he used generally to write, and call himself, Richard Giles Kew, 1872, had been at school at Kew, near Melbourne. He came to me from Queensland; he had visited Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney, and had been with me for nearly three years, but his fears of wild natives were terribly excited by what nearly everybody we met said to him about them, This was not surprising, as it was usually something to this effect, in bush parlance: “By G-, young feller, just you look out when you get outside! The wild blacks will [adjective] soon cook you. They'll kill you first, you know—they will like to cut out your kidney fat! They'll sneak on yer when yer goes out after the horses, they'll have yer and eat yer.” This being the burden of the strain continually dinned into the boy’s ears, made him so terrified and nervous the farther we got away from civilisation, that soon after leaving the Peake, as we were camping one night with some bullock teams returning south, the same stories having been told him over again, he at last made up his mind, and told me he wanted to go back with one of the teamsters; he had hinted about this before, and both Carmichael and Robinson seemed to be aware of his intention. Force was useless to detain him; argument was lost on him,
