found out a fellow-countryman who lent him a team of oxen, dragged his goods over the hills to his land, and encamped the first night on the ground, under a few blankets and canvass spread on the brush. The next and successive days the family worked at cutting trees; there was timber plenty for building a house. This house, situated on the slope of a hill, consisted of one long, low, wooden room, surrounded by a dry ditch to drain off the rain, and divided into partitions by blankets. The river lay below: any water needed was fetched in a bucket by one of the young ladies. A garden, in which all manner of vegetables, including tobacco and water melons, soon grew, was laid out almost as soon as the house; an early investment was made in poultry, they requiring no other food than the grasshoppers and grass-seeds on the waste land round. Until the poultry gave a crop of eggs and chickens the guns of the lads supplied plenty of quail, ducks, and parrots. In due time a crop of maize, of wheat, and of oats was got in. Before the barrels of oatmeal were exhausted, eggs, chickens, potatoes, kale, and maize afforded ample sustenance, and something to send to market. Labour cost nothing, fuel nothing, rent nothing, keeping up appearances nothing; no one dressed on week days in broadcloth, except the head of the house. First a few goats, and then a cow, eventually a fair herd of stock, were accumulated. Butter and vegetables found their way to Adelaide; and, while the kid-glove gentry were ruining themselves, the bare-legged boys of the Highland gentleman were independent, if not rich. The daughters, who were pretty, proud, and useful, have married well. In another generation families like this will be among the wealthiest in the colony.
Now, it is certain that every shilling taken from industrious settlers like this Scotch family, under pretence of supplying labour, was money very unprofitably invested, as it would have fructified more rapidly in their own hard hands.
A lady, who landed at Port Adelaide a few months after the governor, in a MS. letter describes the then "dreary appearance of the shores; the anchoring of the ship in a narrow creek, where, as far as the eye could reach, a mangrove swamp extended; disembarking from a small boat into the arms of long shoremen upon a damp mudbank, under a persecuting assault of musquitoes." On this mudbank lay heaps of goods of all descriptions, half covered with sand and saturated with salt water, broken chests of tea and barrels of flour, cases of hardware, furniture of all kinds, pianos and empty plate-chests, ploughs and thrashing-machines. A little further, at the commencement of the "muddy track which led to Adelaide, bullock-drays stood ready to hire
