Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/157

 influence over them, than had been achieved in their behalf by any other sect of Christians, and that a Roman Catholic bishop, whose sole duty was the care of the natives, and who lived in the bush with his converts, had had considerable success amongst them. I inferred therefore, from what our shipmate said, that this bishop, whose name I did not then learn, had found that to benefit the poor savages it was necessary to adapt himself to their own manner of life, and to take up his abode in the bush with the flock that he desired to convert.

After we had been a short time settled in Barladong, the subject of the natives began to hang heavily upon us. They came and went perpetually, lived all around us, but had no religion, and it did not seem to be anybody's business to teach them one. On making inquiries of our neighbours, we were told that some years previously a school had been carried on in Barladong, under the conduct of a Wesleyan head, with the object of Christianizing, and civilizing the native children, by instructing them both in religion and in the cultivation of the ground, and that a number of pupils, towards whose maintenance the colonial Government granted an allowance of a shilling each daily, had been collected together in a building which still bore the name of the Mission-house. Sickness, however, having soon appeared amongst them, many of the children died, and the remainder ran away.

The illness was said to have been caused by feeding the children too exclusively on rice, a diet which, however suitable for Hindoos, is perhaps as little qualified to be the principal food of an Australian as of an English native. The provision which Nature has given to the