Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/161

 ticket-of-leave men, yet the prospects held out by such alliances are poor rewards for adopting Christian habits, and but sorry inducements for retaining them.

An attempt has been made to decide the knotty point by the modern panacea of emigration, and a short time before we returned to England a statement appeared in the newspapers, and received no contradiction, to the effect that Mrs. Camfield had received, from a missionary in another Australian colony, photographs of such of his young male converts as might prove eligible matches for the elder girls in her school, and that, the portraits being pronounced satisfactory, several of her pupils had been shipped to that colony and consigned to the missionary's care. At any rate a few of the girls emigrated, and the letters that Mrs. Camfield received from one of them, describing the voyage and its termination, might safely be adduced as satisfying for ever all doubts of the intelligence and capacity of the natives of Australia.

Of this one particular pupil, when a child, mention is made by Mrs. Smythe, in her 'Narrative of a Voyage to the Fiji Islands.' The ship having entered King George's Sound, she and Colonel Smythe paid a visit on the Sunday to Mrs. Camfield's school, and were much struck by the correctness with which this little native repeated the collect for the day. Mrs. Smythe also makes mention of having observed that the hair of some of the children was light-coloured in comparison with their skin, a fact of some importance in the vexed question of race.

Up to the time of our return no school or institution for the benefit of the natives in connection with the Church of England had been established in the colony, with the