Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/349

320 nothing in the darkness excepting one person walking up and down alone who had been aroused by the firing, they thought it best to go back to bed. When morning broke a vessel with a fresh load of immigrants was observed to be grounded upon a sand-bank, with the waves beating heavily on her. The passengers and crew, however, were all rescued, although in nearing the shore a boatload of women and children was capsized in the surf. The boys, of course, were eager spectators of the affair, and a little girl who was fished out of the water eventually became the wife of one of them.

The failure of Swan River put a final end to the system of free grants of land in Australia; but either this fact was not universally known, or a supposition existed in Barladong that, in case of overwhelming merit, the practice might be revived of rewarding private individuals with Government fiefs.

Whatever the necessary pitch of deserving might be, a hard-working neighbour of ours, whose worldly wealth consisted of a little flock of some dozen or so of goats, deemed that he had reached the requisite climax on the morning that his wife presented him with twins. Perhaps he had dim recollections of clergymen at home duly advising their sovereign of the advent of three subjects born at a birth, and may have thought, not altogether unreasonably, that twins being somewhat of a similar phenomenon in Swan River, and free immigrants wanted there, a grateful Government might express its sense of the obligation he had conferred on it by endowing his progeny with a few acres.

He therefore waylaid us as we were riding past his mud