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338 spiteful answers, but, unfortunately, my prescription wanted the charm of novelty: "the Sisters," at Perth, she said, had already advised the same.

Where, however, the name of religion was not dragged in as a reason for matrimonial disputes, there were two other causes which produced an unfailing supply. These were the drunkenness of the men, and the wounded pride of the women caused by the unavoidable consciousness that the tabooed position of the convict was reflected upon his wife. Under these deplorable circumstances the only phase of married life which seemed compatible with any degree of happiness was that of persons engaged in cultivating a piece of land remote from neighbours, where the necessity for working hard, and the difficulty of obtaining drink, might help to keep both parties in their right senses. Very little actual money is made by these small farmers; but the pigs and fowls, which they rear at slight cost, supply them with a better table than falls to the lot of day-labourers at home, while the loneliness of the situation causes that colonial line of separation between bond and free to be forgotten, which, inevitable though it be, resembles the distinctions in America between white and coloured people.

The habit of immoderate drinking which prevailed in the colonial towns was not by any means confined to the men, nor even to those women, only, who were chafed by social inequalities. We had lived but one fortnight in our Australian parsonage before learning how rare it was to find a woman, amongst our poorer neighbours, of whom it could be said that she was habitually sober. An old resident whom I asked to recommend me a washerwoman,