Page:An account of a voyage to establish a colony at Port Philip in Bass's Strait.djvu/128

( 108 ) wife suckling her infant daughter while his son, yet unable to walk, was amusing her with his playful gambols upon the bare earth. Without answering Zelida's anxious enquiries, he thus addressed her: To procure your liberty, more dear to me than my own, I have, since the moment of our acquaintance, deprived myself of every comfort my state of bondage allows; for that purpose, I have laboured during those permitted hours of relaxation, which my fellows have employed in amusements; I have curtailed my scanty meal of cassada, I have sold my morsel of tobacco, and I have gone naked amidst the burning heats of summer, and the pinching