Page:Extracts from the letters and journals of George Fletcher Moore.djvu/109

 Rh As to the ladies—I suppose you have hitherto been in the habit of mistaking them for Hottentot dames, and consider them suitably appareled in linsey-wolsey, or "in druggets drest of thirteen-pence a yard;" but our fair ones of the upper grades are of a very different class indeed: but, alas! alas! I cannot enumerate any of the thousand articles which they may wish for, from the bustle (no allusion to the Hottentot ladies, I assure you) to every other appendage of the person:—pray interest yourself to have a well-selected cargo sent especially to them. Among the common necessaries which would sell well in this colony are starch, blue, candles of every kind, glass, flannel, and soap, which now brings (and sold as a special favour) 2s. 6d. a pound.

Masters here are only so in name; they are the slaves of their indentured servants. In my absence, * *  * does nothing, and if I speak to him exit in a rage. I could send him to gaol, but I do not like this extremity, and yet I cannot afford to lose the advantage of his time, and pay 30l., besides diet, to another in his place. Letty, however, continues faithful.

Yesterday, after the adjustment of a boundary line between neighbours at the base of the hills, a singular circumstance occurred, when the last two trees were struck with an axe, for the purpose of making a boundary mark—a jet d'eau issued from out of a blue gum tree, and continued