Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/345

 temporary inconvenience to the household, I have always felt inclined to pardon them.

The butler was a smartish young Dublin man, not more than a year out. He behaved well—was steady and willing. The laundress—Catherine Maloney, let us say—a quiet, hard-working young woman, was a valuable servant, worth about fifteen shillings a week, as wages go now. Fancy the privilege of keeping a capable servant, say, for four or five years certain! 'Please to suit yourself, ma'am,' and the later domestic tyrannies were then unknown. However, Patrick and Kate nourished deep designs—made it up to get married; wicked, ungrateful creatures! One fine morning they were missing, and, what was really exceptional in those man-hunting days, were never discovered—never indeed found from that day to this! 'These lovers fled away into the storm.' It would be in 1839, just about the 'breaking out' of Port Phillip. They probably got there undetected. Who knows? One wonders what became of them. Did Patrick grow rich, prosperous—even politically eminent? It was on the cards. They had my good wishes, in any case.

When we migrated to Port Phillip in 1840, a special permit was obtained from the Governor in Council to take down our servants—eight men and two women. The men went overland with the stock, and of course remained till their tickets-of-leave were due. But the women, our fellow-passengers by sea, married soon after they got to Melbourne. It was a 'rush,' in the latter-day goldfields' idiom, and women were at a premium. We might have refused our royal permission to this, but were not hard-hearted enough to do so. We were thus left desolate and servantless, a condition in life much less common in those days than it is now, I grieve to say, speaking as a householder. The men on the whole behaved well. George Stevenson, a clever mechanic and gardener from the north of Ireland, was drowned while crossing the Yarra at Heidelberg by night—a shanty being the fatal temptation. The groom died in the Benevolent Asylum at Melbourne, after many a year of faithful service to us and others. All our men but one got their tickets-of-leave, and drifted away out of ken. But while on the question, I may here record my opinion, that these men and their class generally did an immense deal of indispensable work in the earlier decades of