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Rh fellow kill her," said the fellow; that is, though she had died from a lingering disease, he insisted, according to native superstition, that the neighbouring tribe had bewitched her, and occasioned her decease. Resolving upon revenge, and quite forgetting the practical lessons of which he had been reading, Jemmy waylaid and murdered an old friend, but one who, unfortunately, belonged to the other tribe.

The first account of attempting Tasmanian civilization I saw in the Sydney Gazette of Sept. 2, 1804. It is related that a child was found in the Bush near Risdon, that had been lost by its native mother, and was taken care of by a gentleman residing at Sullivan's Cove, or Hobart Town. "In compliment to his native soil," says the paper, "and in remembrance of the month upon which it was the will of fate that he should be released from a state of barbarous insignificance, he has been baptized Robert Hobart May." In all probability the little foundling was picked up after the massacre of the tribe in May, 1804. The parents had been, perhaps, murdered, and the little one was to be brought up, like a transplanted flower, under uncongenial and unnatural circumstances.

In the course of the work several instances are mentioned of half-civilized Blacks. Few girls were taken into households, for, before their arrival at puberty, their instincts led them to the camp in the Bush, or the tribe stole or decoyed them away. But several persons whom I knew in the island had tried to train up boys.

The children placed at the Orphan Schools of New Town, near Hobart Town, do not appear to have turned out well, though some laudable efforts were made by kind, Christian people to do them good. They could not be happy at the school, and they were not content with their position in a family. However English lads may reconcile themselves with a life of subordinate servitude, it was too opposite to the instincts of the Aborigines, and they fretted under restraint. As a writer in a colonial paper of 1818 observed: "A poor native boy in a kitchen was worse than in a state of solitude; for he had constantly, and the more so as he improved in faculty, to lament a debasement which Nature alone had stamped upon him." Two lads, Joey Tamar and Teddy Flinders, had been placed at the Orphan School at nursing age; but, as they grew up, they were