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 All honour to the settlers of Port Dalrymple! Unlike the soldiers of Risdon, they, a small party in the brush, were not alarmed at the presence of two hundred real "wild men of the woods," but, while retiring, enticed the savages to a conference, and trembled not to hear their war-shout, or see their spear rasping. They gave presents and kind words, instead of oaths and musketry. This was a real victory, and gave the little northern settlement repose, when other places witnessed fire and blood. Twenty years after this, the women walked to the Basin, above the Falls of Launceston, and carried on in peace their laundry operations, while the naked spearmen of the forest looked down curiously upon them from the basaltic wood-crowned heights.

There is another quotation from the Sydney Press of August 26th, 1804, giving news from the Derwent; for at that time there was no name for the colony, although, as perceived from the Sydney Gazette of October 13th and 21st of 1803, the first settlement had been named after Lord Hobart, then Secretary for the Colonies. Even after the name of Hobart Town had been transferred by Colonel Collins from Risdon to Sullivan's Cove, the people most commonly spoke of it as the Derwent, and a Derwenter to this day is the appellation for a Hobart Towner specifically, and Tasmanian generically. This letter from the South gives a slight sketch of our Natives, after a glowing eulogy of the superior climate and soil in the new colony to that of the old Botany Bay region:—

"To its human inhabitants, however, does Nature appear to have vouchsafed her powers with a sparing hand; in point of ingenuity they excel not those of our own acquaintance (at Sydney), with whom in savage ferocity they nearly or exactly correspond. The only discernible disagreement in their barbarous customs is that these go naked, and that those throw the skin of an animal over their shoulders during the winter season."

A venerable lady, who came to Hobart Town in 1804, with her parents, the first free settlers of the first fleet, gave me much interesting information of her early days. Some of her stories may appear in another work. She had heard people express their fears of the wild Blacks, and her mother gave her a caution about venturing far into the Bush, because she might be killed and eaten by the cannibals. At that time the family lived on