where, as I have already stated, I enjoyed in my Western Victorian
travels the squatting hospitalities.

Let me add just one more incident of the Henty family, one personal to
myself, but in quite a different direction from the above. Once, on a
special occasion, I met the banker, Charles, who had stuck to his
profession at Launceston, instead of adventuring across the Straits with
his brothers. Besides his quiet banking vocation, he was, I think, the
portliest of the family, which may be the explanation. The occasion was
a public dinner to the Anti-Transportation League delegation, sent from
Melbourne, in 1852, to stir up the cause at the Van Diemen's Land
fountain head of the common evil, and of which delegation my lately
deceased old friend Lauchlan Mackinnon and myself were regarded as the
heads. Mackinnon, like many another such vigorous Highlander, as he then
was, could never take a subject of deep interest to himself quietly. We
had had a sample of him already at Hobart, where the feeling as to our
mission was by no means clear, both from the natural touchiness of
convict connection or descent, and from that still considerable section
of colonial employers and traders who thought that the ledger and its
profit and loss account had at least an equal right to be heard in the
question as any other so-called higher interest. The ground, slippery
enough at Hobart, was supposed to be still more treacherous at
Launceston. Had not Edward Wilson, of the thoroughly Mackinnonized
Melbourne "Argus", been but a little before nearly mobbed by the furious
Anti-Antis of this place, to his utter surprise and astonishment at his
own importance, and been only saved, in life or limb perhaps, by old
Jock Sinclair, who was timely on the spot, and who dexterously led him,
by a roundabout, to safety within the departing steamer for Melbourne?
In short, a row was more than half expected from the Mackinnon speech,
and as this was undesirable, for good reasons to all sides of Launceston