darkness of our dark past--a page that has long since been closed
down--when innocent men and women were transported to shame, misery,
and horror; when mere boys were sent out on suspicion of stealing a
hare from the squire's preserves, and mere girls on suspicion of
lifting a riband from the merchant's counter. But the many kindly
and self-sacrificing and even noble things that free and honest
settlers did, in those days of loneliness and hardship, for wretched
runaway convicts and others, are closed down with the pages too. My
old grandmother used to tell me tales, but--well, I don't suppose a
wanted man (or a man that wasn't wanted, for that matter) ever turned
away from her huts, far back in the wild bush, without a quart of
coffee and a "feed" inside his hunted carcass, or went short of a
bit of bread and meat to see him on, and a gruff but friendly hint,
maybe, from the old man himself. And they were a type of the early
settlers, she an English lady and the daughter of a clergyman. Ah!
well---

Do you ever seem to remember things that you could not possibly
remember? Something that happened in your mother's life, maybe, if
you are a girl, or your father's, if you are a boy--that happened to
your mother or father some years, perhaps, before you were born. I
have many such haunting memories--as of having once witnessed a
murder, or an attempt at murder, for instance, and once seeing a tree
fall on a man--and as a child I had a memory of having been a man
myself once before. But here is one of the pictures.

A hut in a dark gully; slab and stringy-bark, two rooms and a detached
kitchen with the boys' room roughly partitioned off it. Big clay
fire-place with a big log fire in it. The settler, or selector, and
his wife; another man who might have been "uncle," and a younger