"I wish I could say that at the same hour John Bodger was comforting his wife and little ones; sorry am I to report that he left them to weep and complain, while he went forward and smoked his pipe, and sang, and drank grog with a jolly party in the forecastle—for John's heart was hardened, and he cared little for God or man.
"This old, fond love for his wife and children seemed to have died away. He left them, through the most part of the voyage, to shift for themselves—sitting forward, sullenly smoking, looking into vacancy, and wearying the sailors with asking, 'How many knots to-day, Jack? When do you think we shall see land?' So that the women passengers took a mortal dislike to him; and it being gossiped about that when his wife was in the hospital he never went to see her for two days, they called him a brute. So 'Bodger the Brute' he was called until the end of the voyage. Then they were all dispersed, and such stories driven out of mind by new scenes.
"John was hired to go into the far interior, where it was difficult to get free servants at all; so his master put up with the dead-weight encumbrance of the babies, in consideration of the clever wife and string of likely lads. Thus, in a new country, he began life again in a blue jersey and ragged corduroys, but with the largest money income he had ever known."
The second scene is a picture of John Bodger's prosperity in Australia, where eviction and workhouses are forgotten. If Australia had not been open to John as a refuge, most probably he would have become a criminal, or a worthless vagrant. Here is the second scene:—
"In 1842, my friend Mrs. C. made one of her marches through the bush with an army of emigrants. These consisted of parents with long families, rough, country-bred single girls, with here and there a white-handed, useless young lady—the rejected ones of the Sydney hirers. In these marches she had to depend for the rations of her ragged regiment on the hospitality of the settlers on her route, and was never disappointed, although it often happened that a day's journey was commenced without any distinct idea of who would furnish the next dinner and breakfast.
"On one of these foraging excursions—starting at day-dawn on horseback, followed by her man Friday, an old lag, (prisoner,) in a light cart, to carry the provender—she went forth to look for the flour, milk, and mullet, for the breakfast of a party whose English appetites had been sharpened by travelling at the pace of the drays all day, and sleeping in the open air all night.
"The welcome smoke of the expected station was found; the light cart, with the complements and empty sack despatched; when musing, at a foot-pace, perhaps on the future fortune of the half-dozen girls hired out the previous day, Mrs. C. came upon a small party which had also been encamping on the other side of the hills.
"It consisted of two gawky lads, in docked smock frocks, woolly hats, rosy, sleepy countenances—fresh arrivals, living monuments of the care bestowed in developing the intelligence of the agricultural mind in England. They were hard at work on broiled mutton. A regular, hard-dried bushman had just driven up a pair of blood mares from their night's feed, and a white-headed, brisk kind of young old man, the master of the party, was sitting by the fire, trying to feed an infant with some sort of mess compounded with sugar. A dray, heavily laden, with a bullock-team ready harnessed, stood ready to start under the charge of a bullock-watchman.
"The case was clear to a colonial eye; the white-headed man had been down to the port from his bush-farm to sell his stuff, and was returning with two blood mares purchased, and two emigrant lads hired; but what was the meaning of the baby? We see strange things in the bush, but a man-nurse is strange even there.
"Although they had never met before, the white-headed man almost immediately recognised Mrs. C.,—for who did not know her, or of her, in the bush?—so was more communicative than he otherwise might have been; so he said—