(who was premier as well as poet) threw a poetic glamour over the miscegenation, as another minister found in the race the Ossianesque attributes of his own Highlanders. It sometimes, even now, rises into passion: the colonial schoolmaster who marries a native girl will declare that his is a love match. But the chief reason at all times was "the custom of the country." "It was the regular thing," remarked an old legislator, looking ruefully back on his past. Nor is it to be harshly censured. Corresponding to the Roman slave-concubinage which Cato Major did not disdain to practice, it repeated a stage in the history of the mother country when the invading Angles allied themselves (as anthropology abundantly proves) with the native Britons. While making a kind of atonement to the indigenes, it was a solatium to the pioneer colonists for a life of hardship and privation. A higher grade was the concubinage of convictism, which was with women of the same race and was capable of rising into normal marriage. In the early days of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land it seems to have been almost universal, and it lasted for many years. Not one in ten of the officials lived with his legally married wife. In the latter colony it was suppressed by the governor, who ordered them to marry the women by whom they had families. In the former, if Dr. Lang's account of his exertions is accepted, it was put down by the exposure of guilty parties. It was accompanied by other features of a low social state. The public and private sale of wives was not infrequent. The colonial equivalent for a wife, in the currency of those days, was sometimes four gallons of rum, or five pounds sterling and a gallon, or twenty sheep and a gallon; one woman was sold for fifty sheep. Around gold and silver mining encampments nondescript relationships of a slightly higher order arise. They are with free women, though the women are apt to be of the same class as Bret Harte's Duchess of Poker Flat, answering to the Doll Tearsheets of hardly more civilized communities. They often issue in marriage. In mining townships, and even in colonial towns, professional men are to be found married to unpresentable women.