But neither father nor uncle made any opposition when, with a basket laden with wine and arrowroot, and a neat little Bible, bound in brown, my mother took her way to the excommunicated cottage. Her visit was as signal a failure as those that preceded it. Miles Square refused the basket; 'he was not going to accept alms, and eat the bread of charity;' and on my mother meekly suggesting that, 'if Mr Miles Square would condescend to look into the Bible, he would see that even charity was no sin in giver or recipient,' Mr Miles Square had undertaken to prove 'that, according to the Bible, he had as much a right to my mother's property as she had--that all things should be in common--and that, when things were in common, what became of charity? No; he could not eat my uncle's arrowroot, and drink his wine, while my uncle was improperly withholding from him and his fellow-creatures so many unprofitable acres: the land belonged to the people.' It was now the turn of Pisistratus to go. He went once, and he went often. Miles Square and Pisistratus wrangled and argued--argued and wrangled--and ended by taking a fancy to each other; for this poor Miles Square was not half so bad as his doctrines. His errors arose from intense sympathy with the sufferings he had witnessed, amidst the misery which accompanies the reign of _millocratism_, and from the vague aspirations of a half-taught, impassioned, earnest nature. By degrees, I persuaded him to drink the wine and eat the arrowroot, _en attendant_ that millennium which was to restore the land to the people. And then my mother came again and softened his heart, and, for the first time in his life, let into its cold crotchets the warm light of human gratitude. I lent him some books, amongst others a few volumes on Australia. A passage in one of the latter, in which it was said "that an intelligent mechanic usually made his way in the colony, even as a shepherd, better than a dull agricultural labourer," caught hold of his fancy, and seduced his aspirations into a healthful direction. Finally, as he recovered, he entreated me to let him accompany me. And as I may not have to return to Miles Square, I think it right here to state, that he did go with me to Australia, and did succeed, first as shepherd, and, on saving money, as landowner; and that, in spite of his opinions on the unholiness of war, he was no sooner in possession of a comfortable log homestead, than he defended it with uncommon gallantry against an attack of the aborigines, whose right to the soil was, to say the least of it, as good as his claim to my uncle's acres; that he commemorated his subsequent acquisition of a fresh allotment, with the stock on it, by a little pamphlet, published at Sydney, on the _Sanctity of the Rights of Property_; and that, when I left the colony, having been much pestered by two refractory "helps" that he had added to his establishment, he had just distinguished himself by a very