'While at Nanima I constantly saw one of these, named Jemmy, a
remarkably fine man, about twenty-eight years of age, who was the
'model Christian' of the missionaries, and who had been over and
over again described in their reports as a living proof that, taken
in infancy, the natives were as capable of being truly christianised
as a people who had had eighteen centuries of civilisation. I confess
that I strongly doubted, but still there was no disputing the apparent
facts. Jemmy was not only familiar with the Bible, which he could
read remarkably well, but he was even better acquainted with the more
abstruse tenets of christianity; and so far as the whites could see,
his behaviour was in accordance with his religious acquirements. One
Sunday morning I walked down to the black fellows' camp, to have
a talk with Jemmy, as usual. I found him sitting in his gunyah,
overlooking a valley of the Macquarrie, whose waters glanced brightly
in the sunshine of the delicious spring morning. He was sitting in a
state of nudity, excepting his waistcloth, very earnestly reading the
Bible, which indeed was his constant practice; and I could see that
he was perusing the Sermon on the Mount. I seated myself, and waited
till he concluded the chapter, when he laid down the Bible, folded
his hands, and sat with his eyes fixed abstractedly on his fire. I
bade him 'good morning,' which he acknowledged without looking up. I
then said, 'Jemmy, what is the meaning of your spears being stuck
in a circle round you?' He looked me steadily in the eyes, and said
solemnly and with suppressed fierceness, 'Mother's dead!' I said that
I was very sorry to hear it; 'but what had her death to do with the
spears being stuck around so?' 'Bogan black-fellow killed her!' was
the fierce and gloomy reply. 'Killed by a Bogan black!' I exclaimed:
'why, your mother has been dying a fortnight, and Dr. Curtis did not
expect her to outlive last night, which you know as well as I do.' His
only reply was a dogged repetition of the words: 'A Bogan black-fellow
killed her!' I appealed to him as a Christian--to the Sermon on the
Mount, that he had just been reading; but he absolutely refused to
promise that he would not avenge his mother's death. In the afternoon
of that day we were startled by a yell which can never be mistaken by
any person who has once heard the wild war-whoop of the blacks when
in battle array. On marching out we saw all the black fellows of the
neighbourhood formed into a line, and following Jemmy in an imaginary
attack upon an enemy. Jemmy himself disappeared that evening. On the
following Wednesday morning I found him sitting complacently in his
gunyah, plaiting a rope of human hair, which I at once knew to be that
of his victim. Neither of us spoke; I stood for some time watching him
as he worked with a look of mocking defiance of the anger he knew I
felt. I pointed to a hole in the middle of his fire, and said, 'Jemmy,
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