the great rushes to the Victorian diggings that there is absolutely no excuse for any pretence of superiority on this account in this the smallest of the colonies on the main land. I do not say this out of any ill-feeling towards Victoria, or with the desire to glorify any other colony, at her expense, but simply to point out the folly of such petty and absurd jealousies as have tended to keep the colonies apart hitherto. As a plain matter of fact South Australia is the only one of the seven colonies which can claim not to have had a convict origin. That colony was founded directly from England by a syndicate. All the other colonies were either portions of or were founded from New South Wales, about the convict origin of which colony there can be no doubt. But even South Australia, wedged in as it is between what have been two convict colonies, could not escape the contagion. But, judging from the statistics, Australia as a whole does not appear to have suffered much, now that the bushrangers have been disposed of. The percentage of crime in each of the colonies is lower than in most other civilised communities, and the "convict colonies," as they were called, do not show a higher percentage of crime than the "free colonies." I have already pointed out that the condition of Victoria, during the years 1853-55, was worse than that of any of the so-called convict colonies at any time, so far as the number and ferocity of the bushrangers were concerned, and we shall soon see that Victoria can produce native-born bushrangers as well as New South Wales. Only a few months after the poeans of self-glorification had been sung by the Victorian press over the death of Morgan in that colony, the same papers lamented the fact that while bushranging appeared to have been stamped out in the mother colony, it still flourished in Victoria. CHAPTER XXII. The Brothers Clarke; The Raid at Nerigundah; Deaths of William Fletcher and Constable O'Grady; Murder of Four Special Constables at Jinden; Annie Clarke at Goulburn; Capture of Thomas and John Clarke; A Terrible Record; A Plucky Woman; An Attempt to Escape Custody; "Shoot Away, I Can't Stop You"; Some Daring Robberies; Murder and Cremation of the Brothers Pohlmann; Blue Cap.