long probationary years, he is eligible, if he has any capacity, to take a ticket-of-leave and become what is locally known as a self-supporter. "The convict is now in a sense 'free.' He earns his living in his own chosen way; he lives in a village, in his own house; he farms a little land; he keeps cattle; he can move about unwatched; he can send for his wife and children, or, the far more frequent course, he can marry a convict woman, who, under her own regulations, is eligible for marriage. He can thus become _pater familias_, with a little hoard of his own earning, and differing outwardly in no way from the ordinary villager or properly conducted member of human society. In reality, however, he differs so greatly, that he misses all those things that 'free' men prize so highly. He has no civil rights under the ordinary law, and all the affairs of his life are dealt with by the executive authority. He must live where he is told; and generally conduct his life as he is told; he may move about beyond his village and his fields by permission only; he cannot leave the Settlement; he may not be idle, under pain of a forced return to convict labour. In this state he remains ten or fifteen years, according to the crimes that have sent him here, until the happy day comes when the order for absolute release is placed in his hands and he goes free as other men. "As in the other portions of his life in transportation, even in the condition of self-supporter the convict passes through two distinct stages. In the first stage he is assisted at the beginning with house, food, and tools, and then by exemption from rent, taxes, fees, and other cesses payable by the free towards the common benefit. In the second stage he receives no assistance whatever, but finds the whole of his means of livelihood, and is charged with every public payment which would be exacted from him in his own country. "The women are dealt with on the same lines, but more gently, as becomes the gentler sex. For the first three years the convict woman works in the Female Jail as a mere slave, fed, housed, clothed, and cared for. Then for two years she is treated to the same easing down of severity as is granted to the men, and after a total of five years she is eligible for marriage and domestic service. Assuming that she marries, she joins her husband in his village, where she leads the ordinary life of an Indian woman, but subject to the same disabilities as her husband until she has completed fifteen years in transportation, when she may go free with him whithersoever he may go.