"Had I acted as many of the very worst convicts are in the habit of doing--that is, fawning upon the overseers--I might have regained my liberty in two years and a half; but I never could crawl, or play the hypocrite; and all the less so, that I knew my sentence was unjust. Neither could I allow the ill-usage of others to pass without complaint; and frequently did I complain. For doing this, I had to serve the full term of my sentence, while others, much worse than myself, by using a little deception, obtained their liberty on `tickets-of-leave.' "After the term of my transportation had expired, I was no better than most of the `old hands.' If I have not committed all the crimes of which many of them are guilty, the reason is, that I had not the temptation: for, I acknowledge, that I have now completely lost the moral power to restrain me from crime. "I happened to be free when gold was discovered in New South Wales; and, of course. I hastened to the place. After the discovery of the richer diggings here, I came overland to try them. "In my gold seeking, I cannot complain of want of success; and I have not spent all that I have made. "I am thinking of going back to England--although my visit to my native country cannot be a very pleasant one. I have, probably, some brothers and sisters still living; but, notwithstanding the strong affection I once had for them, they are nothing to me now. All human feeling has been flogged, starved, and tortured out of me. "Sometimes, when I reflect on the degradations I have endured, I am ashamed to think of myself as a human being. "When I look back to the innocent and happy days of my boyhood--of what I aspired to be--only an honest, respectable, hard-working man, when I contrast those days, and those humble hopes, with the scenes I have since passed through, and my present condition--my back scarred with repeated floggings, and my limbs marked by the wear of iron fetters--I am not unwilling to die. "I am glad to learn that a change has been made in the mode of punishing crime in the mother country. It has not been done too soon: for, bad as many of the convicts are--who are transported from the large cities of the United Kingdom--they cannot be otherwise than made worse, by the system followed here. A convict coming to this country meets with no associations, precepts, or examples, that tend to reform him; but, on the contrary, every evil passion and propensity is strengthened, if it has existed before; and imbibed, if it has not.