"To get work done, you must feed well; and when the rations are ultimately raised upon your own farm, you never give their expense a moment's consideration. The farm-men usually bake their flour into flat cakes, which they call _dampers_, and cook these in the ashes, cutting their salted meats into thin slices, and boiling them in the iron-pot or frying-pan, by which means the salt is, in a great measure, extracted. If tea and sugar are not supplied, milk is allowed as a substitute, tea _or_ milk forming the beverage to every meal. Though not living so comfortably as when everything is cooked and put down before them, yet it is more after their own mind, while the operations of preparing their meals amuse their leisure hours and give a greater zest to the enjoyment of those repasts. When the labour of the day is over, with enlivening chit-chat, singing, and smoking, they chase away _ennui_, and make the evening hours jog merrily by. Indeed, without the aid of that magic care-killer, the pipe, I believe the greater portion of our 'pressed men' would 'take the bush' in a week after their arrival in our solitudes, before time had attuned their minds to rural prospects and industrious pursuits. "Convicts, when first assigned, if long habituated to a life of idleness and dissipation, commonly soon become restless and dissatisfied; and if failing to provoke you to return them into the government employ, wherein they may again be enabled to idle away their time in the joyous companionship of their old associates, will run off for head-quarters, regardless of the flogging that awaits them on being taken or on giving themselves up--the idle ramble they have had fully compensating them for the twenty-five or fifty lashes they may receive, in case they should not be admitted among the list at head-quarters. Many, too, start off for want of something for their fingers to pick at,--the leader of one batch of runaways from a friend of mine, exclaiming to those he left behind, on bidding them adieu, 'Why, I may as well be dead and buried in earnest, as buried alive in this here place, where a fellow has not even a _chance_!' The chance here wished for, not being the _chance_ of bettering his condition by good conduct, but by emptying the full pocket of some luckless wight! If they can be coaxed or compelled to stop, however, for a _twelvemonth_ or so, the greater portion, even of the worst, generally turn out very fair and often very good servants; cockneys becoming able ploughmen, and weavers, barbers, and such like soft-fingered gentry, being metamorphosed into good fencers, herdsmen and shepherds; a little urging and encouragement on the part of the master, and perseverance in enforcing his authority, generally sufficing.