Throughout her trials Margaret found in Mrs. Cobbold a constant friend, one who never allowed her for a moment to feel forsaken. The letters which passed between her and her former mistress are preserved, and on reading them one cannot but fail to note how in style and diction the maid had been influenced by Mrs. Cobbold. Margaret continued to write from Australia, and her letters are marvellous when one considers her antecedents and lack of early education. She collected specimens to send to her mistress, some of which were presented to the Ipswich Museum. Once more she was able to save life by an act of desperate daring, from which the men shrank, at the time of a flood. At last, according to the story, “John Barry,” who had prospered in the colony, found that she was there, sought her out, and married her. The last letter published in the book is dated June 25th, 1812, and announces her marriage to John Barry. It contains these words: “Should you ever think fit, as you once hinted in your letter to me, to write my history, or to leave it to others to publish, you have my free permission at my decease, whenever that shall take place, to do so. But let my husband’s name be concealed, change it, change it to any other ... for mine and my children’s sake.” She died September 10th, 1841, in the sixty-eighth year of her age. The book raises problems of exceptional literary interest. In the first place, it was written by a man of unimpeachable character, who wrote with a distinctly religious aim, in view mainly to shew that the heroine after having violated “the laws of God and man” became by “the inculcation of Christian faith and virtue conspicuous for the sincerity of her reformation.” He avers that his narrative is strictly true and based on facts “well known to many persons of the highest respectability still living” and that he himself received the letters he quotes. He has no motive for deviating from his intention to tell the truth except that, as we have seen, Margaret Catchpole desired her married name to be concealed. That the author studiously carried out this natural wish is proved by the fact that a wealthy lady in New South Wales, named Mrs. Reiby, who had left Bury in Lancashire as a girl, was declared to be the true Margaret Catchpole, to her great annoyance, as she naturally had no desire to figure as a “convict heroine.” In 1910 the story of Margaret was dramatised in London and acted by the late Mr. Laurence Irving and his wife. A correspondence thereupon appeared in the _East Anglian Daily Times_ in which it was hinted that Mrs. Reiby, a Staffordshire girl, was transported in 1791 for the same offence of horse stealing.[14]