The weather cleared up, and the men in the party were sent to assist the residents near at hand to pull what remained of their maize crops, and when the first day's labour was over, they asked the farmer whom they had been helping for some tea and sugar. He looked at them for a moment, and then answered: "I will not give you a d---- bit; you have stolen plenty of potatoes and pumpkins, and if you don't help me finish the corn-pulling, I'll get your rumps tanned. Since the road party came here, I can't keep fowls, turnips, cabbage, or anything else." This was his thanks, and also his usual way of doing business. One young fellow tried to do the men in the road party a good turn, by killing one of his master's calves for them. But while he was in the act of killing it, the calf bellowed out and drew the master's attention, when he ran up and caught the culprit, and got him six months in irons for trying to do others a good turn. CHAPTER XII. THE FEMALE CONVICTS. "Be to her virtues very kind, Be to her faults a little blind." It was not an unusual thing in the old days to see one or more of the female convicts sitting in stocks about the streets of the Settlement, suffering a recovery from drink. Most of these women were quite equal to their liquor, like the men, when they could get it. The principal drink was rum, and nice stuff it was, too; there was plenty of tobacco juice in it, so that when anyone got two or three drinks aboard, they were in a fairly muddled state. When a man went into an hotel, the cry was generally: "Shout, now, or out you go!" and some of the publicans kept a plate of salt herring on the counter, and it goes without saying that they soon got paid for the fish. Two servants, Polly ---- and Sarah ----, used to be employed at one of the hotels, and the fact that they each had a sweetheart was well known to almost everybody. These two servants were working away in the hotel as usual one day, and there was a good gathering of men discussing different matters not far away. While thus assembled they noticed these two girls at the hotel, and the conversation immediately drifted on to them. This wound up in betting me a bottle of rum that I could not start the two fighting. I at once undertook the contract, proceeded up to Polly, and, pointing to Sarah, said: "She pretends to be a great friend of yours, doesn't she?" "Yes," was the reply. "Well," I said, "you should hear the way that she runs you and your sweetheart down." I got her sufficiently excited in this way, and then went to Sarah and told her the same things about Polly. They flew at each other in a terrible rage, and fought like two cats, then I commenced to laugh and to think how nice the rum would be. But they found out the joke also, when the crowd began to laugh, and it was a good job for me that I could run well, as they each picked up a clothes prop and chased me for my life. I then went and got my rum.