“I had not been more than two or three weeks in Hobart Town, when I was assigned as a crown servant to a worthy gentleman--Mr. Allen--with whom I lived, until it pleased God to call him away from this life: I served him faithfully, and he treated me more like a relation than a slave. He failed in business as a merchant a year before his death, and I believe it preyed upon his mind. He left scarcely any property behind him, but what there was, he willed to me:--seventeen pounds was all that remained after the whole of his things were sold by auction, and his funeral expenses paid. This sum fell to me. I was very happy while Mr. Allen lived; but after that, I began to think of obtaining my liberty, in order to return home to this country, for there was nobody I cared about in the colony. I was applied to by a Mr. M’Carthy, to undertake the overseeing of his land; and I accepted the offer. I had my choice of places; for old Jack Worral--that’s my name--was well respected by every free settler in the country. Shortly after my going to Mr. M’Carthy’s, the Bush-rangers became very troublesome: there was a gang of them--about seven-and-twenty--out in the woods and wild country; and they used to come down of a night and plunder the settlers of everything--neither cattle nor corn, nor house, was secure from their depredations. Mr. M’Carthy had a fine schooner lying in the Derwent, loaded with goods; he feared that the Bush-rangers would plunder her; for his neighbour, a Mr. Carlisle, had been recently robbed by them, and he, himself, had seen some of them shooting kangaroos on the banks of the river. He therefore mentioned to me, that he would like to form a party to go in pursuit of them. I volunteered to be one; for although then near sixty years of age, I could manage the best of them. Several of the neighbours instantly joined:--there were Mr. Triffit, and Murphy, and Jemmot, and Brown, and Carlisle, and Tooms, and Hacking, and O’Berne, the master of our schooner, the Geordy, and three or four sailors. Every man had a fowling-piece or a musket--some had also pistols, and swords, and bayonets. We started on the track of the Bush-rangers, just an hour before sunrise, of a beautiful twilight-night, in the latter end of spring: our direction was towards the centre of a space, between two high hills, which was about three miles away, and where there was an open valley on the banks of a small river: we used to call it the fairy’s valley, on account of the little patches of green pasturage which every where appeared through the thick and matted brushwood?]--for you know it is said, that these are the spots where the _good people_[18] dance of a moonlight night.