The settler who remembered Old Cranky’s antecedents was Mr. Walter Daventry, son of a deceased Captain Daventry, who had moved up into the Kakadua district from the sea-coast, where he had first made himself a home. If I tell you something about Mr. Walter’s boyhood, you will get a notion of Australia in the old convict times. This Captain Daventry was a military settler. When Mrs. Daventry, and her son Walter, and her maid Ph?be, went out from England to join the captain on his grant, both mistress and maid thought they were never to know what comfort was again—that they were going, so to speak, to the world’s back-yard, in which all kinds of dirty rubbish were shot. Walter would have preferred India or Canada; people teased him so when they learnt that he was going to “Botany Bay”—asking him when he was sentenced to transportation—how many years he had got—and a good many more such silly questions, which they thought a great deal wittier than Walter did. Still, any change was acceptable that would take him away from the dull little Norfolk town that never seemed thoroughly awake, and its dark, long, low-pitched grammar-school, in which two masters, in cap and gown, nodded over their far-apart desks, and pretended to teach Walter and another small boy, and tried to fancy that they were preparing a lanky hobbydehoy for the University. Masters, hobbydehoy, and small boy all half-envied Walter, in a drowsy kind of way, when one morning he burst into that gloomy old school-room to say good bye. An hour afterwards he was rattling out of the dreamy little town along the Ipswich road, en route for London. The coachman was making his leaders and the off-wheeler canter, the guard was tootle-tooing on his horn; the townspeople stood at their doors and the inn gates, sleepily watching the coach that had come from great Norwich and was going to still greater London, and sleepily waving their hands to proud Walter, who had begged for an outside place, instead of being shut up in the stuffy inside with Mamma and Phoebe and an old gentleman, who wore a bandana under his fur travelling-cap, and got out for refreshment at every inn at which the coach stopped to change horses, munching ham sandwiches and drinking cold brandy and water almost without intermission when the coach was in motion. Walter had a much pleasanter companion in the coachman, behind whom he sat, and who told him stories about the gentlemen’s seats they passed, and gave him the biographies of all the horses, and even let him hold the reins sometimes, when Mr. Jehu got down at a roadside house to deliver a parcel or drink a glass of ale. Walter enjoyed the first part of the journey exceedingly, but he was very tired and sleepy before it was over.
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As the coach swung through Mile End turnpike, the coachman woke him up with a back thrust of the butt-end of his whip, and said,

“Now, then, squire, you can reckon yourself in London.”

Walter just opened his heavy eyes, and then shut them again—not thinking much of the Great City, if that was London. By the time the coach got to its inn, he was so sound asleep again that a waiter had to carry him up to bed. The ride from Norfolk to London, however, was flying on eagles’ wings compared with the voyage from London to Sydney. In those days the magnificent steamers and sailing clippers that now arrive almost daily at or from Australia had not been dreamt of. At long intervals clumsy old tubs of ships and barques sailed for the far-off southern land, pottered about for months at sea, and at last turned up at the Antipodes, seemingly more through good luck than good management. The barque in which our party sailed was named the Atalanta. Walter had often read through the proper names at the end of his Latin dictionary, and was greatly amused by the barque’s flying name when he found how she crawled. She had to put in at Plymouth, Lisbon, Bona Vista, Rio, and the Cape. She was just half a year and half a month in getting from the Nore to Port Jackson Heads.
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Once inside the Heads, however, even Mrs. Daventry and Ph?be picked up a little spirit, and Walter was in ecstasies. Both sky and water were so brightly blue, the islands sprinkled on the water looked so pretty, and, though the trees seemed almost as black as ink to English eyes, the rocky, wooded shores, sweeping down to the little coves and bays, beached with white sand that shone like silver under the glowing sun, had a fairyland-like look. Sydney then had not the fine buildings it boasts of now, but the town was so much more civilized in appearance than Mrs. Daventry and Ph?be expected, and the little country houses, that even then had begun to dot the south side of the harbour, were such darling little nests, that both mistress and maid fell in love with Sydney. Captain Daventry came on board as the Atalanta let go her anchor in Sydney Cove. He was very brown, and he had a long curly beard. He was dressed more lightly than he would have been at home, but still he was dressed, and like a gentleman. A horrid load was lifted from Mrs. Daventry’s mind, since she had half given in to Ph?be’s belief that Master would only wear a bit of ’possum or kangaroo skin about his loins, and that he would carry a spear instead of a walking-stick. As for Walter, he was very proud of the brown manly-looking Papa whom he had not seen since he was almost a baby.
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“Oh, Walter,” cried Mrs. Daventry to her husband, when the kissing was over, “I hope your farm is close by. I used to think that they sent the convicts out here because it was a hideously ugly hole, but this is a love of a place.”

“It’s nicer to look at than to live in,” the captain answered. “What with convicts and emancipists, you’d soon be sick of living in Sydney. No, my grant is some miles up-country. There’s a nasty swarm of ticket-of-leavers round it, but, of course, you’ll have nothing to do with them. And then there are some good fellows of our sort within reach—some of them married, too. What a time you’ve been! I was down two months ago looking out for you. It’s quite by chance I’m down now. However, there’ll be room on the dray for your luggage, if you haven’t brought out a ship-load, and we’ll start home to-morrow, if one night will be rest enough for you. I’ve been buying some horses, and you and Walter can ride two of them, and help me to drive the rest. You’ll be better off than you were before you married me, old lady. You had only one horse then, but I can give you your pick out of a dozen or two now. Of course Walter has learnt to stick on a horse somehow, though you couldn’t keep a pony for him? The girl will have to learn to ride, too, if she wants to get about up-country. In the meantime she can go up on the dray. The bullock-driver is an assigned servant, but he’s as true as steel, and that’s more than I can say for some of the beggars I’ve got.”
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But when the loaded dray was brought to the inn door next morning, with a chair on it for Ph?be, she had learnt that assigned servant meant convict, and refused at first to take her seat. She wasn’t going to have her throat cut with her eyes open, she screamed. The bullock-driver, Long Steve, was a good-tempered fellow, and did his best to calm her.
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“Why, law bless ye, miss,” he said, “I’ve got an old ’ooman an’ half a dozen kids. What call have I got to do any harm to a pretty gal like you?”

But flattery was thrown away on Ph?be. She entreated her mistress not to leave her to the tender mercies of that wicked-looking man, and made such a fuss that at last her master was obliged to say,

“Well, look here, Ph?be. If you don’t go in the dray, you must either stay in Sydney, or walk, or ride one of the horses. Take your choice—which shall it be?”
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Ph?be mounted the dray then, and though it was night when she reached her journey’s end, she was on quite good terms with Long Steve when he helped her off the dray. She had been talking to him for hours, half condescendingly, half propitiatingly, thinking all the time what a capital adventure it would be to relate in her first letter home. In that letter Ph?be made out that Long Steve had committed half a dozen murders, whereas the honest fellow had never committed one. A great many terrible scamps were sent out to Australia in the old convict times, but, mixed up with them, there were men who were far better fellows than many of the people left at home.

Late in the afternoon the Captain and his party reached his farm. “Oh, what a first-rate broad!” Walter, fresh from Norfolk, exclaimed, when the riders had mounted the top of the shore-hills, and were looking down on the lagoon which the farm fringed—a lagoon with thickly-wooded banks, cleared here and there, a little stream running into it at one end, and at the other a sandy bar over which the sea was breaking.
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Mrs. Daventry was delighted at first with her new home. A pretty flower-garden sloped down to the lagoon, and the verandah of the snug one-storey house of brick and weather-board was smothered in passion-flower. The Captain had furnished the house as comfortably as he could for his wife, and altogether it seemed a much smarter, livelier place than the dark old house in the dull, grass-grown side-street of the little Norfolk town where she had been economizing whilst her husband was first doing military duty, and afterwards building this snug nest in New South Wales. There was no need, apparently, to economize now. Beef and mutton were the commonest of things at Daventry Hall. Cream, butter, eggs, honey, pigs, poultry, fish and game were all to be got, to almost any extent, upon the premises. Besides English vegetables, there were pumpkins and sweet potatoes in the kitchen garden. There was a nice vineyard, which Walter mistook at first for a field of currant-bushes; and in the orchard there were raspberries and strawberries and mulberries, pears and pomegranates, figs and plums and loquats, oranges and lemons, peaches, apricots and nectarines, and gigantic rock and water melons. Walter thought of the scanty pennyworths of sour apples that he used to get in Norfolk, and for a week or two devastated the orchard and the vineyard like a ’possum or a flying-fox. As soon as it was known that Mrs. Daventry had arrived, the Captain’s friends and their wives rode over to Daventry Hall, and then there was a round of dinners at the friends’ houses, and then the Captain gave dinners in return, and both Mrs. Daventry and Ph?be were delighted with the gaiety. But when things settled into everyday course, and, as often happened, Captain Daventry was away from home for hours together, they both began to fall back into their old dread of Australia. Mrs. Daventry had been proud at first of having so many servants inside and outside the house, but it was not pleasant to remember that all except Ph?be were convicts. Captain Daventry was a strict, but then not a severe master, and so he got on pretty well with his assigned servants, but in all their faces—except Long Steve’s and his wife’s—there was a shallow, time-serving look, however cringingly civil they might be, that was not assuring.
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Walter did not trouble himself about such things. He made friends after a fashion with the men, and rode about with his father to look after the horses, and cattle, and sheep; the maize-paddock and the potato fields; the clearers, the fencers, and the sawyers. His father soon let him go about by himself, and then he was a proud and happy boy. He could scarcely believe that only a year ago he was stumbling through the irregular and defective verbs in that gloomy old Norfolk school-room. Walter could leap logs now far better than he could conjugate Fio or Inquam then. Of course, his father or his mother gave him lessons every now and then, but that was not like regular school, you know. Long Steve had taught him to crack a stock-whip, and Long Steve’s wife had plaited him a cabbage-tree hat (in those days the lagoon was studded with cabbage-tree palms), and Walter used to gallop through the bush like a Wild Huntsman on his own three-parts blood chestnut Dragon-fly. Sometimes he went out on foot with his little gun, and after a bit he managed to shoot wallabies and kangaroo-rats, and quail and snipe, and bronze-wings, and parrots and cockatoos to make pies of. Sometimes, too, he took his gun out with him in the boat, and shot wild duck, and now and then a black swan, on the lagoon. In the lagoon and the little river, moreover, he caught eels and schnappers, and guard-fish, and so-called bream, and mullet and trout, and delicious oysters. The Captain was very proud of the way in which his little boy took to the colony, but Mrs. Daventry was very anxious because he was out so much alone.
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One day, when the Captain and Walter rode home, they found Mrs. Daventry and Ph?be almost dead with alarm. A party of blacks had taken possession of the front verandah, on which they were jabbering and gesticulating—rubbing their sides and poking their fingers down their throats. Poor Mrs. Daventry and her servant thought that these were signs that the blacks wanted to eat them, and therefore were ready to faint from fear. The Captain soon bundled the black fellows off the verandah, but he made it a point of policy to be kind to them, and so he ordered the cook to supply them with tea and damper and mutton chops. They ate and drank until even they could eat and drink no more, and then remarking, with great self-satisfaction, that they had “budgeree big belly,” they drowsily tramped into the bush, and lay down in the sun to sleep off their surfeit.
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The black fellows were not grateful to the Captain for his kindness. Unfortunately, they had tasted his potatoes, and thought them so nice that they twice saved him the trouble of digging up his crop, and once even scooped out and baked his seed-potatoes. The Captain did not want to make enemies of the darkies, but he was obliged after that to give up supplying them with chops and damper, except when they had fairly earned them by working for them.

Far worse thieves than the black fellows, however, persistently preyed on Daventry Hall.
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All the assigned servants, except Long Steve and his wife, were habitual thieves. They did not get any wages for their work, and so they thought themselves free to help themselves to their master’s property. So many pounds of salt or fresh meat and flour, so much coarse brown sugar and inferior tea, and a little tobacco, were the rations served out to each man every week; but there was good living in the men’s huts for all that. China pigs, ducks, turkeys, &c., mysteriously disappeared. The men made out that they had wandered into the bush, and been devoured by bush beasts and birds, or else starved to death; but if Captain Daventry had gone to the huts a little more frequently, instead of trusting, as he did, to his overseer, the savoury scent that often issued from them would have told him what had become of his poultry, &c. Walter noticed the savoury steam one evening, but the overseer said that he had shot some wild ducks, and given them to the men. The overseer was a convict—a smooth-faced, smooth-tongued rascal. He was trusted to weigh out the rations, and the men used to carry a good deal besides their rations out of the store. The house servants, too, whenever they had a good opportunity, would appropriate unguarded valuables. They had no difficulty in disposing of them, since all the assigned servants, except Long Steve and h............