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When they arrived in the town, the novelty
of their appearance and their story soon drew
about them all the idle babbling people that are
usually found in such a place. Their curiosity
was still more annoying than that of the savages.
They had to repeat their story a hundred times.
At first there was a show of much sympathy, and
they received a great number of invitations to
partake of the hospitality of various considerable
citizens. They were gazed at as lions. They
ascertained that a thousand different editions of
their story went abroad. Most of the people
entertained precisely the same apprehensions
with Mr. Clenning, touching the reception he
would probably receive from the father of his
wife. Almost every one repeated that it was a
shame that such people should not be supplied
with money, whether the loaners ever recovered
it from Mr. Wellman or not. The profligate
drew hopes from the extreme beauty and destitute
condition of his wife. The excitement and

sympathy thus manifested soon passed away, and
left the inhabitants to the natural callousness and
hardness of heart, and avarice, that are generally
prevalent in a new place, with a character like
that of Sidney Cove. They soon found the generous
professions, that were so frankly made to
them on their arrival, vanishing into thin air;
and they would actually have come from the
abundance of their solitary island to want bread
in the midst of their own people, had not one man
of real generosity and sympathy appeared, who,
moved by hearing their case, unsought and unsolicited,
came forward, and offered them the loan
of one thousand dollars, to be repaid by Mr.
Wellman, when they should arrive in England.
Augusta had spent two days in tears, and in
apprehensions that admit of no description,
amidst the cold and grim looks of the people of
the place where they had taken temporary board.
They did not explain all their straits to Rescue;
but her intuitive sagacity partly comprehended
the case; and she began a kind of rude pastoral
ditty, so often repeated afterwards, about the
comfort of their green island, and the meanness
and hardness of heart manifested by what she
phrased the bad white peoples.

With this opportune offering of benevolence,
Mr. Clenning hastened home to his disconsolate
wife and faithful servant. “Courage,” said he,
“my dear Augusta. God and man have not yet

forsaken us.” Their bill was paid. Their landlady
became meanly submissive and annoying
in her officiousness. Better apartments were
taken, and these people of such strange fortunes
were at once enjoying themselves in society.
Nothing in their new condition furnished them
with more amusement than the wonder and
curiosity of Rescue, in a region, which was, of
course, all a land of unexplored wonders. Sidney
Cove was a new and thriving place. Living was
very expensive, and there was no such feeling as
confidence between man and man. Nothing
struck her with more surprise than the folly of
making subsistence, and every thing, depend
upon the possession of such little round pieces of
metal as dollars; which, she affirmed, were of no
manner of use, except to furnish playthings to the
little Augusta. The utility and value of money
were things altogether beyond her apprehension.
The hardened and insensible character inspired
by avarice, impressed her with settled and unutterable
dislike. Her thoughts were incessantly
occupied in unfavourable comparisons between
the hard modes of subsistence there, and the
exuberance of the pleasant island they had left.
Nevertheless, when a vessel about that time
sailed for the island, to bring away the remains
of the wreck of the Australasia, left at the grotto,
and she was offered a passage back there, she
utterly refused, unless her master and mistress
would accompany her. As soon as she found
how indispensable was money to subsistence,
with her own peculiar goodness of heart and
docility of character, she immediately put herself
in earnest to learn the duties of her new position;
and her master was at once astonished and affected
to learn, that during the period that intervened
before they had obtained the loan of
money, she had hired herself in the intervals of
labour and nursing at home, to attempt to gain
some of those dollars that she found so necessary
to subsistence.

Mr. Clenning and his wife were soon modestly,
but respectably, provided with all that was
necessary for propriety of appearance, conformable
to their uncertain expectations. He had
much feared the effect of the return to society
upon the tastes and wishes of his wife. It gave
him inexpressible satisfaction, to observe that
she was considerate; and in all her arrangements,
rather looked to their present means, than to the
inclinations inspired by her former condition.
“Now,” said he, as he made this discovery,
“Augusta, you have done that in society, which
I had thought impossible: you have inspired me
with increasing love and admiration, in discovering
that you are as considerate and wise, as you
were always lovely.”

The beauty and expectations of his wife gave
them an easy and immediate introduction to the

best society in that place and vicinity. They
found the new and strange arrangements of
society, the country itself, and its natural productions
still more whimsical and striking, than
they had expected to find it. In the island which
they had left, they had seen but few things out
of the common analogies of nature except the
structure of the kangaroo, and the singular plumage
and form of some of the larger birds. Here
every thing was out of any nature that they had
ever yet contemplated; and the dame seemed to
have wrought in her wildest frolics. Most of
the trees were nearly branchless like masts, and
as hard, and almost as heavy, as iron. The
kind of trees most precious and valuable in
other countries, as useful for the most beautiful
cabinet work, were here annoying from their
abundance; while trees of common use for
timber were scarce. Here were birds without
wings or feathers, of the size of a deer, and
covered with hair instead of plumage. Here
were four footed beasts, with the beaks of birds,
black swans, and white eagles; ferns, nettles, and
weeds growing to the size of trees; rivers, whose
sources were in the sea, and their outlets in the
interior swamps; here were moles that laid
eggs, wooden pears, and cherries with the stones
upon the outside of the cherry. In fact, to describe
all the amusing vagaries of nature here,
would have been to describe almost every
natural, animal, and vegetable production in the
country.

The character of the people was, if possible, a
thousand times more outré and whimsical than
the aspect of physical and animal nature. Here
women and children so beautiful, that in other
countries they would have been objects of general
admiration, were so common as no longer
to excite interest or surprise. Most of the former
had been prostitutes, and the latter illegitimate.
They were regularly introduced, first to the assemblies
of the immaculates; for here the grades
of society are obliged to be marked by the most
palpable distinctions, and separated by the most
inaccessible barriers. The high birth and former
standing of Augusta, gave her husband a
reflected lustre; and they received every desirable
attention from all classes of society. Her
appearance and manners won her unbounded
admiration. It was plain to perceive, that this
order of things strongly tended to awaken habits
and feelings, which had been extinct for years;
and which her husband fondly hoped had been
radically extirpated. But the moment it came
to her ear, which it shortly did, that she was considered
as having sacrificed herself in being
united to her husband, and that she was the object
of improper hopes and pursuit by some of
the profligate adventurers there; that they supposed
they might find advantages in her estimation,

on account of their birth and bearing, in
comparison of her husband; from that moment
the disgust of a naturally virtuous and innocent
mind, produced a recoil of horror and disgust,
in reference to the society, and an earnest disposition
to fly from the country for England.

The comments that would be naturally made
by the dissipated and licentious, upon the manner
in which the courtship and marriage of Augusta
with her husband, had been conducted, induced
both to desire, that their marriage should be
there solemnized anew with the rites of religion.
Accordingly they were married in the church at
Sidney Cove, with all the rites and ceremonies
of the Episcopal church. Augusta pronounced
her second vows, in presence of a crowd of
spectators, apparently with as much alacrity,
steadiness, and affection, as her first. When the
ceremony was over, and in their retirement they
embraced their dear babe, they felt how much the
mind depends on the associations of publicity, solemnity,
and the force of divine and human ties,
sanctioned by public opinion in making up its
estimates of things. Never had either embraced
that infant before, without feeling an indefinable
something that was wanting to the instincts of
parental affection.

If they could have found amusement in originality
of character, and the view of extreme
beauty without virtue and self respect, and too

often without repentance; they would have found
it in the visits which they occasionally made in
company with their friends among the immaculates,
in the society of the “maculates.” They
visited a ball room, filled with a blaze of apparent
fashion and beauty; and the company had all
the factitious airs, graces, and tone of the highest
and most polished society. Most of them were
reclaimed convicts. Every one had borne in
some way a deep stain. Never had they seen
such an exemplification of the “Apple of Sodom.”
The sensation from the scene was bewildering.
It was a painful labour to force the conviction
on the beholders, that this splendour of beauty;
this bewitching aspect of grace and sweetness;
this vain show of a few hours; gave place, in the
more free and unrestrained intercourse of their
retirement, to all their native habits, and the use
of their gross and vulgar colloquy. What a
history of the “road to ruin” could each one of
these syrens have given! Here the pick-pocket
bowed most gracefully to the prostitute. There
all the maudlin cant of sentimentality passed between
a worn Celadon and Amelia. Each was
ready to furnish materials for the biography of
her neighbour; who, probably, at the same moment
was occupied with some other person, in
rendering the same kind office to her. At home,
and among people of their own class, all calls
for this kind of observance having ceased, the
paint being washed away, the tinsel torn off, and
the clear light of day let in upon the scene; the
whole aspect and character of the people stood
forth in its naked and undisguised deformity.
Then the disgusting slang of the colloquial intercourse
among themselves, was heard. Then
they were the first to ridicule their own assumption,
and acting of decency in private. If these
annals might be stained with samples of their
horrid dialect, their interior language, their terms
of art, and their previous callings, a vocabulary
sufficiently ample and disgusting might be given.
Well and deeply was this maxim engraved on
the minds of Mr. Clenning and his wife, that the
“true is the only beautiful.”

As respected the general society of the colony,
all the elements of bitterness, scandal, heart-burning,
mutual rivalry, jealousy, and distrust,
that are so apt to have an abundant existence
in small, detached, and newly formed societies,
existed here in combinations and forms, and to
an extent that would have been ludicrous and
amusing, if the predominance of evil in the picture
had not thrown over it the aspect of disgust.
“This,” they said to each other, “is not society.
This is not that for which we left the innocence
and repose of our happy island.” Both duty
and hope prompted Augusta to wish to return to
England. She still flattered herself that her
father would receive her graciously, and take

her and her husband home. Besides, they never
forgot that they had a resource from dissatisfaction
and disgust abroad, in the endearments and
privacy of their interior intercourse with each
other. With Rescue and their babe, they took
long walks amid those new and interesting scenes.
In addition to the deep verdure and boundless
extent of the inaccessible forests, that had, until
lately, slept from the creation, undisturbed by
the sound of the axe, there was the interest of
cultivated fields, fine gardens, sheep pastures,
and orange groves bending with their golden
fruit; and this impressive blending of nature and
art, struggling for the mastery on the ruins of
these ancient woods, rendered the scenery of the
country a source of exhaustless interest to the
lovers of nature. The strength and vigour of the
cultivated vegetation cheered the eye, and refreshed
the heart. From these walks they always
returned to their home, satisfied and happy;
with more confident hopes, and more enlarged
feelings, and more adoring conceptions of the
God of nature.

Already had Mr. Clenning touched gently
upon his wish to fix his family finally in his own
native country. He often spoke of it with all
the earnest feeling of instinctive patriotism. So
often, and so eloquently had he compared his
own great and good country with all others, that
he made a firm convert of Rescue to his own

predilections; and in her view, the United States
were the home of all that is pleasant and desirable.
Once or twice these themes had been
urged with a warmth of nationality, that aroused
that of Augusta, and drew from her in turn, a
contrasted view of great, glorious, and unrivalled
England, as it stood in her thoughts. They
were daily importuned to fix themselves permanently
in New Holland. But he had no dreams
of happiness and final retreat, but in his own
country. He did by no means fully enter into
the sanguine confidence of his wife, that her
father would receive them kindly. He thought
it probable that his pride, if not his affection,
might induce him to allow his daughter a pittance
of his wealth, on condition of their agreeing
to settle in America, where he might not be
reminded of what he would doubtless deem his
daughter's misalliance and disgrace. Hence
his own hopes and dreamings of the future, constantly
rested in America. A thousand circumstances
conspired to make them both anxious to
leave New Holland. Of their thousand dollars,
only enough remained to pay their passage to
England; and in that country, there appeared
no chance to renew their means. Nameless circumstances
of disgust were created constantly for
him in the deportment of the people towards his
wife, whom they affected, even to his face, to pity
as a ruined heiress.

They, of course, took a passage in the first
packet ship that sailed for England; and were
traversing the immense wastes of ocean for that
country. Augusta trembled, indeed, and turned
pale at first, at the thought of once more committing
herself to that faithless element on which
she had suffered so much. But they cheered each
other, that their interest and duty alike required
them to encounter this long voyage, and they
mutually agreed, that if they once found a safe
and comfortable harbour, they would cast anchor,
and wander no more. It is true, he often smiled
upon his wife, with dissembled confidence in his
countenance, when his heart ached with the apprehension
that her father would make their
divorce or separation the only term upon which
he would be reconciled to his daughter. Rescue,
too, whose heart instinctively turned towards the
green groves in which she was born, had received
no pleasant associations with the country of
money, luxury and art, and she carried a heavy
heart upon the water. She often gave them to
understand, in her own peculiar dialect, that she
had seen enough of white people at Sidney Cove.
She had imbibed a settled conviction, that her
master and mistress were the only good white
people in the world. “Oh, missee,” she would
say, “good island! Sweet island! Fine trees;
plenty bread-fruit; no work hard; all good; all
happy; no want dollar to keep from starve;

missee always smile. Oh, me wish we stay there!
Bad people at Sidney Cove.” Still in the end
of her lament, the faithful creature always gave
them to understand that she had rather endure
the scourge of living with white people with
them, than live in the perennial freshness of her
own groves without them. These demonstrations
of unshaken attachment from Rescue, the increasing
strength and beauty of their little daughter,
training her to run alone notwithstanding the
rocking of the ship, hearing the delightful lispings
of her first articulations, mutual tracing of father
and mother in the developing sweetness of her
countenance; these joys of innocence, nature
and affection, cheered the long voyage. They
had some gales, but no severe or dangerous
storms. They embarked in December, and in
March they saw the white cliffs of Albion, and
soon afterwards landed on the busy shores of the
Thames, and were added as a drop to the ocean
of human existence, in London.

With a hundred dollars, and Augusta holding
to his arm, and Rescue carrying their prattling
daughter, they entered London in the dun fog
of a March evening. The tall and outlandish
form of Rescue, was but too well calculated to
attract for them a painful degree of notice.
They felt the strange and unpleasant sensation
of treading their first reeling steps on terra firma,
after having been so long accustomed to the

feeling of a ship rolling under their feet. Amidst
the gloom and dejection naturally inspired by
such a scene, through which they desired to glide
unnoticed and unknown, they could not but smile
to witness the keen black eyes of Rescue, wild
with curiosity, glaring upon the multitude of
strange and surprising objects about her. Unconscious
of the object and motive of the laughter
of the spectators, she laughed with them as good
naturedly as if she herself had not furnished
them with their amusement.

To every mind capable of entering into their
condition, no effort will be necessary to paint its
features of gloom and discouragement. Carriages
rattled past them. The glare of wealth surrounded
them. A crowd of busy and bustling people
filled the streets, like the uninterrupted current of
a river. On all sides was life and animation.
Every countenance wore the careless and unconcerned
consciousness of being surrounded with
friends, and having an object and an asylum.
Poor and unfriended strangers from the extremities
of the globe, without money, friends, or
home, and with no prospect of finding a place
in which to lay their heads; they were borne
along the same tide of life with the rest, mutually
gazing, and exciting their gaze. It did not
lessen the bitterness of the contrast with Augusta,
to remember the period when she had been
borne along those very streets, in her gilded

chariot, the fairest, and the gayest of the gay.
The gloomy sky conspired with the natural
smoke and darkness of the city, to add deeper
shade to the sadness of their prospects. As he
felt his spirits sink, and despondency making its
way to his heart, he summoned up all his manhood,
and measured the beautiful and frail being,
whose destiny was so identified with his, and
who required all his energy to enable him to
support her and his babe. Happily she was a
mother; and as they spoke of their prospects, she
embraced and kissed the little smiler in the
arms of Rescue, and declared that she was
sorry for nothing, and found nothing difficult,
or unpleasant. On the contrary, she exhorted
her husband to take courage, and banish dejection
from his heart, that it might disappear from
his countenance.

After much inquiry, and frequent pauses in
the different public houses, before the light of
the day was gone, they obtained in the fourth
story, a little dark apartment, with two beds;
and having ordered a cheap and frugal supper,
they proceeded to devise and arrange operations
for the morrow. During the voyage, he and his
wife had made joint stock of their invention,
and had, after infinite study, and blotting and
destroying a dozen copies, agreed upon a letter
that was to be despatched to her father, immediately
upon their arrival in the city. It gave a

succinct, but clear and impressive account of the
manner in which Mr. Clenning had found his
daughter. It presented an affecting, because a
just and true account of the condition from which
he had rescued her. It proceeded, with guarded
delicacy, to unfold the various motives and circumstances
that led to their union. It gave the
details of their attempt to escape by sea in the
boat; and on the failure of that attempt, their
hopelessness of ever making their escape afterwards.
The latter part purported to be entirely
the statement of his daughter. It dwelt upon the
honour and decorum of her husband, before their
union; and of his entire devotedness to her comfort
and happiness, during all their residence together.
It generously exonerated him from having
originated the project of marriage. With equal
delicacy and tenderness, she described the progress
of affection and gratitude, in view of his
deportment towards her. She represented the
union rather as of her seeking than his. She
stated, that they had been subsequently united by
the laws of the country, and with all the solemnities
of religion, and that in whatever light her
father might choose to view him, in the sight of
heaven and earth, and by all laws, human and
divine, he was the true and lawful husband of her
legal duties and obligations, as well as those of
her affection and her heart. But she conjured
her father, by his old age, by the filial affection
and duty of his only child, by their dear babe,
and by every motive that could soften the heart,
to receive, and bless, and acknowledge his daughter,
as one returned from the dead. Even her
husband, albeit unused to the melting mood,
gave tears to the simple and touching paintings
of maternal tenderness. In short, it was an
energetic appeal to his feelings, at once so true
and natural, so simple and affecting, that it
struck them as impossible that he could withstand
it.

On making the proper inquiry, they found
that her father had arrived in England, and was
now at his usual residence in the city. They
sent this letter, the joint production of their
inventions, to the residence of her father; and he
spent the remainder of the day in such an agony
of suspense, as effectually extinguished the power
to make any other effort, and repressed any disposition
to go abroad, or converse with any one.
Rescue caught the common gloom. Angusta
paced her little dark apartment, alternately
kissing her babe, and looking upwards. A
thousand times they traversed the dark precincts
of their apartment, in alternate paroxysms of
hope and despair. In this manner they passed
that and the succeeding day, neither going
abroad, or having any other communication
with any one, than receiving their frugal meals,
as they were sent to them.

On the evening of the second day, they received
a letter, directed to a person calling herself
Augusta Clenning. It was conceived in the
following terms.

“I should have considered the letter you have
done me the honour to write me, as a pleasant
attempt at forgery and imposition, had not the
resemblance to the hand-writing of my daughter
induced me to bestow some degree of credit to
the strange story which it narrates. If you are
indeed my daughter, that you were saved from
the wreck, as things have happened, I may consider
good fortune or otherwise, as circumstances
may hereafter determine. Whether I am hereafter
to know you as my daughter, will depend
upon a contingency, over which you only have
the control. I am not disposed, as you perhaps
will anticipate, to attempt menance, intimidation,
or command. I shall take a perfectly cool and
dispassionate view of this affair. Were I to
manifest any warmth, it might excite future hopes
of playing upon my feelings, and might lead to
unwarranted hopes, and consequent disappointment.
Neither am I about to appeal to the
dormant pride which belonged to her who was
my child; nor shall I utter reproaches upon the
immorality and dishonour of this misalliance,
which you say you have consummated; nor
remind you, on your own showing, that it was
unnecessary. If the predicament were such as

you state, I know enough of female nature to
palliate your folly. That you extenuate the
ungenerous advantage taken of your misfortunes,
by him you call your husband, only proves that
you are, or would be thought to be, still under
the influence of that feeling, which silly girls call
love. This illusion ought long since to have
passed away. There are few young persons in
this city, at present, so simple as to suppose that
the childish liking, formerly called love, means
any thing more than a word to palliate the conduct
of persons with weak heads and libidinous
inclinations. If you once deemed yourself in this
predicament, you surely ought to have recovered
your sober reason ere this. The person of whom
you speak, you say, has loaned a thousand dollars
at Sidney Cove, on my credit. Now to the point.
The past is irrevocable. But we may operate
upon the future. This marriage may all be
passed by, as a thing that has not been. To
spare your eloquence, I am ready to grant you
that this person has been brave, disinterested,
and so forth. These are qualities of common,
and every day show. Our tars are brave, and
said to be generous. Our soldiers are brave.
Every good little book makes its heroes and
heroines brave and disinterested, and all that.
Thousands of these paragons can be purchased
in our city for half a guinea apiece. But I cannot
learn that more people are born rich and distinguished
than formerly. Now let me whisper
to you, be a wise girl. I will place all that has
happened to necessity and circumstances. Some
of our garretteers may, perhaps, take you up,
and make a tragi-comedy, or a romance out of
you, and you will only become the more distinguished
for what has happened. I will receive
you, asking no questions, nor ever recurring to
the past. The other unfortunate circumstance I
will send into the country. I will either cause
this marriage to be as though it had not been,
or I will procure it to be annulled. I will also
repay the thousand dollars, and do something
for that person, provided you return alone, and
promise me that you will see him no more.
Otherwise I request you neither to write, introduce
yourself, nor importune me, either in person,
or by another. No stratagem will circumvent
me; no eloquence move me. You can well
remember, whether I was easily moved even
when you were the pride of my heart, and my
all. I am neither younger nor weaker than formerly;
and you cannot but recollect that you
never saw me, as a babe, easily affected either to
joy or tears. I have no respect for any one
whose judgment does not preponderate over his
feelings. I am cool, and I wish you to infer
from it, that I am determined. Take time for
consideration; four days if you please. If, after
mature deliberation, you should see fit to accept
the terms, come to my house alone, and be
received by your father. If you still prefer to live
with that person, I shall be happy to serve you
as I would another stranger, that is, with kind
wishes and good advice, but shall otherwise be
to you, as to others, simply,