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We'll grant 'im a reprieve. Fetch that stool, an' sit down beside me there. Now, Mr Sparks, alias Blazes, no doubt you're a precious specimen of hinnocent 'unmanity, ain't you?" Sparks made no reply, but scowled at the boy with a look of deadly hatred. "Well, upon my word," resumed the Bloater, with a smile, "if I kep' a menagerie, I'd offer you five 'undred a year to represent a Tasmanian devil.
This extreme propensity to imitation is one great reason of the amazing sameness which every observer notices in savage nations. When you have seen one Euegian, you have seen all Fuegians one Tasmanian, all Tasmanians.
I take up one, and am soon buried in an article on Tasmanian fauna. It is strange, but whenever I do know anything about a subject, I always find these writing fellows either entirely ignorant or damned wrong. After supper, I took a stroll to see the river. It was a silver grey evening, with just the last lemon and pink streaks of the sunset staining the sky.
It had been the Judge's original intention to have nothing but native trees and shrubs and flowers on this summer estate, and a well-clipped hedge of saltbush at present flanked the drive, and a breakwind plantation of Tasmanian blue gum, alternated with silver wattle, ran for several hundred feet where the westerly winds had at first caught one side of the house.
The Tasmanian who wished to hurt or bewitch any one, procured something belonging to his enemy, and especially his hair; this, was enveloped in fat and then exposed to the action of fire, and it was thought that as it melted, the man himself would waste away.
For the Australian black-fellow must have got there a very long time ago indeed; he belongs to an extremely ancient human type, and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull the Neanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races; while the woolly-headed Tasmanian, a member of a totally distinct human family, and perhaps the very lowest sample of humanity that has survived to modern times, must have crossed over to Tasmania even earlier still, his brethren on the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on when the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast ashore upon the continent inhabited by the yet more barbaric and helpless negrito race.
On the 27th July, 1835, he set sail from Launceston; but the weather was so rough that, after three days and two nights of inexpressible sickness, Fawkner found himself still in sight of the Tasmanian coast. He therefore asked to be put ashore, and left Captain Lancey to manage the trip as he thought best.
Here at the Zoo, besides the opossum, we have kangaroos, wallabies, wallaroos, wombats, and certain other eccentric things, including the Tasmanian devil; but none is a bigger fool than the biggest marsupial, the kangaroo. This is natural, because he has most room to store his imbecility. The kangaroo's general weakness of character is visible all over him.
But it was to her that my own stormy childhood was chiefly confided, at Fox How; it was she who taught the Tasmanian child to read, and grappled with her tempers; and while she is there the same magic as of old clings about Fox How for those of us who have loved it, and all it stands for, so long.
Though he lacked the large grasp, the fertile suggestiveness, of great scientific travellers like Humboldt, Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace, he was curious, well informed, industrious, and sympathetic; and as he was the first trained anthropologist to enter into personal relations with the Tasmanian blacks a race now become extinct under the shrivelling touch of European civilisation his writings concerning them have great value, quite apart from the pleasure with which they may be read.
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