Imagine boots, and they were very
second-rate ones, at four pounds a pair. One of our between-deck
passengers who had speculated with a small capital of forty pounds in
boots and cutlery, told me afterwards that he had disposed of them the
same evening he landed at a net profit of ninety pounds--no trifling
addition to a poor man's purse. Labour was at a very high price,
carpenters, boot and shoe makers, tailors, wheelwrights, joiners,
smiths, glaziers, and, in fact, all useful trades, were earning from
twenty to thirty shillings a day--the very men working on the roads
could get eleven shillings per diem, and many a gentleman in this
disarranged state of affairs, was glad to fling old habits aside and
turn his hand to whatever came readiest. I knew one in particular, whose
brother is at this moment serving as a Colonel in the army in India, a
man more fitted for a gay London life than a residence in the Colonies.
The diggings were too dirty and uncivilized for his taste, his capital
was quickly dwindling away beneath the expenses of the comfortable life
he led at one of the best hotels in town, so he turned to what as a boy
he had learnt as an amusement, and obtained an addition to his income,
of more than four hundred pounds a year as house carpenter.
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