concerns in a girl's life, but it was not the case with me. I had only
two offers of marriage in my life, and I refused both. The first might
have been accepted if it had not been for the Calvinistic creed that
made me shrink from the possibility of bringing children into the world
with so little chance of eternal salvation, so I said. "No" to a very
clever young man, with whom I had argued on many points, and with whom,
if I had married him, I should have argued till one of us died! I was
17, and had just begun to earn money. I told him why I had refused him,
and that it was final. In six weeks he was engaged to another woman. My
second offer was made to me when I was 23 by a man aged 55, with three
children. He was an artist, whose second wife and several children had
been murdered by the Maoris near Wanganui during the Maori insurrection
of the forties, and he had come to Adelaide with the three survivors.
The massacre of that family was only one of the terrible tragedies of
that time, but it was not the less shocking. The Maoris had never been
known to kill a woman, and when the house was attacked, Mr. Gilfillan
got out of a back window to call the soldiers to their help. Though
struck on the back of the head and the neck and scarred for life--owing
to which he was always compelled to wear his hair long--he succeeded
in his mission. His wife put her own two children through the
window, and they toddled off hand in hand until they met their father
returning with the soldiers. The eldest daughter, a girl of 13, escaped
with a neighbour's child, a baby in arms. She was seen by the Maoris,
struck on the forehead with a stone axe, and left unconscious. The
crying of the baby roused her, and she went to the cowyard and milked a
cow to get milk for the hungry child, and there she was found by the
soldiers. She was queer in her ways and thoughts afterwards, and, it
was said, always remained 13 years old. She died in November last, aged
74. Her stepmother and the baby and her own brother and sister were
murdered one by one as they tried to escape by the same window that had