Explore "Sydney Cove" by J.H.M. Abbott on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE sun was shining through the open flap of his tent when Patrick woke in the morning, with the strange, absurd guffawing and cackling of kookaburras in his ears, and the pleasing sight of Mr. Owen Morgan polishing his boots outside, in his eyes. For a few moments he lay wondering why he had a feeling of depression and discontent--that unpleasant sense of something wrong that is a bad beginning of the new day--and then he remembered his interview with the Governor.
He turned over on to his back, and gave a little groan. Poor Mary! Perhaps the only virtuous convict woman--or one of the very few--in the Settlement. It was hard that his Excellency should be possessed of a fear that she, of all of them, was leading him astray, and causing him to be regarded as one who set a corrupting example to the innocent lambs of this chaste community. The very irony of it made him smile ruefully. "The woman Mortimer," Phillip had said, as though she were some common, notorious drab, whose cheapness was every man's jest, and whose name was a synonym for looseness. Good God--that angel!