not altogether uneducated; but he could not have had many chances in that direction, otherwise the facility with which he educated himself in life’s practical work after he had reached manhood would have told for him as a schoolboy as well.  In business, in public speaking and debating, and in public life in general, he took successfully a first part; but when he had to condescend to such schooling products as writing and spelling, he made confessedly only a bad second.  But, again, a defect of this kind is much less of an obstacle in new colonies than in old societies, because for generations in the former the hand is relatively more important to progress than the head, and the man of work than the man of thought.  In colonies men of great natural parts, if ambitious, can usually take good positions even if but little educated.  At Home this is hardly possible, and the consequent social distemper is there a danger to the State—­a danger, however, which our Education Acts since 1870 must be steadily removing.

I happened, on one occasion, to meet Nicholson’s home employer in Liverpool.  He had been foreman, if indeed so high as that, in a warehouse.  When he told his employer that he had made up his mind to go to Port Phillip with his family, there was regret to part with so quiet and trustworthy a servant, but, as he said to me, not the least idea that the unpretending individual before him would, within a few years, take a position considerably in advance of his own.

He set up a grocery shop in Melbourne, and was soon on the road to success.  Then he stood for the municipality, which was hardly yet out of infancy, was duly elected councillor, and in a very few years became Mayor of Melbourne.  Then, gliding easily onwards and upwards, he entered the young colonial Legislature of 1851, as member for the Metropolitan County, North Bourke.  He had previously, as I have told, tried unsuccessfully for the capital itself, getting some compensation, however, in the “next first.”  But with all this rising importance he was ever the plain, unassuming William Nicholson, and when Mayor or M.L.C. both he and his wife would be found in their shop as usual—­so far, at least, as the other crowding duties would permit.

When he formed his first and very brief Ministry, under Constitutional Government, prior to my definitely leaving the colony in 1857, he did me the honour to invite me to a place in his “Cabinet,” if our young colonies may use that grand Imperial term, as his Commissioner of Customs.  With regret I was compelled to decline; for, from experience a few years before, I had found that if a man has business of his own which he must attend to he cannot possibly at the same time attend to that of everybody else.