My proclamation answering Fisher's piece of treachery has been printed and distributed about the town and will appear shortly in the next edition of the Register.
I was rather pleased with it.
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| Hindmarsh's proclamation as it appeared in the Newspaper. |
I was even more pleased with my first draft, but Stevenson made some nimminy pimminy objections to some of my expressions, calling them "admirable in their enthusiasm, but possibly ill advised." And so my references throughout to Fisher as "a bastard son-of-a- whore" were deleted as was a passage in which I suggested that Brown was not to be trusted either with money or sheep. This is a pity, as I felt that my joke that "he would fiddle with either" was particularly witty. But no place for humour, it seems, in official documents and we are the poorer for it.
Fisher, who has heard, no doubt, of my intention to take action against him for seditious libel, has been acting with unaccustomed smoothness towards me. "As smooth as a bucket of snot" as I said to Strangways. (And once again he recoiled in a way that suggested to me that he will find it difficult to find a place in the familial bosom.) Fisher has written to me to assure me that he acted "without the least intention of personal disrespect towards your Excellency, but as a matter of imperious duty on my part."
Imperious fiddlestick!
His only intention towards "your Excellency" is to get rid of him so he can run the colony for himself and to his own advantage. I fear that increasingly he sees himself as a Robespierre - or worse, as a Bonaparte - and hopes to have a republic here before too long.
Well, I helped to defeat the real Napoleon and I have no fear of this poor impersonation.
On a lighter note, it appears that Mad Menge, the German Rockhound has disappeared. As recently as three weeks ago he announced the discovery of a huge deposit of coal under Victoria Square, but since his increasingly fantastical discoveries have been greeted with ever greater scepticism, no-one seems to be taking all that much notice of him any more.
I trace this disbelief back to his announcement in July of the world's largest iron ore deposit in Hurtle Square. A group of investors, certain of making their millions, quickly formed a consortium and began digging furiously, but when they discovered not a thing and had nothing to show for their money save a large collection of shovels, they turned on Menge and denounced him for a charlatan.
I was forced to step in and explain that Menge was no charlatan. Rather he was a Lunatic and not to be held responsible. SInce that time people have simply been ignoring him and letting him harmlessly draw his company salary. I understood that he had been dismissed from the company, but it seems that due to Sam Stephens's ineptitude he was dismissed, but not removed from their payroll.
And now he has disappeared entirely. Perhaps he has gone back to whatever world he came from for I cannot believe that he was of our natural order.
And speaking of the unnatural, Widow Harvey's daughter Harriet has taken her first steps. Mrs Hindmarsh was in a transport of excitement at "our baby walking". I have a suspicion that the lazy pudding has been able to walk for some time, but just couldn't be arsed. I have never seen a child who so resembled a blob of bread dough in my life. Soft, white and shapeless. Broad at the base and coming to a point at the top.
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| Little Harriet Harvey in a skin tight smock. |
I believe that the only reason I have not yet placed the brat in the oven by mistake is that every time I go near her she screams like a banshee from the deepest pits of Hell. And then Mrs Hindmarsh inevitably appears screeching "What have you done to that child now?" as though I would touch it with a barge pole. And then we get "Don't you like the big silly Navy man? Don't you? Don't you? No, you don't! Do oo! Do oo!"
The woman has taken leave of her senses.
I can assure her that the child's dislike for me is as nothing compared to my distaste for the squealing, puking unholy terror.
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