I duly received your short letter of 22nd January two days after you had left for England. It was a strange, though not altogether a surprising letter; the edge of surprise at any letter from yourself has become ere this well nigh worn off. The Court, you have said, and quite truthfully, upheld in a great measure your [unclear: administration], and therefore any statement or explanation from you appears to be of little consequence, and hardly, I presume, worth bothering about; but to have to confess that you, our highly paid Managing Trustee, who himself sold all the boats, received all the proceeds, who personally kept all the books, which certainly should have recorded if the "Result" and the "Enterprise" was one or two beats, to whom they were sold, what became (definitely, not by guess) of the proceeds, of, I suppose some £1500, or £2000, and further to have become quite oblivious, and also to have no records of what became of the £150 I left with you when I went to England in 1871 to pay our one quarter of the £600 balance then owing on the Bell Award, and for us to find out many years after that quite unknown to us, you had, in contravention of the agreement proposed by yourself and asented to by the four contributors, charged the whole of this £600 to our Residue Funds, and that the £150, our one quarter had somehow altogether vanished. All this would, I venture to think, under ordinary circumstances, be more than a little surprising, and though the Judgment now restores this £600 to our Residue Estate, from which you had, without any apparent reason debited it, yet the Court peremptorily disallowed me the interest on it, which for 25 years I have been deprived of, and as firmly refused to allow our very able counsel (Mr. Sim) even to argue the point.

This letter of yours of the 22nd January assures me "that you would like to help me (and that is not true, Mr. Mills) but cannot entertain any claims by way of compensation." For this crumb of consolation I suppose I ought to try to be grateful, even though it may appear but a poor equivalent for the loss of these thousands and for the very much mental and physical suffering you have inflicted on me. The assistance I requested at our interview the other day was your charitable aid, but a restoration of my rights. I did not intend to hunt for and probe your generous instincts. I wanted you to make restoration for at least a portion of these many thousands your wanton neglect has deprived me of. You say you would like to help, but decline to make any compensation because, as you justly state, the Court almost entirely sustains your administration, and therefore I ought I suppose to bow very submissively to the ruling of the Court, and accept gratefully this half loaf you have spared me and which it consents to me getting. It would, I confess, afford me a little aditional consolation if I could at all understand the Judgment of the Court; I mean if I could understand how it can be affirmed that page 26 the state of our Residue Funds "could at any time have been assertained," when the books and the accounts rendered for riling by the order of the Court, copied from these books of yours, were alt wrong omitting, as I pointed out before, all record of the items of nearly £5000 in the H table, that the I list were all wrongly charged, also that the Residue account contains to this day no credit entries for the £593 19s 8d the balance of the seven or eight hundred pounds paid in December 1869 by Rich, Short, and others, referred to in the judgment in these words "with respect to the items in red ink (those of Woodhouse, Short's interest, Rich's interest, and discounts in excess, I do not see upon what principle they have not been credited to Residue, in my opinion they ought to be so credited," that I should have been deprived of all interest on these amounts for fully 13 years—from 1863 to 1883—because I had not ascertained that these debts were either owing or had been paid to you (how could I? no account you [unclear: eve] rendered me made the slightest reference to them) and by you left entirely unproductive, because, so the Court rules about this "it was quite reasonable that something should be kept in hand (r)(n). What £593 for 12 or 14 years? Then what Lord Langdale said in [unclear: dictun] (a) that Trustees will be held personally liable if they keep Trust funds in hand for more that one year, must be great nonsense, and, at least on this side of the globe, very bad law besides. I venture also to think that Tables N. P. and R. completely and very rudely dispel this defence, besides which, if anything else need be said, the accounts [unclear: you] now render for filing show that every Estate debt was discharged in 1871, 12 years before, and that you held in possession bank shares iron store, and steam boat property valued at fully £30,000, which any father had, if needed, made chargeable with debts. Yet our poor little £593 must be kidnapped and held for nearly 14 years unproductive, out only with the approval of the Court, but as the Court suggests that for this purpose it was so held, while the Tables just referred to show the many thousands that were unemployed, continuously in hand. Nor can I understand why this £593, adopted in the Judgment as Residue as above referred to and duly recorded in the books as interest earned, should be in the end of the Judgment reduced to £309 (t). The difference, I am instructed, is created by you by debiting the larger amount with interest for bank overdrafts! !not a penny of which was for me. In 1879 I notice that my trust funds show a credit balance of [unclear: £2470] not only unemployed and unproductive, but we at thattime debited with interest for bank overdraft in the sum of £122 13s. That means, does it not, interest at eight per cent, for £3000 for six months? For whom? In 1881 they show a credit balance for £423, when again [unclear: we] are charged for bank overdraft for six months in the sum of [unclear: £59] 17s. i.e. eight per cent, for £1500. Who (I think I have a right to [unclear: a] got this advance? I certainly did not, for though the judgment [unclear: he] specifically upholds this, by adopting the £309, yet to me it [unclear: appear] heart-sickening record of injustice and wrong, and for which I [unclear: alone] am made to suffer. But what a picture it makes. Let me [unclear: rougthly] sketch it. First we find £2470 of my trust funds lying in your [unclear: hadn] page 27 dead and quite unproductive, and we are charged with bank interest on an overdraft for £8000 for six months, and later on for £1500 overdraft for another six months. Then our Residue funds in the amount of £2000, have been, unknown to us, misapplied, and for 25 years made by you entirely unproductive for all that period to us, and upon which the Court refuses to allow us a penny of interest. Then £598 of ours is kidnapped, and for 14 years credited to a wrong account, and upon which, too, we lose every penny of interest, and was also found, then it emerged from its hiding place to be shorn down to £309. Am I exaggerating one single word? And then the picture gets the effective back ground, you say, of the approval of the Court. With a little bit of light (?) shading thrown in by you by an assurance "that you would like to help me," and I again say that it is not true Mr. Mills.

But let me roughly sketch another small picture (it only refers to a tithe of the losses you have made me suffer from).

Let me repeat, three pounds eleven shillings and twopence is all the income earned for me from the above enumerated thousands from my father's death in 1869 to 1883, and in 1895, that is, for the following 12 years their entire earnings, under page 28 your administration, amounted for me to £165 11s 9d, that is for 25 years for all these amounts. As all but the N table came under the direct notice of the Court, and were each separately adjudicated upon, their unproductive character being specifically passed in review and were by it upheld and approved of, I cannot therefore dispute that here your administration was certainly, as you claimed, sustained by the Court, and that you were as surely protected by it and held freed from (almost entirely) any liability, and that there can be so far no necessity for you to trouble about questions of "compensation," &c, (those of conscience and morality appear not to be of much importance) for any of these [unclear: appare] great wrongs you have inflicted on me, but again I say I wish very much I could understand it all—I mean why the receipt of these funds of ours by you, unknown to me or Mr. Isaac, and, in fact, disclosed for the first time in this administration suit, should in the unproductive character be upheld and approved of by the Court.

Permit me again to refer to this £598 19s 6d (d) and to the process by which it became so attenuated. First, about £180 (£122 13s Od and £59 17s Od) is deducted from it for overdrafts, not a penny of which was for me. Then I find you took from it in July 1881 £85 14s 3d to cover [unclear: a] debit balance in our "Residue Account," which, but for your misapplication of our funds in this account, should show a credit balance of about £4500 (I). Then there is another deduction of £30. But let me give a copy of the entry from your books:—"1879 January 31st. To Fred, Jones' intent on £2000 as for James Mills' private account, £30." Apparently this means (pray correct me if I am wrong) that you took the use of this £2000 of my brother's for three months at 6 per cent., and then debited my funds with the interest you paid to him for it. I notice also that you made several loans to J. H. H., I presume from my N funds, and received interest from him for them—£89 17s 5d. This is credited to Residue, which should, I think, have made it £680; but after all this it left our original £593, at the end of the deal in 1888 (14 years after), £809 8s 8d, T for which the Court was pleased (I was going to say very pleased, for I feel quite sure it was so) to allow me to get £3 11s 2d for interest whereas had this £680 been invested at 7 per cent. since when you received it in 1869, that is, had you been faithful to your trust, we should have received, at simple interest, not £8 11 2d, but about £1200 from it as income (I am told it is doubtful if yearly rests should not have been allowed), and this is the administration you say the Court upholds! But how strange it all seems. The fining down process of the Squares diagram appears in evidence everywhere; first there is the steamboat property J appendix; page 29 then our Residue Funds of £1000 shown in your figures when you took charge as Trustee—later on Mr. Isaac recovered £3900 from Sydney, which was added to the Residue, all of which, under your control, disappeared like a passing cloud, and after being entirely unproductive to us for 25 years, £4600 of it by this suit has at infinite trouble and expense been raked together from the wreckage you had made, and is now restored (I) to Resilue Funds. Then £5000 of our property (the mill paddock) was beyond question given to the wrong beneficiary. Mr Cook, under my father's instructions in your presence, wrote my name across this land on the will plan (c), and you went to Mr. Cook's office every day till the will was completed to see that these instructions were carried out, added to which you refused a many times repeated pressing offer of £13,000 for my Island Farm, though supported by our approval and strong request in writing. This property is now worth under £3000. And now the "Result" and "Enterprise" and their sale proceeds have vanished and cannot be traced. The £150 I left with you in 1871 is also gone like a shadow; then the £600 you had spared to me (Residue not as yet misapplied) went wrongly at last to pay the balance of the "Bell A ward," B, and now we find that Rich's and Short's £593, [unclear: seceived] in 1869, and which entirely disappeared in 1871, reappeared again in 1883, fined down to £309 8s 8d, with an entire loss to us of income for 14 years, but I am forgetting that it carried with it its tiny bantling of £3 11s 2d. Is this, oh yes, and much more than this, true, Mr. Mills? or is it the dream of lunacy ? for sometimes I have thought ray mind would give way under the strain of the wrongs your "moral madness" has inflicted on me and mine. As for the Court—but I must not forget the sacred injunction, "Thou shalt not speak evil of the rulers of my people "—let me ask this one question : Had you been the legatee or partner with me in my father's bequests would a single one of the above acts have been committed by you? It is quite inconceivable; and yet I think the division shown in the Squares diagram would anyhow have been the final result.

If I have committed the slightest inaccuracy in these statements I again beg that you will point it out to me, and thus give me the opportunity of withdrawing or modifying any of them.

I wish, too, I could understand why I should be deprived of 25 [unclear: rs] interest on the misapplied and now restored thousands of [unclear: due] in Table I previously referred to, the misapplication of which, [unclear: ptio] the Meadow Bank claim, I knew nothing, but had, by [unclear: inacie] accounts sent by you, been entirely misled. Neither can I [unclear: arstand,] as I said before, how such cases as Heard v. Thorno and [unclear: the] Somerset case can be said to apply to mine and govern it" (Pc). page 30 As in the first the Trustees very justly escaped liability, because, [unclear: asf] judgments again and again affirm, the Trustees knew nothing [unclear: of] were in the remotest degree "party or privy" for the wrongs [unclear: Thu] suffered from, (is mine analagous to that?) In the latter it was [unclear: pobi] out by the three Lord Justices' in their judgments that Somerset [unclear: i] statute barred because he was a consenting party to and fully [unclear: cogoii] of all that had been done. Do these cases not, as has been [unclear: authe] tively pointed out, stand out in striking contrast to mine? Nor [unclear: ca] understand in the least degree why, as the result of the loss of [unclear: l] Harbour Steam Company's Ledgers, estate vouchers, and accounts [unclear: i] payments for over £50,000 (none of them were lost in the flood [unclear: i] stated) for neglecting to file accounts as ordered by the Court and [unclear: the] leaving us to grope our way in the dark in our struggle to unravel! [unclear: t] complex account of yours, and for which neglect I am told a [unclear: m] proper statutory penalty is enacted but was not imposed; for all [unclear: this] say I and my dear children alone have to suffer and I cannot [unclear: un] stand it; or why Mr. Isaac, who thinks he never even saw one of [unclear: y] books, should be held by the Court to be chargeable for [unclear: negles] duties (and vicariously, I through him) from the performance of [unclear: wh] my father bad expressly freed him, and the responsibility for [unclear: whi] had no power to clothe him nor did I attempt to do so, and [unclear: with] [unclear: wh]"no Court had the right to invest him." I had in a crude kind way thought that British law was in such cases framed with the [unclear: obj] of affording strong shelter to guard with especially jealous [unclear: care] rights of women and their infant children, and that it was based [unclear: up] the good old-time theory that "Governors and magistrates were [unclear: j] pointed for the punishment of wrong-doers and for the praise of [unclear: the] that do well." I am still further at a loss to understand why [unclear: l] Justice Williams should, five years ago, at a public dinner, [unclear: h] attacked my dear old father (whose shoe latchet, &c.) while [unclear: meai] of his family who love and revere his memory still reside here; [unclear: t] though the apology he wrote me was very courteous, and if not [unclear: s] cient, yet the necessity for it should not have arisen.

I suppose I ought to bow very submissively to the ruling [unclear: of] Court, even though I am punished at every point, for not one [unclear: si] act of wrong doing of either Mr. Ieaac's or my own has been [unclear: in] remotest manner even hinted at; but acting under advice my [unclear: inte] is to yet make another effort to obtain the justice which I think [unclear: I] been denied me here. For that purpose I am induced to follow example which a lady in India took lately, and with complete [unclear: su] that is to prepare a petition, which I intend to have carried [unclear: to] steps of the Throne accompanied with these letters, the [unclear: judgments] other papers, (which I am getting printed for that purpose) and [unclear: im] Her Majesty the Queen, who never yet turned a deaf ear to an [unclear: inj] woman suppliant, to instruct her advisers to investigate them for [unclear: j] purpose of arresting and defeating the effect of this conspicuous [unclear: i] carriage of justice.