mining; twenty of the leading properties having returned amongst them £6,000,000, and having paid two and a half millions in dividends, while making calls of only half a million. The chief mining here, however, is in quartz. So heavily impregnated with gold is the water in the deep levels of these Victorian mines that the old hands working in them have a superstition that, when exhausted, a level has only to be left unpumped for a few years to be worth working again; and some barrels of water taken from below, hermetically sealed and shipped to Paris, are recorded, when opened after a storage of some years, to have been found to have precipitated several nuggets. Ballarat, which is a most unusually clean and pleasant place for a mining town, is remarkable chiefly for its wide, tree-planted streets and for the municipal lake of Wendouree. An economical town-councillor, criticising a proposal to beautify this lake by procuring some gondolas to float on its waters, is said innocently to have proposed to "get a pair of them and trust to Nature." As the centre of a large and very flourishing agricultural and pastoral district, Ballarat is not dependent on mining alone, but has as its near neighbours the farmers of the forest of Bungaree, as well as being within an (Australian) day's drive of the famous and hospitable squatters of Colac. It was the former whom the present Mayor of one of the municipalities into which, according to Australian custom, the place is divided, immortalised, when he thundered at an excited meeting, during a Parliamentary election, as "Men of Ballarat, and savages of Bungaree!" And it was not so very far from here that a weary sundowner, disgustedly conscious of the failure of his most lurid adjectives to convey the full tedium of his dusty tramp from the one town to the other, started a new vogue in colonial swearing by sand-
