wiching his oaths. He had walked all the (bloomin') way, he said, from Dim-(dam)-boola to Warrackna(bloomin')-beal. The Botanical Gardens are decorated with marble statuary, bequeathed to the city, for the most part, by mining speculators. One group, the Flight from Pompeii, by Benzoni, cost over £4000.
A journey of about sixty miles further lands one in Melbourne, one of the two principal cities south of the Equator. It was named after Lord Melbourne, who was Prime Minister of England at the time it was founded, in the year 1836. It had then only a handful of enterprising settlers, and its remarkable growth has been one of the wonders of the century; for in fifty years it has developed into a city of nearly half a million inhabitants, with property of the net annual value of £15,000,000. The latest estimate, for 1897, gives the population of Melbourne and suburbs at 458,610 (as against Sydney's 417,250). During the boom period of a few years ago it rose to 470,000. But the burst of the land boom was followed by the reconstruction of the Banks: and it will be long before rents, even near the centre of the city, recover themselves, for the simple reason that its suburbs are full of empty houses and shops.
One of the first things that struck me in Melbourne was the splendid means of communication, throughout the whole place, in its system of tramways, the best, and the most costly, in the world; far superior to anything we can show in England, and only paralleled by the similar system in San Francisco. We are not likely to see anything like it in England, in any case. For this was an extravagant luxury of the boom times; and both Sydney and Perth, in choosing their new tram systems, have bowed to the demonstrated fact that electricity, while nearly as good, is much cheaper than
