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were detained for judgment, are buried in a dense layer of obscurity, from which it is a task of extreme difficulty to disinter them. After six months' persistent investigation, this mildewed old topic, more intricate than a cluster of spiders' webs, I have endeavoured to unravel in the following narrative, of the correctness of which there can exist n o reasonable doubt. W h e n Captain Lonsdale arrived as Police Magistrate in 1836, and possessed himself and his small convict settlement of the "Government block" previously described, hisfirstbusiness was to provide quarters for himself, and almost the next was to set going the legal machinery necessary to keep his rascally retainers to their good behaviour. It was not needful then to have a Court-house gazetted as such, for the Police Magistrate carried about him the inherent privilege of making a Court when and everywhere he liked, so that if he only had his ink-horn and goose-quill (steel pens were then ranked amongst the " things not generally k n o w n "), his constable, and flogger, he could open his law-shop anywhere sub Jove or sub tegmine, according as his whim or duty dictated. Lonsdale, having billeted himself off the north-west terminus of Little Collins Street, he fixed upon the other side, a little eastward of the Sailors' H o m e , between Collins and Little Collins Streets, as the position of the Police Court. It was something of a " betwixt and between " an aboriginal mia-mia and a roughly m a d e summer-house, formed of wattle-tree boughs and branches, and thatched, or rather heaped over on the top with reeds. This rural retreat had for itsfloora solid substratum of mother earth, and its dimensions were about twelve feet square. T h e entrance or hole for admission faced the rising, whilst a chair or some convenience passing for one, was backed towards the setting sun, and here by himself, minus a clerk, with a kind of rheumatic table before him, sat the C o m m a n d a n t of the embryo colony, " monarch of all he surveyed," the sole representative, judicial and ministerial of the majesty of Britain, dispensing justice to those w h o claimed it, and to others who would be only too glad to escape it. His business was mainly confined for s o m e time to the punishment of insubordinate or drunken convicts—prisoners w h o could only, under the surrounding circumstances, be kept within proper bounds by a brisk application of the lash, and lashed they used to be accordingly. A few yards away from this bower, in the direction nearer to Collins Street, was the guard-house and lock-up, built also of ti tree, reed-roofed, but of more compact and substantial m a k e than the Court-house. This place consisted of two compartments, an outer and an inner division. T h e former was always occupied by a small military guard on duty, whilst the other was the lock, or rather, shut-up, for into this oven the prisoners would be crammed, and secured, but whether by lock or bolt and bar is uncertain— probably by nothing more than the presence of the guard, whose loaded muskets were always on the qui vive to pop off should any confinee attempt an escape. T h e two divisions communicated with each other by a door, very shaky in the hinges, with a circular aperture cut out of the upper half, through which the guard could peep in, or the prisoners peep out whenever they liked. This whole concern was, in 1837,firedby some black sheep-stealers screwed in there, in a manner exhibiting no small native ingenuity, and the entire place went up in a grand blaze. Particulars of this extraordinary outrage—thefirstfirein the colony—will be given when I c o m e to write of the conflagrations of the early times. T h e effect of the arson was to compel a shifting of the lock-up across near King Street, in another hut edifice, placed close to the prisoners' barracks, and where, by a strange coincidence, the West Melbourne Police Station is now located. A guard-room was also put up here by the utilization of a second hut, and the miserable d e n — t h e lock-up— occasionally served as an hospital. Towards the end of 1838, thefirstreal watch-house was erected at the south-west angle of the Western Market Reserve. It was built of stone, from a plan prepared by Mr. Russell (the Clerk of Works), and though a palace as compared with its predecessors, its great fault was smallness. It contained three apartments, i.e., a central room of ten feet by nine feet, as a residence for the keeper, with a cell at each end,fifteenfeet nine inches by nine feet, for the reception of prisoners, and an entrance corridor four feet in width. In 1840, a second watch-house was built at the south-east corner of the Eastern Market. It was on a somewhat larger scale, and in after time served occasionally as a relieving prison, where w o m e n used to be enclosed. It was also useful as a temporary Lunatic Asylum. The Police Office followed the house of detention, and the Police Magistrate shifted the pennant of office to a turf and sod hut, roofed with bark, and pitched about the centre of the Market-square. This Court-house was about fourteen feet by twelve feet, and here Lonsdale "captained" it, until the beginning of 1839, when the establishment of a Court of Quarter Sessions rendered it absolutely necessary to provide something like