hymn." The district of Fitzroy-cum-Collingwood may well be proud of the fact of having the two chief Convents in the colony within its boundaries—each placed like a sentinel on the Eastern and Western frontiers. It is very amusing how some of the East Collingwood streets have been named. I am fond of harping on street nomenclature, because I think I see in it an indication of the public taste or feeling of the time. Smith Street, as I have said, was called after the once potent civic magnate— "John Thomas"—and then we have such names as Sackville, Regent, Oxford, and Cambridge, which, when compared with their name-sakes in British Capitals, are most laugh-provoking. We have Easy Street after a long "easy" going auctioneer of that name; Perry Street, but whether after a bishop or another auctioneer, I cannot say. We have Peel, and Derby and Stanley Streets appropriately enough—and the great Duke of Wellington is honoured with a very long street, which, if not "ironed" is always tolerably well metalled; but with execrably bad taste, we have a narrow, lanky, miserable-looking lane, called Napoleon Street, I suppose intended to convey a relative estimate of the military capacity of both heroes. Grim Oliver Cromwell, the gay and dashing Prince Rupert, and poetic Rokeby, are shunted off into an out-of-the-way, and not very salubrious, locality. In another place we have a street called "Gold" where things certainly do not look very golden, and there is a Ballarat Street, which is evidently a nominal relic of the auriferous era—when no people were more bitten by the gold mania than those of East Collingwood.
The region lying between the famous Reilly Street drain and the Merri Creek was bare, barren, and stony, if we except the portion now known as Clifton Hill; and as bluestone began to be required for building purposes, the pick, and the crowbar, and the shovel went to work—and so originated that network of quarry holes that used to be found everywhere here, many of which have been recently filled up. Hence the suburb known so long as "The Quarries," and extending along the Merri Creek and on to Brunswick. The sites of the Heidelberg and Northcote Bridges were the natural crossing places; and the Hill just beyond Northcote Bridge is historical, for it was there Batman entered into his celebrated treaty with the aborigines. It was for a long time surmised that building enterprise would never penetrate to any extent beyond the sickly Reilly Street drain. This due northern region was the most unpleasant of the surroundings of Melbourne; the cold north wind in winter and the hot wind in summer, produced climatic variations anything but agreeable. O n e was either half-drowned or half-baked, and between mud and dust, and wet and heat, you could hardly dream that homes and hearths could have an abiding place there. In a comparatively shoit time, however, the auctioneer's hammer knocked all such imaginings to pieces; the land was placed in the market, and then did not land jobbers reap a golden harvest? The result, as now seen, is that quite a town sprang up as if by magic, and Fitzroy is fast being linked to Northcote and Brunswick. In the nomenclature of North Fitzroy, the Fitzroy Council had their turn in naming after themselves, and the streets are called after a swarm of municipal nobodies. There are a few notable exceptions—for we have long M'Kean running head foremost into little Langton, and phlegmatic George Harker plodding the same way as mercurial Tom Rae. And then, as a sort of royal centre-piece, there are the Duke of Edinburgh's Gardens, while H.R.H.'s distinguished boon-companions, York and Newry, are not forgotten.
I must now rapidly keep moving, and ask my readers to clap on all steam and accompany me across by what was the Prisoners' Stockade, afterwards a branch Lunatic Asylum, and now a State School; and skirting along by the fence of the Necropolis, where some hundred thousand human beings have found a resting place in thirty years, we stand on the highest spot of the palaeozoic hill on which the greater part of Carlton is built. Looking around you, compare it as it now is with what it was not many years ago, when all the country around by the Royal Park and the other Hill of Hotham revealed a vista of hill and dale, well wooded and grassed, well suited for a delightful rambling excursion. The perspective now is an untold treasure, planted in the soil, and cropping up in splendid mansions handsome villas, busy marts, spacious streets, squares, parks, and gardens, and stately churches—all these practical evidences of civilization
"Where flourished once a forest fair."
Carlton and Hotham were once known by the general designation of North Melbourne, and the old Supreme Court building was quite out of town. I well remember when jurymen and suitors, during the
