pick out one of my eyes, wounding my cheek-bone with a sudden stab of his closed beak. The lovely bronze-wing pigeons were plentiful then amid the wild forest tracks of Newtown, afterwards Collingwood. Many times have I and my boy comrades stood at no great distance from the present populous suburb and wondered whether we were going straight for the "settlement," as we then irreverently styled the wonder-city. The streets of the new-born town had been "ruled off," as some comic person phrased it, very straight and wide; but there had not been sufficient money as yet available from the somewhat closely-guarded distant Treasury of Sydney to clear them from stumps. However, as in most communities during the speculative stage, any amount was forthcoming when required for purposes of amusement. Balls, picnics, races, and dinners were frequent and fashionable. Driving home from one of the first-named entertainments, through the lampless streets, a carriage, piloted by a gallant officer, came to signal grief against a stump. The ladies were thrown out, the carriage thrown over, and the charioteer fractured. Paterfamilias, absent on business, marked his disapproval of the expedition by resolutely refraining from repairing the vehicle. For years after it stood in the back yard with cracked panels, a monument of domestic miscalculation.
It must be terribly humiliating to the survivors of that "first rush" to consider what untold wealth lay around them in the town and suburban allotments, which the most guarded investment would have secured. The famous subdivision in Collins Street, upon which the present Bank of Australasia now
