not more than thirty or forty thousand inhabitants. Described in station parlance, it was well grassed and lightly stocked. As a matter of fact there was a good deal of grass in the streets, and between Macquarie Place, which was our first location, and the Domain, the little Alderney cow, which had accompanied us on the ship, was able to pick up a good living. She and other vagrom milch kine often eluded the vigilance of the sentry, at the entrance to the Domain, where they revelled in the thick couch-grass; to be turned out at the point of the bayonet when discovered. Much of the city is changed; but much remains unchanged. Our first abode was a moderate-sized house in Macquarie Place. It possessed a second story and a garden, standing next to a tall, narrow building, occupied by Mr. Harrington, an eminent civil servant of the pre-parliamentary régime, later on Griffiths Fanning's office. Messrs. Montefiore, Breillat, and Co. possessed the corner house with its walled enclosure, taking in the angle of Bent Street, with a frontage also to O'Connell Street. The wall, the house, and the store still stand, unaltered in half a century. Mr. Dalgety, then himself a junior clerk, might be seen walking to and fro from the wharves, inspecting cargo, note-book in hand. Think of that, young gentlemen in like positions, and ponder upon the mercantile monarchies which have been (and may still be) reached by perseverance, financial talent, and prudent ambition!
Chief-Justice and Mrs. Forbes, with their family, inhabited a large stone house on the opposite side of the street, also surrounded by a wall. It now forms a portion of the Lands Office buildings. Archdeacon Cowper lived on the other side, now New Pitt Street, a grass plot with two large cedars being in front of the house.
Sydney must have been then not unlike in appearance to one of the larger country towns, Bathurst or Goulburn, save and excepting always its possession of the unrivalled harbour and that fragment of Eden the Botanic Garden. There we children walked in the mornings of our first summer in Sydney. The grateful freshness of the air, the beauty of the overhanging trees, the vision of blue water and white-winged skiffs seen through flower thickets, still remains among my childhood's fairest memories.
At the back of our garden rose a stone wall, which supported the higher level of the allotments fronting O'Connell
