look like miniature Mississippi steamers—it often seems I as though one were rushing directly into a cliff, when suddenly a little opening is seen to one side, and another inlet opens out for miles. Each of these inlets is in a way a reproduction of the main harbour; and for boating, or fishing, the waters of Hacking River, George's River, Botany Bay, Narrabeen Lake, Hawkesbury River, and Lake Macquarie, offer further and unlimited facilities. It is easy to see why the professional scullers of New South Wales are ahead of our Britons. A great sculler is a natural product, as it were, of a large expanse of suitable water. Hanlon, the founder of modern sculling, lived in his father's hotel on a small island at Toronto. Beach and Searle never "trudged unwillingly to school." They flashed down the Parramatta in wager-boats.
As the mail steamer glided to the inner anchorage known as Circular Quay, I got a glimpse of a group of men-of-war—the largest of them the Royal Arthur^ the flagship of the Australian station—lying in Farm Cove, with the lovely Botanical Gardens, in the ponds of which bloom the pink and purple water-lilies of the tropics, partly encircling them between two headlands of mown lawns—a crescent of green turf Sydney is the headquarters of our strength in the South Pacific. And besides being the capital of the greatest of the colonies, she is the true metropolis and rendezvous of those pathless seas; the Queen city of that strange half-squalid, half-romantic Empire of the Islands. In her purlieus you may find, beside the lean squatter of the Riverina, the rustic selector from Twofold Bay, or the stunted cockney-looking larrikin of Wooloomooloo, a curious element from the corners and forgotten by-ways of a half-known world;—traders, bêche-de-mer fishers, pearlers, blackbirders, whalers, beachcombers, missionaries, savants, and the heterogeneous rascaldom of
