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very respectable townsman was treated to a broken collar-bone, by being jerked from his trap into the highway, and just stopped short of a coroner's inquest. T h e washerwomen, and the half-dozen police then in existence, were on the best of terms and seemed to understand each other thoroughly; so the ladies were allowed to have a good deal their own way. Elizabeth and Swanstons Streets were shallow gullies, with deep and dangerous ruts every twenty yards. Flinders Street was a swamp, and even Collins Street was so slushy and sticky, that often to cross over from any portion of the n o w well-flagged and fashionable " Block" one required to be equipped in a pair of leggings or long mud-boots. Horse-power was useless in m a n y places, bullock teams being chiefly the order of the day, and some of the most dangerous " hoggings " of the cumbersome vehicles of the time happened at the intersections of Collins and Queen, and Elizabeth and Bourke Streets. In two of the localities of greatest traffic now, there were then twofissuresrunning towards and discharging into the Yarra, which for some years were known as the rivers T o w n e n d and Enscoe. T h e former starting from near the junction of Collins and Elizabeth Streets, some thirty-six feet above sea level, took its n a m e from a fat, comfortable-looking grocer w h o long did business in a little shop at the south-west corner; whilst the other propelled its waters along near the north-west corner of William and Flinders Streets, and was designated after one of the limbs of a mercantile firm having a counting-house there. Such was the condition of Elizabeth Street in winter, that it was seriously proposed to put on a punt or two there for the transit of goods and passengers ; but the project was regarded as unworkable. In one of the newspapers of the day this advertisement a p p e a r s — " T H E S T R E E T S — W a n t e d immediately one thousand pairs of stilts for the purpose of enabling the inhabitants of Melbourne to carry on their usual avocations— the m u d in most of the principal thoroughfares being now waist deep." Stilts would be about as useless as walking-sticks for the purpose indicated, and the notice, though a skit, did not very m u c h overrate a condition of affairs which n o w appears simply incredible. O n e of the earliest popular delusions was a belief that Little Flinders Street would be the best business part of the town, Collins, Elizabeth and Bourke Streets being merely second, third, and fourth fiddles. Swanston Street was little thought of, and all the other streets except portions of William and Flinders Streets, as business places, were completely out of the running. There was, consequently, a desire to secure building sites in the western quarter of Little Flinders Street; and h o w the longest heads m a y sometimes be foiled in their calculations is amusingly exemplified by this incident:—Mr. W . F. Rucker, deemed a shrewd and wide awake m a n for his generation, owned as part-purchaser with J. P. Fawkner, the allotments of land about the corner of Collins and Market Streets, upon part of which the Union Club Hotel is n o w built. T h e purchase took in frontages to Collins, Market and Little Flinders Streets, and when it came to a division of the property, Rucker thought he had done a very clever trick when he persuaded Fawkner to take the Collins Street half, which was considered the less valuable. T i m e soon told him that he had the worse of the bargain, and Fawkner used to laugh over the supposed smart stroke of business for many a day after. T h e township east of Swanston Street was then known as " Eastern Hill;" and anyone w h o could think of investing there for anything other than a dwelling, a timber yard, a brewery, or a house of prayer, was booked as little less m a d than a hare in the March season. A n auctioneer in puffing a tract of land offered for sale a short distance above the present Argus office asseverated as a strong inducement to intending purchasers that there was a very valuable and inexhaustible stone quarry on the ground. A s for the suburbs, they were at a discount. A few well-to do merchants and professionals had cottages (which they called villas) erected at Brighton, South Yarra, Richmond and Fitzroy (then N e w t o w n ) ; but nothing in the shape of business was dreamed of in such far-away places. In consequence of the manner in which land was sliced up into small sub-sections at Newtown, bunches of cabin residences leaped up there, formed of sods, brick, wood, canvas, or any other sort of material available ; and d o w n about where Brunswick and M o o r Streets now embrace each other, there gathered a conglomeration of huts, which offered a harbour of refuge for the worse half of the rascality of the town, and whenever a " spotted" individual was wanted by the police, he was sure to be picked up either there or at the Brickfields between the Yarra and Emerald Hill, an area squatted upon by a brood of the greatest scoundrels in the district. A s for Emerald Hill itself, it was a sheep pasturage; and the present flourishing Sandridge was represented by the one tent of an adventurer, w h o afterwards was well and favourably known as " the Liardet," but in the course of a few months he put up an hotel there, and was generous enough to offer to bring the mails from the shipping to Melbourne without charge.