or up to the period where there is a general leaving off. They were written currente calamo, with no attempted ornamentation, or fine writing, word-painting, or florid flourishing, accomplishments in which the author is well aware of his "know-nothingness." My Sketches aim at being merely a faithful portraiture of the times they affect to depict.
I am now not unlike a pilgrim after a toilsome, though not disagreeable, journey. Having reached the summit of the ascent upon which, as at a shrine, I hang my memorial tablet. I may rest at length, for my mission is over, my work is done, and my Chronicles are completed. On the 1st June, 1880, I set to work, and in the period of three years, without trenching upon my ordinary avocation, the materials were procured and the structure, such as it is, finished.
Though no Spiritist, I had been abiding in a spiritual world, and, impelled by imagination, retraced a region dead and gone, held communion with friends and foes alike, re-visited cherished spots long effaced, re-acted many a queer old " scene," in fact re-lived some of the pleasantest, most exciting, and eventful years of my colonial career. But all the illusions disappeared, the phantasmagoria by which I was entranced dissolved, the spell was broken, when my vow to write a book on Old Melbourne was fulfilled. My visit to Spirit Land was a trip from which I derived a pleasurable, though melancholy enjoyment never to be my lot again; and now that I have resumed my ordinary position upon the prosaic terra firma of everyday life, it only remains for me to conclude by affixing that which is the assured doom of everybody and everything in this mundane state of existence—aye, even the great globe itself—the inevitable word
FINIS.
