'Let us travel along each of these lines, radiating somewhat as the fingers of a spread hand from south to north.

'The South Coast Railway, the most recently opened and not yet completed line, runs down the south coast to Kiama. This line is a purveyor of many luxuries and necessaries of life, leading out first to broad suburban breathing grounds on the country between the southern bank of Port Jackson and Botany Bay, making a hundred square miles of good building country accessible, crossing the historic bay three miles up the tidal estuary of George River, crossing a somewhat barren plateau, and arriving at the National Park. It penetrates next vast forests and overruns tremendous gorges, winding about precipices, and getting down by a way of its own to the country at the foot of the Bulb Pa.s.s. All the seaward slopes and ravines of this pa.s.s are as a vast natural conservatory. They take all the morning sun, they are never touched by western or southern wind, they are plentifully watered with regular rains, and they nurse and produce a beauty unfamiliar to the lat.i.tude.

Take a few steps over the brow of the hill on the old road, and look down. You see tropical verdure and bloom, palms rising a hundred feet, and spreading feathery plumes upon lance-like stems; myrtle and coral trees, figs and lily-pillies, with a sheen upon their leaves like the light on a summer sea; bowers and arches and impenetrable jungles of great vines, trailing tendrils fifty feet long, and swinging ma.s.ses of perfumed bloom a hundred feet from the ground. There is nothing of the old familiar Australian bush about it. You are 1,200 feet above the sea, which stretches away to the world's rim beneath and before you. Below, past all the wonderland of the bush, is the white tower of Woolongong, and beyond that the fringe of white beach and snowy breakers, the Fern Islands, set in sapphire. Far, far away goes the coast land.

'Between coast-line and mountains lies the fertile land, the strip of country that serves and feeds the great city. The train comes here to be laden with the rich produce--milk, b.u.t.ter, and cheese--which by tons upon tons is taken in and distributed in Sydney every day. Out of the bowels of the mountains the line brings also coal and iron and shale and other mineral products, and from the dense forest pour down the little coast rivers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EMU PLAINS.]

'Halting at Kiama first, it will render all the beauties of the Illawarra district proper accessible, as all its rich products available; but in a very few years it must pa.s.s on across Shoalhaven and Bega, and over the rugged country of the Victorian border beyond Eden and Boyd Town.

'Our next finger, The Great West, is a mighty one in every sense, 574 miles in length, and crossing in that length a fair section of the whole colony, and enclosing in the triangle of which it forms the northern side, with the Southern and South-Western line and Murrumbidgee river opposite, and the Darling for base, the wildest mountains, the richest agricultural acres, and the broadest pastures of the colony. By Paramatta, Castle Hill, and Toongabbie, the earliest agricultural settlements the colony knew, which, however, seem rather to have reached senility than perfect development, the North-Western line strikes out for the rampart of the famous Blue Mountains--now one of the show-places of Australia. Very soon the traveller perceives the great barrier stretched right across the plain. Behind the dark green trees of the middle distance it looms as the wall of some forbidden land. And nearer the deep blue river at its feet looks like a moat specially made for purposes of defence. Long indeed was the barrier effective, before the strong right arm of civilization put down the stone pillars and carried over the platform of the railway-bridge across which the train thunders now, the great engines puffing and snorting, their force conserved for the present, but ready to be expended by-and-by in the charge up the mountain.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE VALLEY OF THE GROSE.]

'The upward view from that bridge should never be missed. It is a long gla.s.sy sheet of water, coming from the bold and densely timbered gate of the hilly sh.o.r.e miles away, and flowing down to the bridge, past the sleepy old town, between gra.s.sy banks or drooping willows, or groves of whispering oaks. There is no perceptible current, the water-lilies sleep on the surface, and if a boat be pulling upwards the ripples of the water break gently on either bank. You may note so much in the rapid transit of the train, which ten minutes after its departure from Penrith station is fairly at the feet of the mountains. There are little knolls there, lightly gra.s.sed and gracefully timbered, looking down upon

"Long fields of barley and of rye."

Very soon we pa.s.s these fields; we are rising fast. The plains sink and extend beneath us. The white stones of the little grave-garden at Emu Plains glisten beside the tall black cypress trees, the river shines like a band of steel, and the reflection of the willows and oaks are faintly seen.'

Penrith looks as a child's toy village; and Windsor and Richmond, far away, are but indistinct white dots. All quiet, tame, prosperous, and very simply beautiful below; all above and beyond wild and rugged, and, in the commercial sense, unprofitable. As marvellous a contrast as could be imagined, the beginning and the end apparently of new orders, the results of different forces, the work of the earth spent in opposite moods. One must needs marvel in contrasting such scenes, and more profound becomes the marvel and the wonderment, as with every mile a vaster, wilder, grander region is found. Cliff-faces leagues long, and a thousand feet perpendicular; huge basins, like veritable gulfs in s.p.a.ce, where a firmament of blue gathers between the rocky mountain head and the forest growth below, isolated rocks that dwarf all monuments reared in any city of old; deep calling unto deep in innumerable waterfalls, and through all the summer months frequent thunder, as if the spirits who had wrought their marvels below were still toiling at some other labour in mid-air. The meanest mind becomes expanded in wonder, and the least philosophical instinct begins to speculate and inquire. There has, indeed, been much deep speculation, much zealous and competent inquiry as to the phenomena of these mountains, and the startling contrast upon their southern front. Tennison-Woods studied and wrote of them, and more recently Dr. J. E. Taylor has, in a few graphic sentences, expressed his opinions of the geological changes which have taken place, particularly of the changes and causes which have produced the fertile plains and the hills, whose chief present product is ozone, with the river rolling between. Having touched lightly upon the facts generally known of the Hawkesbury sandstone formation, overlaid on a great breadth of the county of c.u.mberland by the Wianamatta shales, he says:--

'But the continuity of both the Hawkesbury sandstones and the overlying and usually accompanying Wianamatta shales is interfered with on a magnificent scale at Emu Plains. The entire country from this point to Sydney Heads has been slowly let down by one of those great earth movements known as a "downthrow fault." The downthrow was not the work of one single act of disturbance--it went on for ages. Meantime the Wianamatta shales, which overlaid the Hawkesbury sandstones of the Blue Mountains, were denuded off, or nearly so, for there is only a small patch now remaining, right on the top, after we have ascended by the first zigzag, to show that they were once continuous with those of the plains more than 2,000 feet below.'

There is infinite variety in the mountains. Even though wearied of the grandeur and wildness of the gorges, the vastness of the basins, whose great forest carpets appear but as robes of green evenly spread, or the grotesquely piled rocks, and the bold and beautiful flora of the table-lands and mountain heads, the traveller need not hasten back to town, imagining he has seen all. Let him find his way down from Blackheath to the entrance of a valley known as the Mermaid's Cave--a great grey rock that juts out and almost blocks the valley, dividing a somewhat arid gorge above from a lovely dell below. He pa.s.ses through a rock-cleft, and there before him is a scene beautiful as new. There indeed,--

'A vale of beauty, lovelier Than all the valleys of the greater hills.'

Yes, this is the fairy land of the mountains. Tall, feathery-foliaged, golden-blossomed wattles rise side by side with the olive-green turpentines, and through them runs the mountain brook in cataract after cataract. Upon the edge of the wattle-grove the tree-ferns grow, and beyond them is a carpet of bracken--a broad slope at the hill-foot, rich dark green with tips of pink, and shadows and hollows of russet and brown, where new growths display yet their dainty shades, or dead leaves have taken the rich autumnal brown. There is deep, grateful shade here in the heat of the day, for no sunbeam penetrates the roof of wattle and palm-like fern, and the water seems to bring down coolness from its higher springs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ZIGZAG RAILWAY IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS.]

A bolder valley, one of the great gorges of the world, is the Lithgow, the road to the western slopes and the long-locked interior. It was down this great ravine that the first explorers looked awe-stricken at the marvellous road that nature had prepared for them; and who can gaze without awe and wonder and broadening conceptions of nature and nature's work as he looks down that entrance way to Australia's heart, and realizes the manner and the period of its making? The ages that have clothed the mountain sides with forests are but as seconds to years by comparison with those which have worn the world's crust away, and by comparison with these stupendous results of natural forces, what pigmy work appears the zigzag down which goes the inland train! This Lithgow Vale is usually considered the western limit of the Blue Mountains, though in their further northward range, notably about Capertee on the Mudgee line, they rise again and display forms of rugged grandeur.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FISH RIVER CAVE.]

Beyond the mountains the artistic surveyor may travel fast. Branching off at Waleraw.a.n.g, he may find the mountain scenery he has just left repeated on the line to Mudgee, but there is another turn, and not by rail, which he must not miss. It is at Tarana, in the Fish River Caves, newly christened Jenola. The road runs off to the southward, a distance of forty miles, to the west of a wild country on the western slopes of the Blue Mountains, and then by a grim cavern in the hillside is entry found to a natural temple, which travellers affirm has no equal in the wide, wide world. The old guardian and guide of the place, who alone can walk safely amid the labyrinth, tells us that we have hardly begun to explore the caves so far, for every year some new grotto is discovered.

He plods his careful way along some dripping track through the tall stalagmites, standing as monuments of the dead in fairy-land, feels some fissure in the mountain side, works the point of his staff through, and discovers--vacuity; makes carefully a small hole, introduces a thread of magnesium wire, sets it ablaze, and in the long glow learns that he has discovered another cathedral vaster than St. Peter's, with a dome that mocks St. Paul's. By-and-by he will open a way to it; will add it to his catalogue; will say to a party of visitors: 'I have found another cave, and will flash light upon the glory which, could it be transported to London or Paris, would be worth a million sterling.' How many more caves remain to be discovered it is impossible to say; they may run miles into the mountains. Future days may see mimic electric cars running through the caves, and brilliant globes of light flashing like suns upon the summits of tall lone columns ten miles from the entrance. Now there is no tramway nor riding way whatever within the caves, but difficult foot-paths and painful steps, and slightly hazardous creeping places, and ladders to ascend, and narrow parts to pa.s.s, and a good deal of labour to be performed to see even a little of the treasures which have so far been unlocked. There are, to the traveller who has leisure and who is content to live hard and sleep hard, so that he may delight his more refined faculties, four days' good sight-seeing in the caves--four days through which the world and all the things therein may be left behind, and glories as of a kingdom of old may be fully enjoyed--four days through which he may imagine himself entering into such a land as that held by Lytton's 'Coming Race,' domes of the world above you vast as the dome of heaven without. Far down below the strange black river, running--

'Through measureless caverns to the sea;'

mysterious echoes meeting you, great white ghostly figures appearing suddenly in the fitful illumination, alabaster lakes, pools, baths, spotless, stainless marble sanctuaries, and palace halls, which, lit by the sudden flash from the magnesium wire, seem bespangled more thickly and gorgeously than any royal crown with glittering jewels. You are filled rather with wonderment than admiration, and the whole world without seems utterly contemptible to you, whenever you return to the cave's mouth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WATERFALL AT GOVETT.]

There are green fields at the bases of great timbered hills all the way to Bathurst, where the oldest and most considerable of all inland cities of the colony sits beside the Macquarie river, on the crown of the down country which rolls, rich with gra.s.s or grain, for leagues around. On the long north-eastern flight we may hover a while over Bathurst, may note with pleasure the fair country homes amongst the gardens and bowers, the church spires of the city, and the many fair buildings. We shall not find another such town as Bathurst, though country fair enough is beneath us by Blayney and Orange, and southward thence through many villages and little mining towns to Forbes. And almost due north to the Wellington valley, and out to Dubbo, which is the gate of the great pastures, the country is of the same character.

On leaving Dubbo we reach the magnificent distances of Australia, the land of the mirage and the great drought, the land of marvellous flocks and herds. There on the vast bush plain or amongst the box forest are great hosts of cattle, one or two or three thousand head, already six or nine months on the road, hoping to make the port or the trucking station in three months more. Strange men are with them, white as to colour--as white in pluck and endurance, but as uncivilised as the one or two trackers who watch the horses. In this region during the bad seasons you cross bare and bone-strewn plains. At a wretched homestead you may find a man in the lowest deep of despair. Well-to-do a couple of years ago, hoping to be rich before the decade had closed, he is lord now of twenty thousand skeletons lying upon the soil, which looks as if indeed cursed, and so effectively that it will never bear gra.s.s or herb again. You may see river-beds of baked mud, and glistening veins of sand that once were running creeks. Here grow brigalow and mulga, gaunt and weird as the dragon-tree of the Soudan. Hundreds of miles stretches this dreary land, the Lachlan winding through it from east to west, the least significant stream in a dry or ordinary season that ever served as the watercourse for so broad a land.

Out in its centre lies a village, Cohan, grown about a mountain of copper, and along the Darling are other villages, Bourke, Bremoroma, Welcanna, Wentworth, lingering on when no rain falls, and blossoming with a dripping month as rapidly almost as the herbage of the black flats. I never saw anything beautiful in them except the self-devotion of some few good women who shine as stars amongst the general blackness.

But when the rain has fallen, particularly in the pleasant winter after a genial autumn, it cannot be said that the land lacks beauty. I remember winter days a hundred miles north and south from the Darling river at Bourke, when the face of nature seemed to shine in open placid beauty and to break into the tenderest imaginable smile with each dying day; mornings in June, when, awakened by the glowing log to see the flush of dawn through an oak hut or over a pine-ridge that seemed to rise mysteriously with the sun, and, as though actually molten down by the increasing heat, to vanish utterly in the full glow of day. There was no painful mockery in the mirage that hung at noon on the horizon, with its flat-crowned trees rooted apparently in the still blue water--for by any clump of broad-leaved colane or drooping myall there was water in abundance, water clear and cool in every hollow; and gra.s.s, herbage and flowers knee-deep over all the land, when the spotted leaf and trees were all abloom and the quandongs were heavily fruited, and the nardoo with its life-saving seed ripened and decayed unheeded. Often at eventide in that winter did the whole landscape seem pure and perfect as a single crystal, the sky just after sunset of the palest primrose or the colour of the neck of a wheat-stalk when the ear is just ripe; the flood water through the lignum bushes gla.s.sy still; not a leaf of any tree stirring nor a gra.s.s-blade or herb-bloom moving upon all the plain.

From the mult.i.tudinous flowers of the sand-ridge comes a rare sweet fragrance mingling with the balsamic odour of the pines. There would be noise and tumult a little later, as the crested galahs came cackling homeward to rest, and then the long and solemn hush of night, with sound enough and yet no lack of peace. The whistle of the wild duck's wing and sharp blow of her descent on the water, the dull thunder of the wings of great birds--pelicans, native companions, swan, ibis, and crane--rising in hurried flight, scared by some movement of 'possum or night-feeding kangaroo. Always the tinkle of the horse-bell and the prattle of the flame-tongues within the little circle of heat and light. Beauty enough in the inner lands in such a year, a marvellous contrast to the ghostliness, the abomination of desolation, of the year when no rain falls and all life dies.

The northern table-land is intersected by the Great Northern Railway, and is bounded by the Pacific Ocean, the Macpherson range, the Dumaresque and Darling rivers, and the Great Western line. The third division of the colony contains upwards of 100,000 square miles of country, of mountain and plain and wild forest and fertile down, and infinite variety of scenery. Near to the coast, and south and west from the line leaving Newcastle for the north, such country as we have seen about Orange and Albany, but with the green in foliage and verdure which comes from a somewhat warmer and more genial climate. Farther inland there are more of the great pastures, and in the extreme north a prosperous agriculture and a beginning of tropical industry, which afford a pleasant contrast to all that we have seen before. We shall not linger long here to look upon any New England villages or prosperous towns. We shall not concern ourselves with the marvellous richness of the Breeza plains--where in the wet summers gra.s.s grows so tall that horses and bullocks are lost; and stockmen tell of patches where they have had the long seed-stalks above their heads, and they on horseback--but visit the north-eastern corner of the colony, where the three sugar rivers come down from the mountains.

All their surroundings are tropical and rich, and never so rich perhaps as in the heart of the country lying about the heads of the Richmond, and northward towards the Tweed River. There we find the vegetation whose density and glory and magnificence must be seen to be realised. It is the country known as the Big Scrub, where everything is gigantic, compared with ordinary Australian vegetation. The river flows deep and navigable for small craft between low banks of rich deep soil, chocolate loam, decomposed trap rock, spouted in remote ages from the mountains whose high wild crests overlook the Queensland country, a hundred miles to the north. The dense scrub growth covered all a half-century ago, and the huge cedar-trees towering above the jungle overhung the river; but now along many a mile the scrub has been cleared away, and the cane-fields surround the settlers' houses. Wonderfully delicate and fair look the canes beside the dark scrub, bright green or pale yellow, as varied in tint as wheat-fields between the time of the bloom and the harvest. They give grand evidence of the power of the soil, and fully justify the wisdom of those bold speculators who built the great mills lower down.

Quickly changes the foliage as the ascent to the table-land is made; vines and flowers and orchids are left behind. Pine and cedar give place to gum, box, and ironbark, while in the gullies are ferns of a hardier growth, and trickling water that seems of near relationship to the mountain snows. Higher and higher, and colder and fresher becomes the air; and, turning now, the panoramic view below spreads broad and fair, the half-dozen branches of the Richmond seen flashing at times through the trees, the corn and cane patches but bright green dots in the dense forest, and braids of a lighter green beside the broader stream, a reflection of the ocean upon the farthest sky; and last, upon the heights the distant northern mountains are seen the giant warders of the Great Divide. Mount Lindsay is the grandest of all, lifting crags and ramparts more than 5,000 feet from the downs below, as rugged in appearance as any escarpment of the Blue Mountains, and of a vaster height and bulk. The rich pasture-lands about his feet are buried in haze, and occasional lagoons sparkle like flakes of silver or eyes of a well-contented earth-spirit looking up to the sky. Waiting there till evening, you may see Mount Lindsay afire with the floods of light which catch his summit when all the trees below are dark; and farther south, where the Clarence River springs, the tall gaunt peak of the Nightcap will only lose the light before the mightier mountain. Both stand out above all neighbours, though joining them is a mighty chain, with beauties innumerable, stretching right along the line which separates the tropic land of Queensland from the beautiful and prosperous colony of New South Wales.

CHAPTER VI.

SOUTH AUSTRALIA.

CONFIGURATION--THE LAKE COUNTRY--HEAT IN SUMMER--FRUIT--GLENELG--ADELAIDE--MOUNT LOFTY RANGE--PARKS AND BUILDINGS--MOSQUITO PLAIN CAVES--CAMELS--THE OVERLAND TELEGRAPH LINE--PEAKE STATION--THE NORTHERN TERRITORY--EARLY MISFORTUNES--PRESENT PROSPECTS--INSECT LIFE--ALLIGATORS--BUFFALOES.

[Ill.u.s.tration: J. A. G. LITTLE. R. G. PATERSON. C. TODD. A. J. MITCh.e.l.l.

OVERLAND TELEGRAPH PARTY.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOVERNMENT HOUSE AND GENERAL POST OFFICE, ADELAIDE.]

South Australia should rather be called Central Australia, for it lies half-way between the western and the eastern seaboard, and the colony runs right through the continent from north to south. It is an enormous tract, 2,000 miles in length and 700 in breadth. The total area is 903,000 square miles, of which at present barely a tenth is in occupation, though exploration has already made known the existence of millions of acres of magnificent pasture-land ready for settlement. In the colonies, when you speak of South Australia, you are understood to mean the district of which Adelaide is the centre. If you referred to the inland portion, you would speak of the 'far north;' and again, if you meant the Port Darwin--Gulf of Carpentaria country--you would use the term 'Northern Territory.' The original South Australia is first to be noticed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WATERFALL GULLY, SOUTH AUSTRALIA.]

No part of Australia is more strongly marked with Australian peculiarities than this. The Murray is the only river, and this stream brings down the waters of the ranges of the south-eastern colonies; the other streams are merely courses in which, under favourable conditions, water may be looked for, and not otherwise. The ranges are few in number, and are of no great elevation. But the gra.s.s plains and the scrub plains are immense. Gazing round from an eminence, the impression produced by the equal height of the vegetation, and the dull glaucous colour of the foliage, is that you are looking upon the open rolling illimitable ocean. South Australia contains whole princ.i.p.alities of the ordinary park-like bush of Australia; the eucalypts standing in gra.s.s without any undergrowth, either singly or in clumps, as though planted by a landscape gardener. If an expert were whisked during his sleep--like another Bedreddin Ha.s.san--and dropped from Europe, Asia, Africa or America anywhere in these regions, he would exclaim the moment he opened his eyes--"Tis Australia.' A glance at the map would lead to the conclusion that the colony is well supplied with lakes. On paper, Lake Torrens, Lake Eyre, Lake Gardiner, Lake Amadeus, cover large areas, but unfortunately an antipodean meaning must be attached to the term; for the most part these lakes are either muddy reed-covered swamps, or salt marshes unfitted for navigation in winter, and evaporating into vast glittering clay pans in summer. The level of several of these extensive depressions is believed to be below that of the sea, and the cutting of a ca.n.a.l to unite them to Spencer's Gulf, the deepest indentation on the southern coast, has been suggested, and will probably some day be carried into effect, and then there may be changes worked in the climate.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MURRAY RIVER BOAT.]

At present, however, South Australia is decidedly hot during its summer months of December, January and February. The thermometer runs up to 110 and 112 and 116 degrees. 'But then,' says the typical South Australian, taking you by the b.u.t.tonhole, 'it is a dry heat, and really you do not feel it; there is no enervating aqueous vapour about;' and there certainly is not. No complaints of wet and sloppy weather are ever to be heard. On the contrary, when the south-easter brings a heavy bursting bank of cloud with it, there is a general rubbing of hands and utterance of congratulatory remarks. 'Splendid rain to-day,' is the usual phrase; and 'How far north does it extend?' is the current query. But, admitting that the South Australian summer is hot, it must be added that the climate during the other eight months is delightful. One enthusiast declares that the pure soft balmy air is such as one would expect to blow over 'the plains of heaven;' and at any rate there is first-cla.s.s medical testimony that for people with weak lungs there are few more hopeful resorts. The 'far north' is subject to droughts and to floods, and the Northern Territory has a weather system of its own. As the description of its climate suggests, South Australia is a grand fruit country. Grapes, peaches, apricots and oranges, grow practically without cultivation, and attain perfection in the open air. In the season there are few tables in Adelaide on which piles of grapes and plates of apricots and peaches are not to be regularly found. The fruit can be purchased in the market at a penny a pound, so that at current wages there is no occasion for the poorest of the working cla.s.ses to stint in these luscious products of the soil.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ADELAIDE IN 1837.]

Adelaide, the metropolis of South Australia, called after the wife of William IV., was founded in 1836. To-day, with its suburbs, it contains about 170,000 inhabitants. On the 28th of December, 1836, Captain Hindmarsh, who had served under Nelson at the Nile, landed from H.M.S.

Buffalo at Holdfast Bay, in St. Vincent's Gulf, and beneath the shade of a patriarchal gum-tree, and in presence of a few officials, read his commission as the first Governor of South Australia. The anniversary of that event is observed as a public holiday by all cla.s.ses in the community, while the old gum-tree has become a source of solicitude, and is reverently cared for by the munic.i.p.al authorities of Glenelg--a fashionable watering-place which has grown up within sight of Governor Hindmarsh's landing-place.

And indeed this Glenelg is a fitting entrance to the fair city of Adelaide, with which it is connected by two lines of railway. Facing the dazzling white beach are the seaside residences of squatting kings, wealthy merchants, and other successful colonists; while the bay itself is studded with yachts and other pleasure craft, with perchance a man-of-war, or two or three mail steamers, at anchor in the offing, for all the ocean-borne mails are either landed or shipped at Glenelg.

During the summer evenings the sands and long jetty are thronged with visitors from the capital, who have come down to enjoy the fresh cool breezes, or to listen to the various bands of music.

Adelaide itself is laid out on a gently sloping ground, from 96 to 176 feet above the sea-level, on both sides of the Torrens, which is spanned by three large handsome bridges. The part out north is called North Adelaide, to distinguish it from 'the City,' which lies on the other side of the river. The streets are all unusually broad, even for Australian cities, and run at right angles, many of them being bordered with rows of trees, the shade of which is very refreshing in the hot summer days. One of the features of the place is the number and extent of its beautiful public squares and park lands. In this respect it transcends even Melbourne. The squares in each quarter of the city are reserves of several acres in extent, embellished with flowers, trees, and fountains; while the parks are extensive reservations, surrounding the city on every side, separating it from the suburbs.

Adelaide, with ordinary care, can never be other than a healthy city.

Moreover, it can never extend its boundaries. This fact accounts for the high prices obtained for city property. Land originally bought for eight or ten shillings an acre has recently changed hands at 1000 a foot. Its surroundings are the charms of the city. On the west is the sea. Four or five miles to the east is the thickly wooded Mount Lofty range, so called from the highest peak, 2400 feet above the sea-level, which, trending away to the southward, closes in on that side the undulating plain on which the city is built. To the northward the range takes a more easterly direction for twenty or forty miles. These hills, which are reached from Adelaide by railways and tram-lines, and excellent carriage-roads, are a favourite summer resort of those citizens who can afford to avail themselves of the coolness and seclusion which they offer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: KING WILLIAM STREET, ADELAIDE.]