other youths, the sons of a colonial magnate,
transported in my company. They were
sharers of my unhappiness. On the first day
that we put foot on the land of our exile, we were
terrified almost out of our wits. We were coming
up from Weymouth to London, on the top of a
mail coach, and were overtaken, near Salisbury,
by a heavy snow-storm. Snow we had heard of,
and read of; but we had never before seen and felt
it. The other passengers laughed, and were very
merry; but this did not prevent me putting (with
livid lips, I fancy) this serious question, "Is there
any chance of it burying us? It will do so, if
it continue for some hours like this." Then, on
the day which followed our arrival in town, I
experienced another awful fright. We, all three,
left our hotel in Covent-garden, and had the
temerity to penetrate into the Strand. Here,
while gazing, with open mouth, at the shop
windows and the dense crowd of people, hurrying
to and fro, I was separated from my
companions; and, as I had forgotten the (then to
me) outlandish name of the hotel—the Tavistock
—I knew not how I should get back to it.
Fortunately, after taxing my memory to the utmost,
I did remember Covent-garden; and, thus, by
many inquiries, I at last found the hotel and my
friends, who, like myself, had lost themselves for
a while. They were much concerned for my safety,
until they saw me; and one of them rather
rationally inquired, "Why the deuce didn't you
cooey, when you missed us?" Had I thought
of it, I should have done so, though the act
would certainly have astonished the weak minds
of the English natives, and have had the effect
of bringing a mob around me. I know that the
cooey that I gave one night from the top of
Queen Anne's tower in Trinity, Cambridge,
created such a sensation, that not only the whole
of the college, but half the entire university,
turned out to ascertain "What is it? what
can it mean?" That cooey was heard in Downing,
in St. Peter's, at Barnewell, and at Chesterton.
One of my co-exiles, who happened to be
returning from the last-named village, heard it,
and answered it. I remember that one of the
public tutors of the college, Dr. Whistle, was
very angry with me, and said that I ought to
have left that savage yell (it was thus he spoke
of that wonderful and valuable call of my native
land) behind me when I came to a civilised
quarter of the world. Soon afterwards I
wished from the bottom of my heart that I had
done so; for the call had become catching, and
nightly from every college came forth cooeys,
some of them very fair, but, generally speaking,
very feeble imitations of that "voice-throwing"
so peculiar to the natives of New Holland and
those Australians who have used it from
boyhood. I beg to state that I was not
mischievously inclined when I cooeyed, like a
"black fellow," from Queen Anne's tower. I
was merely giving a party of friends, whom I
had been entertaining at supper, some idea of
what we Australians did when we lost our way
in the bush, little dreaming that—just as
when one jackal in India strikes up a howl,
all the pack must join in it—the sound would
become infectious, and eventually a tremendous
nuisance.

The sports of England had not the slightest
charm for me. They were not sufficiently
exciting. What was fox-hunting to us? To
see an animal, rather like a dingo, or native
dog, pursued and run down by an enormous
pack of hounds, the field mounted on swift
blood horses, and the ground a cultivated
country, intersected by miserable hedges and
ditches, with here and there a five-barred gate
or a brook! We had been accustomed to hunt
the kangaroo, with only five or six dogs, upon
stock horses, over a perfectly wild country,
intersected by gullies or deep ravines and patches
of dense brushwood; or to ride down the emu
at full gallop (without the assistance of dogs),
and kill him by flogging his neck with the thong
of a cattle whip. Then, the fishing of England.
What was that to us? Flipping at a stream
like the Thames at Richmond, with a rod and
line, the hook baited with a fly, a worm, and,
after a day's work, returning with a little basket
half full of tiny creatures, scarcely worth the
trouble of catching! We had been accustomed
to hire a whaleboat, every Wednesday and
Saturday afternoon, sail down to Watson's Bay,
near the Sydney Heads, drop anchor, and fish
with large hooks and strong lines for Schnapper-
fish weighing from seven to twenty-five pounds;
and frequently would we hook an enormous
black shark ten feet long, play him, get him
alongside, and there destroy him with the boat-
hook. In a couple of hours, we could take as
many large fish as would fill a cart—fish quite
equal in every respect to the turbot, so highly
prized in England. That had been our fishing.
As for pheasant and partridge shooting, we
agreed that it was like the destruction, in cold
blood (and with the assistance of dogs), of a
parcel of barn-door fowls. "Sporting!" we
would sometimes say to our friends who breathed
that word, "what do you know about sporting
in this old, worn-out country? Sporting! You
have never seen sporting, and you have no idea
what it is."

It was the same with the aspect of England
itself. We wanted to see deep and dark-blue
salt water, laving the milk-white sands of
semicircular bays of a mile or two in extent,
grotesquely formed rocks, and the land wooded to
high-water mark with evergreen trees of
luxuriant foliage, and heaths of every hue and dye.
Nor did the watering-places in England satisfy
us. We once went down to Brighton. It was
rather boisterous weather, and a boatman
remarked to us that it was "seldom they saw a
surf like that," pointing to the billows. "Surf!"
we ejaculated. "Surf! Do you call that surf?
Bah! Make a fourth with us, and we will pull
out against it in a cockle-shell. Surf! If you
want to see surf, go to Bandye Bay, about
five or six miles from Sydney. That's the place
to see surf. Every crested wave—giant waves,
not pigmies like these—weighs millions of tons
of water, and when it breaks upon the beach,