my ancestors, to live among my children.
Nothing can save the country now; it has
fallen. I need not particularise, but it has
fallen—

                    "Into what pit thou seest,
           From what height fallen!"

From such a height that certainly its neck is
broken. Let me say no more.

GOING CIRCUIT AT THE ANTIPODES.

DELIGHTFUL is the morning when, after a
tedious voyage, just as you begin to wonder
where all the continents and islands in the
world can be hidden, a lusty voice shouts
"Land, ho!" from the mast-head. And there,
as we see now from the deck, is a long wall of
coast, which appears suddenly to have stepped
out of a cloud! And there, too, is the light-
house!

The ship's nose is immediately put in the
right direction, and in about half-an-hour we
descry a boat bobbing up and down in the
swell of the sea. She is rowed by about half-
a-dozen athletic, copper-coloured New
Zealanders, and steered by a pleasant-looking
pilot, seated in the stern-sheets. We have
scarcely time to wonder why we think this
pilot worthy of being taken to our hearts
and embraced, before he springs on board,
asks for the news, shakes hands with, and
deposes, the captain, who retires into insignificance,
whilst the New Zealanders, having made
fast their boat to our stern, sit and criticise
us at their leisure.

With the usual luffing and shouting of
"tacks and sheets," and the average driving
about of the sailors, by the uncompromisingly
despotic pilot, we find ourselves entering
between the huge heads of Port Jackson. In about
a quarter of an hour more, we are safely out of
the vast Pacific, and gliding along the serene
and sparkling surface of Sydney harbour.

Picturesque and Claude-like as this scene is
at all times, it is strikingly so when you enter
it for the first time, after a four months'
voyage. You appear to be sailing up a
beautiful lake, delightfully variegated with islands
dotted about upon its transparently blue
water. On either side, little promontories
jut out into the harbour, crowned by
mansions, cottages, and windmills, all bright and
glowing in the clear air; while the eye in vain
endeavours to penetrate to the heads of all the
pretty little bays which are formed by the
irregularities of the shore. At all times, in
favourable weather, the harbour is alive with
boats which skim like sea-birds round a
newly-arrived London ship. The harbour being
completely land-locked and protected from all
weathers, we sail out of a rough sea, into water
almost as smooth as a mill-dam. So sudden is
the change from rough to smooth, that we
seem to have reached a charmed and silent
region, where some good Prospero works his
tranquillising spells. We are very soon,
however, reduced from Shaksperean fancies to
matters of fact, by the sounds of "Want a
boat, sir?" startling us in our reverie, like the
ghost of a voice from the Thames.

We got—I and my wife—into the water-
man's boat. The child-like and warm-
hearted tars give us three hearty cheers as
we are pulled away from the ship's side; and,
after about ten minutes' passage up the
harbour, and into Sydney Cove, among shipping
from all parts of the world, we pull up at the
Queen's Wharf. We pay the waterman a
shilling, astonished to find the nature and
uses of that coin so distinctly understood at the
Antipodes, and are once again on terra-firma.

The early part of the day appeared to have
been rainy in town, and the place was wet
and puddled. The footpaths were merely
paved in patches here and there, and three-
story houses of bad-complexioned brick were
huddled up, with wretched hovels of weather-
board, and occasionally vacant spaces, or dust-
heaps. Here and there, a dray, or a mouldy-
looking superannuated gig, behind an
ungroomed horse, as dripping and dejected as if
he were serving out a sentence of hard labour,
were almost all the vehicles we met. The
singular frequency, too, of the children of
Israel—at times unpleasantly economical of
soap—was not, upon the whole, more exhilarating
than the prevalence of badly-cut slop
apparel, in windows and at doors. A good
part of Monmouth Street had apparently got
the start of us, and had already settled down,
squalidly well-off, as at home.

Public-houses were in good force, addressing
themselves to the colonial thirst by the
usual eye-catching announcements in long black
letters, down the fronts of various tenements,
"that Guinness's XXX," or "Allsopp's Ale,"
or "London Particular," might be had inside.
The live part of the scene generally consisted
of sailors, brokers, clerks, draymen, New
Zealanders, one or two aboriginal blacks, and one
or two score of goats and dogs. Upon the
whole, we were very much astonished by our first
impression; for, we somewhat hastily adopted
this quarter of the town as a fair sample of
the whole. We concluded about as wisely and
as justly as a Frenchman would, if he were
suddenly to judge of London from a hasty glance
at Wapping. Every large port must have a
Wapping, and here was the Sydney Wapping;
the only difference being, that it was a
Wapping in its teens.

Taking our ease in our inn the first night
—and what ease, after such a voyage!—we
sallied out, in the bright delicious freshness of
the following morning, to investigate the field
of our future operations. I qualify my sketch
with the results of a subsequent nine years'
experience.

The habits and fashions of a people stick
to them wherever they go. Algiers would
probably now remind us of Paris, as Sydney
certainly reminds us of many a sea-port town