we all need. Yet, the children do not play
about very much; as we send them to an
infant school recently started in one of the
tents by a barrister of superior attainments.
We buy our fire-wood of the young gentleman
who deals in that article and brings
it from the bush, as he has a horse and dray
for that purpose; but our supply of water I
get myself from the Yarra in two water-cans
every morning before breakfast, and the last
thing at night, by which we save fourpence
a day.

The general appearance of this unique
Town is not very easy to describe. It has
too many tents to be at all like a gipsy
encampment, and the utter want of all
uniformity in the tents renders it quite as unlike
an Arab settlement, or military encampment.
The nearest thing of all to it is that of a
prodigiously extensive fair; all tents and small
booths, but without shows, music, games,
visitors, or anything pleasant. It has no gilt,
and very little gingerbread. Luxury, of the
most cheap and childish kind, has no place
here; even comfort, partly for want of money,
but more on account of dust, is impossible.
Finally, there is a mixture of the highly
educated with the totally uneducated, the refined
with the semi-brutal (many a convict with
his bull-dog being among us), all dressing as
roughly, and faring precisely alike.

Close to every tent is a round or oval hole
for the fire, to be protected from the wind;
with the addition of an old saucepan lid, or a
sheet of tin from the lining of a case of goods.
Over the hole a piece of bent or curled up
iron hoop is placed to sustain the pot, pan,
or kettle. The front of each tent presents a
conglomerate specimen of all its owner's
worldly possessions. The whole surface of
the encampment is strewn with the rubbish
and refuse of those who are gone; some
immigrants only staying a week. Cast-away
coats, trowsers, shoes, boots, bonnets, hats,
bottles—whole or broken, but mostly whole
—by hundreds; broken articles of furniture,
cooking utensils, all grimed with dust, if not
battered or half buried in the ground. A
Jew assured me the other day, that if he
could but have found such a treasure in
England, he could with ease have made a
thousand a-year.

There are several sects of religion here;
and, on Sunday, the air is filled with the
voices of the praying and singing of these
different persuasions, all going on at the
same time at different parts of the ground,
and all in some degree audible to an impartial
listener in his own tent. There are new tents
of water-proof canvass, "best twice-boiled
navy brown," number one canvass, number
two, three, four, down to brown holland, and
bleached or unbleached calico. There are
blue tents, bed-tick tents, and wain-covered
waggons. There are squares, and rounds, and
triangles, and wedges, and pyramids; frameworks
of rough branches, and tents like tall
sugar-loaves or extinguishers, and others of
the squab molehill form, and many of no
definite form; being in some instances double
and treble (one tent opening inside into
another), and, in other instances, having been
blown all awry by the winds; or set up
badly, or with rotten cordage. Here and
there you see patch-work tents, made up of
all sorts of odds and ends of bedding, clothing,
blankets, sheets, aprons, petticoats, and
counterpanes; or old sails, and pieces of tarpauling,
matting, packing stuff, and old bits of
board with the tin lining of a case of goods;
old bits of linen of all colours filling up the
intervals. Sometimes, also, you come upon a
very melancholy one which makes you pause
—a so-called tent, of six feet long, rising from
a slant to three feet high in the middle, so
small and low, indeed, that the wretched
occupant (with, perhaps, a wife) must crawl
in beneath it like a dog, and lie there till he
crawls out again. It is like a squalid tumulus.
Such as these are made of any odd bits of
clothing or covering stuck up by sticks cut
in the bush. There are but few so wretched
as this.

The appearance of this place by night,
when nearly every tent shines, more or less,
with its candle, lamp, or lantern, is very
peculiar, and on the whole sombre and
melancholy, the light through the canvass being
subdued to a funereal gleam. Singing is heard
at rare intervals, with sounds of music from
various quarters; but it is generally all over
by nine o'clock; and, by half-past, lights out,
and the encampment is silent. Tents are
continually left without any protection, such a
thing as the robbery of a tent being unknown.
This is surprising, considering the mixture
here, and how close we are to Melbourne,
where there are plenty of thieves. I suppose
the latter are too high-minded for us poor
people.

Deaths and funerals are more than usually
melancholy sights in Canvass Town. The
dead are often utterly friendless. One day a
tent where a man and his wife and child
resided, was closed for two or three days,
the tent being laced up, and they never
appearing. On looking in, all three were
seen lying dead among some dry rushes—of
want, slow fever, broken hearts—nobody
knew anything about them. It is quite as
gloomy when there are one or two relations
or friends. The nearest relations carry the
body; the rest, if any, follow. Sometimes
you see the husband and wife carrying the
little body of a child enfolded in something—
with, I believe, only canvass underneath, for
coffin and shroud. Once I saw a husband,
alone, slowly carrying the dead body of his
wife, with a little child following—the one
mourner.

Great efforts were made in this colony
some short time since, to induce people to
come to Australia—the Home Government
still sending out ship-loads. Now, we have