New South Wales is the mother colony of Australia, and though, after the gold discovery, she was for a time thrown into the shade by the prowess of her former dependency, Victoria, she is making rapid strides to recover; in fact, she may be said to have regained her old premier position. Her eastern boundary is the Pacific Ocean, which washes a coast-line of 800 miles, bold in its outline and studded with numerous harbours. Imaginary lines divide her from Victoria to the south, Queensland to the north, and South Australia to the west. The greatest length of New South Wales is 900 miles; its greatest breadth about 850 miles; mean breadth, 600 miles. The superficial area is 309,100 square miles. That is to say, the colony is as extensive as the German Empire and Italy combined, or as France and the United Kingdom. The million of population which the colony contains is thinly scattered about this vast territory, the country districts obtaining the less, because more than a third of the people are congregated at Sydney, the capital, and at Newcastle, the coal port adjacent to the metropolis. High mountain ranges are found in New South Wales, lofty table-land, and vast low-lying plains, with the result that great variety of climate is obtained. For instance, on a certain day in November, 1885, the newspapers state that between the Warrego and the Paroo, north of the Darling, one thousand out of five thousand sheep had dropped dead upon a rough day's journey, wasted by the hunger and drought, and killed by heat; that two out of a party of three travellers perished of thirst in the Lechlan back blocks, and the third alone, naked and half mad, reached a station to tell the tale; that on the lower reaches of Clarence and Richmond rivers travellers saw cattle in the last stages of starvation, dying in the mud of the river banks, while down upon the Shorehaven a roaring spate was heaving haystacks to the sea; that while enterprising tourists were chilled with ice and sleet upon Ben Lomond, and snow was flattening crops of wheat in the gullies above Tumat, Sydney, despite the coolness of the daily inflow of ocean water, was suffering under a heavy sweltering heat. And while variations like these are the exception and not the rule, yet all these varied experiences may be endured in the colony on one and the same day.