'I don't agree with you,' says the other honourable. 'It's the most amusing, and, in a way, instructive place for a man who wants to know his fellow-creatures I was ever in. I never pass a day without meeting some fresh variety of the human race, man or woman; and their experiences are well worth knowing, I can tell you. Not that they're in a hurry to impart them; for that there's more natural unaffected good manners on a digging than in any society I ever mingled in I shall never doubt. But when they see you don't want to patronise, and are content to be as simple man among men, there's nothing they won't do for you or tell you.' 'Oh, d----n one's fellow-creatures! present company excepted,' says Mr. Despard, filling his glass, 'and the man that grew this "tipple." They're useful to me now and then, and one has to put up with this crowd; but I never could take much interest in them.' 'All the worse for you, Despard,' says Clifford: 'you're wasting your chances--golden opportunities in every sense of the word. You'll never see such a spectacle as this, perhaps, again as long as you live. It's a fancy-dress ball with real characters.' 'Dashed bad characters, if we only knew,' says Despard, yawning. 'What do you say, Haughton?' looking at Starlight, who was playing with his glass, and not listening much, by the look of him. In his latest novels Boldrewood reverts to his familiar themes. _The Sphinx of Eaglehawk_, the shortest of all his works, might have been an excerpt from The _Miner's Right_; and the scene of _The Crooked Stick_ is an inland station in New South Wales in the days of bushranging and disastrous droughts. The materials employed in the latter story reproduce the principal features of almost a score of other Australian novels published within the last few years. The love-affairs of a beautiful, impulsive girl, sighing for knowledge of the great world beyond the limits of her narrow experience; the influence upon her of a fascinating and gentlemanly Englishman, with aristocratic connections and a dubious past; the manly young Australian, whose loyalty, undervalued for a time, is rewarded in the end--these are some of the items which go to the making of a class of story already somewhat too common. The fact that Boldrewood continues to make such subjects interesting is due largely to the pervading sense of scrupulous truth, the evident element of personal experience, and the general cheerfulness of tone, which are never absent from any product of his pen, and which constitute his highest claims to rank in Australian literature. MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED.