Before finally sailing, the Prince spent four days in Sydney, saying good-bye to his friends, and receiving them in the _Renown_, which he made his home. Amongst those he entertained were the Commonwealth Governor, the Prime Minister, the New South Wales Governor, the State Premier, and the principal Commonwealth and State Officials. His staff, meanwhile, was kept busy receiving and dispatching his replies to a mountain of warm-hearted farewell messages, of which the following, from M. Fihelly, acting Premier of Queensland, and head of the most advanced Labour Government in Australia, may be taken as a sample:-- "Your Royal Highness's visit will always be gratefully and affectionately remembered by the Government and people here, who found the greatest delight in your presence amongst them, and who will henceforward regard you as a new link uniting the British peoples. We hope your Royal Highness will have a safe and pleasant homeward voyage, and that long life and uninterrupted happiness and good health will be yours. You came to our land as His Majesty's most effective ambassador to us and we ask you to be our envoy to him, bearing renewed assurances that the lofty ideals which inspire our race are a living active force in Australia to-day." Amongst the individual replies dispatched by the Prince perhaps one of the happiest went to the Royal Australian Navy, which, after expressing thanks for escorts and other services, and wishing good luck to all, ended with the characteristic request that the main-brace might be spliced. In his general farewell message His Royal Highness said:-- "I am very sorry that my first visit to Australia is at an end, and I wish on leaving to express my deep appreciation and gratitude to the Government and people of the whole Commonwealth for the pleasure and happiness which they have given me during my all too short stay. I have been deeply touched by the open-hearted affection shown to me everywhere, and I hope that Australians have realized how much the warmth of their welcome has meant to me. It has made my first visit an experience which I can never forget and which will always bind me to Australia as a real southern home. "Throughout the Commonwealth I have been impressed by the fact that the Australian people as a whole have just the same free and gallant British spirit at home which the Diggers showed so splendidly during the war. Australia has appealed to me intensely as a land where British men and women may make a new nation as great as any nation of the past, and I shall be heart and soul with them in their aims and efforts all my life." [Illustration: EMU ON A SHEEP-RUN] [Illustration: GOOD-BYE TO SYDNEY HARBOUR]