instead of in the fading light of evening. The route, including as it did long straight stretches of undulating ground, enabled the brilliant pageant of flags, escorts and pennants to be seen as a whole as the procession jingled through five miles of densely packed people. The way was kept by returned soldiers and cadets. Triumphal arches, constructed throughout of such characteristic Australian products as wool-bales, corn-sheaves, or balks of timber, dotted it at intervals. Avenues of white colonnades supported flags and bunting which stretched continuously for miles. Sightseers festooned the parapets, crowded the balconies, tapestried the windows with eager faces, and formed a solid mass between the wooden barriers of the processional lane and the plate-glass show-fronts of the business houses. In substantial Macquarie Street the Prince stopped to greet a terribly large community of crippled soldiers, who sat patiently in motors and bath-chairs by the wayside, attended by nursing sisters. Further on a no less touching spectacle awaited him, in a great gathering of black-garbed mothers, widows and orphans of diggers killed at the front, a pathetic reminder that, of the four hundred thousand soldiers raised by voluntary enlistment in Australia during the war, only one in two escaped wounds or death. Here the pressure was dense; and spectators, we heard, paid a shilling a minute to stand on packing-cases to look over one another's heads. The route ended on the shady lawns of Admiralty House, where the Prince inspected a great company of war-workers, who stood in ranks of variegated colour, including the red and grey of sisters who served in hospitals overseas, and the white and black of those whose no less devoted labour kept public utilities active at home while the manhood of the nation was in the field. Before entering the building where he was to stay the Prince shook hands with no less than ten wearers of the Victoria Cross. The reception was over. Perhaps the feature in it which struck the visitor most, next to its magnificence and enthusiasm, was the light-heartedness of the crowds. After the Prince had passed, and had been everywhere cheered, Mr. Hughes, the Commonwealth Prime Minister, Mr. Storey, the State Premier, and other ministers who were further back in the procession were subjected to volleys of chaff and counter-chaff from supporters and opponents, in which they themselves joined with the utmost goodwill. Even the crashing into the harbour, close alongside the reception wharf, of one of the aeroplanes employed on escort duty, upset the equanimity of nobody. A motor-launch promptly picked up the soused aviators, who seemed to find the accident the greatest of larks.