A Christmas week of heat such as Sydney has seldom known was brought to a close by one of the heaviest southerly storms on record. During the stifling morning, the telegraph had announced the approach of a gale from the far south, but in the early afternoon the heat was more terrible than before, when suddenly the sky was dark with whirling clouds, and a cold blast swept through the streets, carrying a fog of sand, breaking roofs and windows, and dashing to pieces many boats. When the gale ceased, some three hours later, the sand was so deep in houses that here and there men‘s feet left footprints on the stairs. Storms of this kind, differing only one from another in violence, are common in the hot weather: they are known as “southerly bursters;” but the earlier settlers called them “brickfielders,” in the belief that the dust they brought was whirled up from the kilns and brickfields to the south of Sydney. The fact is that the sand is carried along for one or two hundred miles, from the plains in Dampier and Auckland counties; for the Australian “burster” is one with the Punjaub dust-storm, and the dirt-storm of Colorado. CHAPTER II. RIVAL COLONIES. New South Wales, born in 1788, and Queensland in 1859, the oldest and youngest of our Australian colonies, stand side by side upon the map, and have a common frontier of 700 miles. The New South Welsh look with some jealousy upon the more recently founded States. Upon the brilliant prosperity of Victoria they look doubtingly, and, ascribing it merely to the gold fields, talk of “shoddy;” but of Queensland--an agricultural country, with larger tracts of rich lands than they themselves possess--the Sydney folks are not without reason envious. A terrible depression is at present pervading trade and agriculture in New South Wales. Much land near Sydney has gone out of cultivation; labor is scarce, and the gold discoveries in the neighboring colonies, by drawing off the surplus population, have made harvest labor unattainable. Many properties have fallen to one-third their former value, and the colony--a wheat-growing country--is now importing wheat and flour to the value of half a million sterling every year. The depressed condition of affairs is the result, partly of commercial panics following a period of inflation, partly of bad seasons, now bringing floods, now drought and rust, and partly of the discouragement of immigration by the colonial democrats--a policy which, however beneficial to Australia it may in the long run prove, is for the moment ruinous to the sheep-farmers and to the merchants in the towns. On the other hand, the laborers for their part assert that the arrivals of strangers--at all events, of skilled artisans--are still excessive, and that all the ills of the colony are due to over-immigration and free trade.