In the end the doctor passed us without a stain upon our sanitary character, and our baggage was put into a lighter, tightly sealed up and battened down, and then fumigated. One of our lady-passengers had a pet canary in a cage and there was much discussion as to what should be done with it. Its constitution would not stand fumigation, and yet the law said that nothing was to go into the colony without either medical examination or disinfection. I presume the Doctor must have compromised either with his conscience or with the lady, for the last I saw of the suspected bird was on the quay, where it was chirping a merry defiance of sanitary regulations, on the top of a truck load of baggage which had neither been inspected nor disinfected. Sanitary officials seem to have the same kind of ideas all over the world. In Noumea they burnt down the house of the first white man who died of the plague, but they allowed his furniture to be sold by auction and spread over the town. At Freemantle they fumigated your steamer trunk and your Gladstone-bag, but they allowed steerage passengers to walk off with swags and bundles which might have held any number of millions of microbes for all they knew. Western Australia is a very wonderful young country, and when it settles down to real business and discovers that it is better to get gold than to gamble in gold shares, it will do great things. It will also be the better for the abolition of its ridiculous system of protection. Some parts of it will one day be great fruit-growing districts and by way of developing these the government impose a big duty on fruit from other colonies, for instance, Tasmanian apples were selling in Perth and Freemantle at a shilling a pound, although they can be brought across the world and sold in London for fivepence. Meanwhile, the Westralian sells his fruit at artificial prices, having no competition to worry about. While the import duty enables him to put his prices up fifty per cent. he is quite content to produce half what he could have done. In fact it was this problem of protection which kept Western Australia aloof from federation for such a long time. Some day, when intercolonial free trade follows after federation, the Westralian will find his new conditions not quite so pleasant, but a good deal more healthily stimulating. Westralia is popularly described in other colonies as the land of sin, sand, sore eyes, sorrow, and Sir John Forrest. Sir John Forrest was one of the men who discovered it. He is now its premier. He also discovered the gold-fields; and he has the loudest voice I ever heard even on a politician. What his connection with his other alliterative titles of his adopted land have been I could not discover. They are most probably creations of the luxuriant fancy of other politicians who would be very glad to have made as much out of the country as he has done.