For weeks and weeks, counting from the English summer, the “Jessie Maxwell” has been surrounded by the ocean, directed through light and darkness, through bright sunshine and howling tempests charged with sleet and spray, by no more than a little needle, but gifted with a steadfastness of intelligence more unerring than the loftiest that humanity is endowed with. For weeks and weeks this little needle points and the helmsman obeys, and onwards the ship sails through hundreds of miles of water, until one morning those on board awake and look ahead, and lo! there is the land, with the ship’s head pointing accurately towards the little cleft in the coast through which the great Bay of Sydney is to be entered. This bay is a vision of beauty. No hint of its existence is given until you have sailed into it. The effect produced by the contrast between the rugged, iron, sterile coast beheld from the sea, and the loveliness of deep blue water and summer islands richly wooded, and green hills sloping to the water’s edge, and sandy creeks, with the heavy bush to the right, and the tropical splendour of vegetation that meets the eye upon the outlying land--all which form the noble bay into which you pass through the narrowest and most repellent of headlands--is not to be described. One might think that Nature had stooped to the human device of a pantomimic surprise, and reared the bleak Australian coast in this latitude for no other reason than to give effect to the grand transformation scene she exhibits behind it. To the eyes of Holdsworth, wearied by the eternal glancing or leaping of the sea, how sweet and refreshing were the green shores, the houses peeping out here and there upon the outskirts of the bush, the trees overhanging the margin of the islands like living things never weary of admiring their own shapes! Here and there a boat rowed from shore to shore. Small coasters lay at anchor, their sails clewed up but not furled, and the men lounging drowsily aboard of them. Hark to the humming of the locusts!--comparable to nothing so much as the murmurs of a sleepy congregation reciting the responses in church. Anon the city of Sydney opened; at its foot a great semicircular basin of water, with the masts of many vessels standing out against the farther houses, and the green hills backing all. How picturesque from a distance the combined colours of the streaming flags, the white-fronted houses, the green of the hills, and the heavenly azure of the sky! All the way on the left ran the houses into the country beyond, and close at hand were shaggy abutments of wooded land, with deep shady recesses through which the sunlight sparkled on the emerald ground, with many boats upon the water to give variety and life to the picture. Far, far away, almost like an echo from the old world, the strains of a band playing a hearty English melody could be heard.