I will not attempt a long description of this the first gold-field I was ever on. There was an ordinary street composed of hotels, boarding-houses, and stores, on both sides of the road. Behind the street were tents in which the diggers principally lived. Everywhere were earth-mounds where some one was or had been busy rooting the ground about. The reefs were each surmounted by an ordinary windlass, where a man would stand hauling up the quartz all day long. Such was the picture presented at a superficial glance at Ravenswood, and I think the description answers for all other Queensland gold-diggings. Nearly all the people boarded in two boarding-houses kept by Chinamen, one on each side of the street. I think there must have been two or three hundred boarders in each. They were both alike, two large bark-houses, no floor, only two immense tables with forms on each side. On these tables were at meal-times every conceivable delicacy in season, and up and down between the tables an army of Chinamen would run round waiting on their guests. During my various fortunes in Queensland, I have often paid two or three pounds per week for board in hotels, and I have paid half-a-guinea for a ticket to a public feast, but it has always been my impression that nowhere was such good or luxurious food served out as in these boarding-houses. It would simply be impossible to compete with them. The charge was one pound per week, payment beforehand, and those of their customers who wanted sleeping accommodation might, without extra charge, fix themselves up as they liked in some sheds behind. There were also many hotels in town, but, as far as I could see from the outside, their "takings" were more across the bar than otherwise, as the Chinamen seemed to monopolize the boarding-house trade. All over Australia, but especially in Queensland, there is a bitter feeling against Chinamen. People say that they ought to be forbidden to come to the country, because they work too hard and too cheaply, and eat too little at the same time; consequently we shall all go to the dogs. How is this? Surely "there is something rotten in the state of Denmark." A white man is always praised if he is hard-working and frugal. It seems a contradiction to abuse one for what is commended in another! This is an awful world. Some people say we are poor because we work too much, and run ourselves out of work. Others say we do not work half enough, and that that is the reason. Some say that Protection is a panacea for poverty, others swear by Free Trade. In Australia they want to turn out the Chinamen because they work too much; in China they want to turn out the whites, I suppose for the same reason. Of all countries, I believe, Australia certainly included the greatest majority of the people living in different degrees of poverty, and work is getting to be as scarce here where the population does not count one to the square mile, as it