I find, in recalling these impressions, that my first idea of Australia still remains the most prominent one left in my memory. Australia was truly the antipodes. Everything seemed to be reversed, a topsy-turvy land. At Botany Bay I was astonished to find the swans were black, thereby demolishing our beautiful ideas about "milk-white" swans. The birds talked, screamed, or brayed, instead of singing, and the trees shed their bark instead of their leaves. The big end of the pears was at the stem, and cherry-stones grew on the outside of the fruit. I was sitting one day in the garden of the governor-general when I thought I felt some one tap me on the shoulder. Then my coat was wrenched off my back, and I turned just in time to see it disappear down the throat of a tame Australian ostrich, called an emu. The bird had taken me for a vegetable. Sidney Smith describes the kangaroo as an animal with the head of a rabbit, the body of a deer, a tail like a bed-post, and which, when in danger, puts its young into a pocket in its stomach. But the most marvelous of all the queer things of Australia, to my mind, was the animal that laid eggs like a hen, suckled its young like a goat, and was web-footed, like a duck. This was the duckbill, or water-mole, which the Australians called the Patybus. I also saw in Tasmania, and on Flinder's Island, the race of men that was then considered the most remarkable on the globe, the original Tasmanian savages; and I saw, also, the most curious weapon that man has ever invented, the boomerang. Holmes has described this weapon in one of his humorous verses: "The boomerang, which the Australian throws, Cuts its own circle, and hits you on the nose." I got one of the Bushmen to throw his boomerang for me. He threw it around a tree and the missile came back toward us. I fully expected to be sent sprawling. It dropped almost at the feet of the savage that threw it. Even gold in that land is found where it all ends in our country--in pockets! Before closing the account of my Australian experiences, I want to record that when I arrived in Melbourne that flourishing port was in a horrible condition for a city of its size and importance. Its streets were such as would not have been tolerated in an American city of half its size or one tenth its wealth. There were practically no public works. After I had been there for some little time, a plan was put on foot to improve the city. It moved along very slowly, as no one seemed to know exactly what to do, or how to do it. Finally, an elaborate program was drawn up, and all that was needed to carry it out was the money, which would have to be borrowed.