The streets of Melbourne are, to my mind, the most tiring I have ever known. They are so straight, so uncompromising; Collins Street alone presents such an endless vista as one gazes up it that I remember, in those first days, feeling as if I would like to take it up in my hands and twist it into some unrecognizable form—warp it and bend it. Straight from west to east, side by side, run several such streets, the principal ones of the city, crossed again at right angles by others every bit as straight—all without a single saving grace of curve, of sheltering crescent, or tree-shaded square, so that when a hot north wind blows it rushes across the interstices of these streets like a hot blast from a furnace, eddying thick clouds of yellow dust—filled with the unutterable debris of the streets—furiously round each corner. There are some really most remarkably fine buildings, but the city is not yet sufficiently complete to show them to advantage or in any harmonious whole, and they look, on the whole, rather ungainly among their humble neighbours—squashed in, in an apologetic manner, between them. During those early days of my life in Melbourne, when the first fascination of newness had faded and I had not yet begun to know the true meaning of the city, the place impressed itself on my jaded mind, with photographic clearness, as an individual without eyelashes, staring unblinkingly, showing a face with no half-tints, no delicacy; and, though possessing a sort of humanity, as all big towns do, yet quite without a soul. Indeed, I believe that this is really the truth, and that the soul of the town is wanting because the hearts of the people, in spite of the manner in which they flock to the big cities, are really all the time in the open country, the strongest proof of this being perhaps found in the growth of the suburbs, which push their way ever further and further afield, and in the fact that very few people indeed—having no inborn love for the life of the town as so many of us have—live in the city itself if they can afford to do otherwise. During the day, indeed, this absence of soul is but little realized, save when the hot winds and dust carve a heavy furrow down the centre of every brow and call into being a thousand criss-cross wrinkles. But at night, or on Sabbaths or holidays, the town is strangely empty, even more so spiritually than actually. On such days in old-world cities, it always seems to me as if the quiet dead were abroad, wandering lovingly round the shady squares—with their sober-faced houses—and the flagged paths of churchyards, the secluded seats, the ancient archways and narrow silent streets; articulate in the twittering of sparrows or the coo of pigeons, lost at other times in the roar of traffic.