this statement: “I buried him where he had been found, as I had previously buried others who had perished under similar circumstances, crossing these plains from one station to another in the middle of the dry season.” Gradually the old identities, people who remember days such as these, are dying out in Victoria; while so few personal histories have been written, and so few letters preserved, that the life and characteristics of the gallant early settlers seem more than likely to sink into oblivion. Mr. Joseph Tuckwell, who died in Melbourne only a very few months ago, could tell some fine yarns when the spirit moved him. As far back as 1851 he was Inspector of Police in Hobart—a position that was by no means a sinecure in those days. Later, when the gold rush in Victoria started, he joined the police force there; then, in 1860, went to Dunedin; and a little later became Governor of Auckland Gaol—his reminiscences dating back to the times before he had sailed for Australia, when he had witnessed the burial of George IV. in St. George’s Chapel. Another link also with the early days passed away, only a month or so back, in the person of one of the last of the convict chaplains of the old Port Arthur Settlement; his wife, who is still living, being the daughter of John Price, the Inspector-General of Convicts, who was murdered in 1857, and niece of the great John Franklin. It is interesting to remember that in those early days Victoria was a country with no old people. Lately I was talking with some old maiden ladies, who told me that, as children, they had never seen an old man or woman; and that when they first went home with their parents, in 1876, they were terror-stricken by the aspect of their old Scotch grandmother in her white mutch, whom they could not dissociate in their bewildered little minds from the wolf in the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” They had lived in those days just beneath the Dandenong Range, fifteen miles out of Melbourne, and speak now of the terror the escaped and liberated prisoners—of course, there were no real convicts in Victoria—used to be to them and their mother; the Botanical Gardens being then in the making, with gangs of prisoners employed upon them and upon the roads, working in small groups, watched over by officials with muskets.