In 1844 I lived in a little cottage at South Yarra, on the Dandenong or Gardiner's Creek-road, then only a bush track, although considerably trodden. I had not many neighbours. Mr. Jackson, at the far end, had bought Toorak, but not yet built upon it; and the near end was graced by Mr. R.H. Browne's pretty villa, in its ample grounds, sold shortly before to Major Davidson, and constituting the palace of its time along the road. There was a trackless forest opposite us, and more than once I missed my way in trying to make a straight cut to the present St. Kilda. One Sunday morning I made a discovery--a small sheet of water, glittering in the sunshine, and I long gazed admiringly on the countless insects and plants about its edges. It was confessedly neither broad nor deep, and a certain tag-rag indefiniteness of outline gave occasion afterwards to envious anti-Prahraners all about to make it out as only a swamp. The little thing had much badgering to endure in this way in Prahran's early progress. Later on, I saw it as a sort of central reserve of the ever-rising Prahran. But still later it was drained off and turned about its business, as either a profitless nuisance, or a too costly ornamentation: sic transit, etc. The following year, 1845, in which my worthy old friend Alfred Ross joined me in business in the Market-square, then a place of the very smallest pretensions compared to now, I rented, with him, the allotment next beyond the Major's. It had been vacant since its previous occupancy three years before by Mr. P.W. Welsh, already spoken of--one of the earliest and largest, best known, and least fortunate of Melbourne's early merchants. That the bad times that had brought many of us to the ground had then not quite passed, although they had by this time evidently "bottomed," may be judged by the fact that we got a fairly habitable large cottage, with twenty-five picturesque acres, and the remains, such as they were, of a garden, for 30 pounds a year. Five years earlier some thousands a year would have been needed to live in such a place. Eight years later it was worth, for mere site value, probably 30,000 pounds. I am afraid to say what it may now be worth. Probably most of it is long ago "cut up" into streets and town lots, like "Major Davidson's paddock" alongside, which, consisting of some twelve acres next the Dandenong-road, realized in 1854, under gold discovery stimulus, no less than 17,000 pounds. Such are a few specimens of colonial ups and downs!