The following year, about the same pleasant spring season, I made out a second goldfields visit, in company with my late friend, Mr. W.M. Bell, senior partner of the early firm of Bells and Buchanan. This time I went further inland, and in the more northerly direction of Mount Alexander and Bendigo, as considerable regions around were then loosely called, and which are now represented respectively by the large municipalities of Castlemaine and Sandhurst. Vast changes had taken place in the colony since my Ballarat visit. There had been, in the first place, arrivals in multitudes, first from the surrounding colonies, and then from Home, and, in a lesser influx, from the Cape, America, and parts of Europe. The tide of such threatening dimensions from China was later on. The roads, such as they were, were crowded with passengers; and with traffic, chiefly in flour, to the starving diggers, the carriage of which to Bendigo ran up to 100 pounds a ton. Indeed, such was the cost of carriage that some of us estimated that a single year's total would equal the cost of making a railway. Of course the railway, draining the labour market, could only itself have been at proportionate cost. Nevertheless, Mr. Trenchard, a Melbourne solicitor, projected "The Melbourne, Mount Alexander and Murray River Railway," an enterprise which, after some months' flutter of chequered life, expired for want of support from the over-busy colonists, who had other far more immediately pressing needs and chances for their money.