I feel it to be impossible to describe with accuracy the effect upon pastoral speculators of a rise in the price of wool amounting to 80 per cent., the whole difference going to profit. My readers may perhaps be able to imagine the present condition of the squatter’s mind. “Non secus in bonis Ab insolenti temperatam Lætitia,” are words which not unfrequently rise to the minds of the observer. It is, however, very much to the advantage of the colony at large that this prosperity should be continued. When wool is low every interest in Australia is depressed. Even mining shares do not go off so readily under the verandahs when the pockets of the squatters are not full of money. I also visited a large cattle station in the south of the colony, on the eastern side of the lakes. It belongs to a rich Scotch absentee landowner who sits in our parliament, and I will only say of it that I think I ate the best beef there that ever fell in my way. Like other things beef must have a best and a worst, and I think that the Portalloch beef was the best. I heard that there was beef as good,--perhaps even better,--up at a large cattle station far north; but the information reached me from the owner of the northern station who was with us at Portalloch. As I found his information on all other subjects to be reliable, I am bound to believe him in this. If it be so, he must be the very prince of beef-growers. On the road from Adelaide to the lakes,--on the lake side of the Mount Lofty hills,--we stayed a night at the little town of Strathalbyn. Afterwards, on my route back to Victoria, which I made by steamer from Port Adelaide to Macdonnel Bay, and thence overland across the border, I stayed also at the little town of Gambier-Town, under Mount Gambier. I mention these places because they were the cleanest, prettiest, pleasantest little towns that I saw during my Australian travels. I would say that they were like well-built thriving English villages of the best class, were it not that they both contained certain appliances and an architectural pretension which hardly belong to villages. When the place in question is dirty, unfinished, and forlorn,--when the attempt at doing something considerable in the way of founding a town seems to have been a failure,--the appearance of this pretension is very disagreeable. But at Strathalbyn and Gambier-Town there had been success, and they had that look about them which makes a stranger sometimes fancy in a new place that it might be well for him to come and abide there to the end. They are both in South Australia. Perhaps I was specially moved to admiration because the inns were good.