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a month to midsummer—A.D. 1883—when on this verge of the great north-western plain-ocean we fall across a section of the railway to Bourke in course of construction. Nature is here hard beset by Art. What a mighty avenue has the contractor's army cut through the primeval forest! The close-ranked trees taper, apparently, to nothingness until the horizon is reached. In the twelve miles that your sight reaches, there is not the smallest curve—no departure from the mathematically straight line. If you could see a hundred and twenty miles, you would find none greater than is visible now; for this avenue is something over that length, and is said by railway men to be one of the longest 'pieces of straight' in the world.

The still incompleted work is even now being ministered to with the strong, skilled hands of hundreds of men. All the same, the inspecting overseer is a necessary personage in the interests of the State. He it is who descries 'a bit of slumming,' however minute; who arrests progress, lest bolts be driven instead of screwed; who compels ’packing' and other minute but important details upon which the safety of the travelling public depends.

How efficiently is man aided by his humbler fellow-creatures, whom, for all that, he does by no means adequately respect or pity. See those two noble horses on their way to be hooked-on to a line of trucks! They are grand specimens of the Australian Clydesdale—immense creatures, highly fed, well groomed, and, it would appear, well trained.

They have no blinkers, and from the easy way in which, unled, they step along the edge of the embankment, where