Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/153

 sixteen volumes were offered as refreshment to the weary. But in good time all this has got thoroughly mended. The stranger can now walk into this noble building without introduction of any sort, and find himself as conveniently provided with facilities for study as in the reading-room of the British Museum.

Society was existing in a state of discomfort and inconvenience difficult to realise. In the capital the ill-lighted streets were also ill-paved, and the flag-ways made in patches or left unmade at the option of the owners of adjoining property. On windy nights one stumbled through some of the chief streets of Melbourne from fragments of solid flagging into unexpected pools of slush and mud. The principal highways in the suburbs bore the same relation to the streets that highways ordinarily bear to streets; that is to say, they were worse made and worse mended. On one of the chief highways to the goldfields, now traversed by a railway, I have seen a coach company after bumping over corduroy road for which the treadmill would have been a pleasant exchange, compelled to descend from their places, wade through a river, return to the vehicle and sit for two or three hours in dripping clothes. The Western ports within twelve hours' sail of the capital have sometimes been longer without Melbourne newspapers than London was ordinarily without newspapers from New York. After a day's rain Elizabeth Street, a great business thoroughfare, was a morass, where a passage was sometimes not merely difficult but impossible. I can recall a case in which I had to forfeit a dinner engagement in the next street because the ocean of sticky slush which separated us was impassable by man or beast.

I speedily visited the Legislative Assembly and made acquaintance with the leading members. They were generally men of capacity and experience, but I was assured