Page:Old Melbourne Memories.djvu/196

 This romantically-named suburb was seven miles from Melbourne, with an unmade road through black soil of considerable richness, and a tenacity, when resolved into mud, which I have, during much after-experience, rarely seen equalled. It might have appeared to some persons a matter of supererogation this planting one's self so many miles away from an infant settlement, such as Melbourne then was. A matter involving loss of time, too, expense in transit, besides exile from whatever society was then available. But these considerations availed not against the charming prospect of a rural home, a country-house surrounded by an estate of fertile land, bordered by the clear-flowing Yarra, and glorified by a distant prospect of the Australian Alps. But chiefly alluring were the persuasive tongue, the sanguine predictions, and the enjoyable al fresco entertainments of Mr. R. H. Brown, a social celebrity of the day, fashionable and distinguished, generally known, from his reminiscent enthusiasm on the subject of the grand European tour, as Continental Brown.

This sentimental speculator, most refined of land agents, had, either personally or as deputy for a firm of Sydney capitalists, purchased a block of land extending nearly from the Darebin Creek to the village, and comprising the estates of Chelsworth, Waverley, Hartlands, and Leighton. There was also a section named Maltravers. I am not sure, indeed, whether he did not christen the whole block "Maltravers," in compliment to the Master upon whose melancholy, philosophical, resistless hero so many of the viveurs of the day fashioned themselves.