Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/483

Rh or three times that amount. We have been told of a gold-digger just down from the mines of whom £12 was demanded one day for an afternoon's drive; he handed the driver a ten-pound note, and told him he would have to be satisfied with that—and he was.

"We went into three or four arcades, which form pleasant lounging and shopping places, like the famous 'passages' of Paris and the arcades of London. One of them is called the 'Book Arcade,' and is principally devoted to the sale of books; and if we may judge by the number of volumes we saw there, the people of Melbourne are liberal patrons of literature. No matter what the taste of a person might be in books, whether he desired a work of fiction or a treatise on science, a volume of travels or an exposition of Hindoo philosophy, he could be accommodated without delay. They have a public library here containing nearly one hundred and fifty thousand volumes, all of which can be read without charge.