Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/17

 the demon of Roman cement has doubled the Cape, and begun to revel in all the luxuriance of the Regent-street school of architecture. Most of the houses are built of bricks and roofed principally, I might almost say entirely, with shingles, which are imported from Van Dieman's Land. The exceptions are a few which are roofed, some with zinc, and others with Welch slate, both of which can be imported on reasonable terms.

The general appearance of the town is more that of an English country town than of any thing else to which I can compare it. The weather-boarded houses and numerous stores giving it, however, a character peculiar to itself, while the long teams of bullocks, with their wild-looking drivers, and occasionally a straggling tribe of natives, followed by a host of mangy dogs, remind you that you are not in the British isles. There is also a deficiency in that neatness for which English country towns are generally remarkable, but which is naturally to be attributed to the circumstances of the place. The streets are alternately immoderately wide and inconveniently narrow—the former being one hundred feet, the latter not more than thirty feet, in width: this gives the town a straggling appearance. Until very lately the streets were in so bad a state as to be absolutely dangerous, owing to the rain having been suffered to make channels for itself, some of which yawn most fearfully in the middle of the principal streets, and even where this is not the case, they give one in wet weather a lively idea of the condition of the world in its transition state, when it is supposed to have been the abode of the Saurian reptiles. In consequence of this state