Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/35

 *come one of the great cities of the world. Its houses are nearly all built of a native stone of yellow cast. Through this wonderful harbor we steamed slowly, and finally landed at noon, as the captain said we would.

—This morning we employed a messenger boy to show us around Sydney. The boy is fourteen years old, and was educated in English schools. He talks no other language than English, but we could not understand half he said: there is this marked difference in American and English pronunciation. Sydney is an English city, and its signs are in English, but we do not understand many of them. Australia is not only an English colony, but the people of its larger towns have a dialect of their own. Sydney is a fine city, but looks more like Manchester or Liverpool than it looks like London. There are no sky-scrapers here, in the American sense; one of the Sydney newspapers wanted to build a sky-scraper, and occupy it as an office, but Parliament would not permit it. Everywhere you see American goods, and signs calling attention to them, and Bud Atkinson's American Wild West is giving exhibitions daily in one of the parks. It seemed queer to me that an exhibition of this character should be granted permission to exhibit in one of the parks; imagine an Australian Wild West in Central Park in New York. And I do not recall Bud Atkinson as a noted American in the Wild West line. This show came over a month ago, in the ship ahead of ours. I should say a jump of three weeks