note. All around are clearings-the selectors' names being given by our driver, as well as the acreage and the prices given by those who are occupiers at second or third hand. The selections appear to be all of twenty acres, but additions of adjoining selections of this sized area have been made by most of those now occupying the land. Our Jehu has an eye to business in answering to such enquiries. He acts as land-agent for many of the lots we pass. I can have this one at £7 per acre, or half of that one at the same rate. It is uncleared land, and but poorly fenced, for which I am thus asked to pay at the rate of seven times the cost price to its original selector. Driver explains to me that the times have altered since, nine years ago, all the land hereabout could be had on the easy terms of a pound per acre, with prolonged years for payment of that, now seemingly, low price. Little indeed appears to have been done to the land beyond fencing it in. Even the huts that were, necessarily, at one time, upon each twenty-acre allotment, are no longer visible. When the land was fully paid for, the continuance of these rude necessities disappeared, and their materials were sold to other settlers intending permanent residence hereabout. Beaconsfield House is visible now and again in openings among the trees. It is reached at the end of an hour and a half's uphill drive, when our vehicle draws up at its garden fence. Two crossroads or tracks have been passed on the journey. The first, I am told, leads to Berwick-a township which supplies all the store wants of the settlers hereabout. From Berwick come the carts of the butcher and baker, with twice-a-week calls upon the customers here and there scattered among the hills. The second road would take me to Gembrook, some two hours' further drive, and more favoured by selectors who were desirous of better farming land than that to be found about Beaconsfield. The host of Beaconsfield House wishes that we had telegraphed him of our coming. His house is the post and telegraph station for this part of the world. He is crowded, and we must put up with what accommodation we can get. As it is Hobson's choice, I am glad to get anything. There is an aroma of my digging days of '52 about the place-the smell of the gumtrees and the general savour of things which recall Fryer's Creek and the Loddon Junction. I should be quite prepared to be put away in a tent, and to again sleep on a stretcher or on a baker's sack nailed to four short posts -the usual digger's bed in the early digging days. As it is, I am, with the manager of a leading insurance company, introduced to a neat little cot, standing away from the house on the hillside. It is a weather-board little place in a breezy situation, with a view of boundless extent on three sides of it. To look at the Bay I must go uphill back to the main building, from which the view is to Port Phillip and Western Port in one direction, and to the Dandenong Ranges and the more distant Baw Baws in every other. Nothing interrupts the view from the hill-top on which Beaconsfield House is situated. Though but twelve hundred feet or so above sea-level, it commands a prospect only to be expected from mounts of twice its altitude. Interested in the place, I inquire its history, and learn the little that has to be told. Ten years ago all was waste, and the solitude unbroken here and all around by man and his doings. The kangaroos increased and multiplied, and the opossums and wallaby replenished the earth then as they had done for thousands of years before. The pioneer settler was a wandering linendraper, who wandered this way into the bush ten miles from off the track of the old Gippsland road. He must have had bush instincts to trust himself so far away among the then thicklytimbered hills and gullies. He climbed the hill upon which Beaconsfield House stands a tall mount surrounded on all sides near and far with other like mounts. "Jerusalem! mountains encompass her!" might have been his exclamation, and have been rightly enough said. Solomon's city stands on a mount, to which the approach from the plains of Sharon is similar to that made to Beaconsfield. The background of the higher Mount of Olives. is alone wanting to complete the similarity of site. This pioneer selected the site he had thus discovered, and built a fourroomed weather-board habitation here. Some of it is probably yet among the timbers of Beaconsfield House, the fourth owner of which is now in possession. Host Sumner, with his genial wife and daughter, well advertise, in their personal appearance, the healthgiving air of the place. It is pleasant, indeed, to look upon their plump and fresh-coloured faces and his farmer-like look. With the invalids who are here seeking convalescence the comparison is conspicuous indeed. It must be pleasant to the sickly, who come here seeking health in a change of air, to see in Mr. Sumner and his family what the climate of this locality will do for those who make a sufficiently lengthened trial of it. It is curative and health-inspiring to look upon such people as our host and his family. In that feeling I once asked a rosy-faced, chubby-cheeked doctor to visit me as often as possible-his presence seemed to do me as much good as his medicine. This was Dr. Maund, now many years deceased. When telling him how I envied his appearance of superabundant health he proceeded to undeceive me. "I had rather have your constitution," he said, "it is not a good thing to be too healthy. Such as I am do not stand sickness so well as you do. I have too good an appetite, and not exercise enough to work off the effects of it!" We are too apt to envy others without considering all things. If we did so we should be better satisfied with our own lot. There are drawbacks to all that we are too apt to think so much advantageous. Everything is compensated, or balanced, if we but look at it sufficiently. This fine, healthy-looking young doctor died of diarrhoea within twelve months after the little talk with him which I have now recorded. The sunset visible this evening made a grand effect-so advantageously seen as it was. Admiring it, I am bidden to see what the sunrise will be as viewed from the bedroom window of my little hillside cot--the outlook from frm which is towards the sunrise. The fine sunset bespeaks a warm next day, and I am glad to be where I can sleep coolly and bear blankets upon the bed. A fresh breeze blows in through the open door, though I can well believe it was then swelteringly hot in Melbourne. No mosquitoes are about, ar:d, for the bush, I am agreeably surprised at the few flies to trouble one. My thoughts go back to the tent life at Fryer's Creek, where I became first aware of the trouble which the Egyptians know so much of, in the "plague of flies." In less than five minutes from turning in, as early as nine p.m., I am sound asleep. So sound indeed that the sun is up before me, and I miss the expected sight of its rising out of yonder mountain range of the Baw Baws. Writes Bunyan, "they laid the pilgrim in a large upper chamber, the windows of which opened towards the sun rising. Here he slept peacefully through the night, and in the morning awoke and sang." I noted that sentence long years ago, and have had often cause to remember it. There are blessed mornings when one must burst into song-and that even while shaving. It is all climatic and atmospheric I suppose, but this gaiety of spirit will cause melodious utterance-whether it be melody to others or not. Something of the sort was the matter on this morning, and I gave credit for it all to the mountain breeze entering at the door, and the glorious sunshine coming in at the window. As late at night, so now in the early morning, it was deliciously cool. By-and-by, when the sun got overhead it would, I knew, be otherwise, and so I enjoyed all the more the start I had got of the warm time coming. The For the day there was choice of visiting any of the surrounding hills and the villas capping them. ceremony of introduction is not much needed here in the bush. It is mostly enough to lift the latch, in the Irish fashion, with a "God save all here," to those within. As often as not no one is to be found within. The visitor may then wander, as I did, over well-furnished but untenanted rooms, and wonder at the |