Little reliable information about the country or its inhabitants was to be had, so I fondly imagined that in such a land, secured from contamination by the wicked world outside, I should find a people of primeval innocence and simplicity, and the long-forgotten lines returned to my memory: 

“Beatus ille qui procul negotils,
Ut prisca gens mortalium.”

It was summer time, and the weather was serene and beautiful, when in the grey dusk of the evening we sailed through the Rip at Port Philip Heads.  Then began the troubles of the heaving ocean, and the log of the voyage was cut short.  It ran thus: 

“The ship went up, and the ship went down; and then we fell down, and then we was sick; and then we fell asleep; and then we was at Port Albert; and that’s all I knows about it.”

I walked along the one street past the custom house, the post-office, and the bank, about three hundred yards and saw nothing beyond but tea-tree and swamps, through which ran a roughly-metalled road, leading apparently to the distant mountains.  There was nothing but stagnation; it was the deadest seaport ever seen or heard of.  There were some old stores, empty and falling to pieces, which the owners had not been enterprising enough to burn for the insurance money; the ribs of a wrecked schooner were sticking out of the mud near the channel; a stockyard, once used for shipping cattle, was rotting slowly away, and a fisherman’s net was hanging from the top rails to dry.  Three or four drays filled with pigs were drawn up near the wharf; these animals were to form part of the steamer’s return cargo, one half of her deck space being allotted to pigs, and the other half to passengers.  In case of foul weather, the deck hamper, pigs and passengers, was impartially washed overboard.

An old man in a dirty buggy was coming along the road, and all the inhabitants and dogs turned out to look and bark at him, just as they do in a small village in England, when the man with the donkey-cart comes in sight.  To allay my astonishment on observing so much agitation and excitement, the Principal Inhabitant introduced himself, and informed me that it was a busy day at the Port, a kind of market day, on account of the arrival of the steamer.

I began sorrowfully to examine my official conscience to discover for which of my unatoned-for sins I had been exiled to this dreary land.

Many a time in after years did I see a stranger leave the steamer, walk, as I had done, to the utmost extremity of the seaport, and stand at the corner of the butcher’s shop, gazing on the swamps, the tea-tree, and the far-away wooded hills, the Strelezcki ranges.  The dismal look of hopeless misery thatstole over his countenance was pitiful to behold.  After recovering the power of speech, his first question was, “How is it possible that any man could ever consent to live in a hole like this?” Here the Principal Inhabitant intervened, and poured balm