and splitting posts and rails all over the city from Spencer Street to Spring Street, regardless of the fact that the ground under their feet would be, in the days of their grandchildren, worth 3,000 pounds per foot.  Their bullock-drays were often bogged in Elizabeth Street, and they made a corduroy crossing over it with red gum logs.  Some of these logs were dislodged quite sound fifty years afterwards by the Tramway Company’s workmen.

DISCOVERY OF THE RIVER HOPKINS.

“Know ye not that lovely river? 
Know ye not that smiling river? 
Whose gentle flood, by cliff and wood,
With ’wildering sound goes winding ever.”

In January, 1836, Captain Smith, who was in charge of the whaling station at Port Fairy, went with two men, named Wilson and Gibbs, in a whale boat to the islands near Warrnambool, to look for seal.  They could find no seal, and then they went across the bay, and found the mouth of the river Hopkins.  In trying to land there, their boat capsized in the surf, and Smith was drowned.  The other two men succeeded in reaching the shore naked, and they travelled back along the coast to Port Fairy, carrying sticks on their shoulders to look like guns, in order to frighten away the natives, who were very numerous on that part of the coast.  On this journey they found the wreck of a vessel, supposed to be a Spanish one, which has since been covered by the drifting sand.  When Captain Mills was afterwards harbour master at Belfast, he took the bearings of it, and reported them to the Harbour Department in Melbourne.  Vain search was made for it many years afterwards in the hope that it was a Spanish galleon laden with doubloons.

Davy was in the Sydney trade in the ‘Elizabeth’ until March, 1836; he then left her and joined the cutter ‘Sarah Ann’, under J. B. Mills, to go whaling at Port Fairy.  In the month of May, Captain Mills was short of boats, and went to the Hopkins to look for the boat lost by Smith.  He took with him two boats with all their whaling gear, in case he should see a whale.  David Fermaner was in one of the boats, which carried a supply of provisions for the two crews; in the other boat there was only what was styled a nosebag, or snack—­a mouthful for each man.

On arriving off the Hopkins, they found a nasty sea on, and Captain Mills said it would be dangerous to attempt to land; but his brother Charles said he would try, and in doing so his boat capsized in the breakers.  All the men clung to the boat, but the off-sea prevented them from getting on shore.  When Captain Mills saw what had happened, he at once pushed on his boat through the surf and succeeded in reaching the shore inside the point on the eastern side of the entrance.  He then walked round towards the other boat with a lance warp, waded out in the water as far as he could, and then threw the warp to the men, who hauled on it until their boat came ashore, and they were able to land.