cricket matches.  The quality of the attendance, also, in Melbourne is something remarkable; but of some 10,000 people, perhaps, who pay their sixpences to see the Melbourne and Carlton Clubs play of an afternoon, there are not a thousand who are not intensely interested in the match, and who do not watch its every turn with the same intentness which characterizes the boys at Lord’s during the Eton and Harrow match.  A good football match in Melbourne is one of the sights of the world.  Old men and young get equally excited.  The quality of the play, too, is much superior to anything the best English clubs can produce.  Of course it is not easy to judge of this when the games played are different, but on such points as drop-kicking, dodging, and catching, comparison can be made with the Rugby game; and every ‘footballer’ (the word, if not coined, has become commonly current here) knows what I mean when I say, that there is much more ‘style’ about the play of at least half a dozen clubs in Victoria, than about the ’Old Etonians’ or the ‘Blackheath’, which are the two best clubs I have seen play in England.

Of athletic meetings there are plenty, but they do not attract much interest as compared with cricket and football.  Nor can rowing be called a thoroughly national pastime, though both in Sydney and Melbourne there are good rivers.  The two colonies row each other annually; and in Sydney, more especially, there is a good deal of excitement over this event.  But the interest felt in rowing is not much greater than in England.  It is a popular sport, and that is all.

Yachting is very popular in Sydney, the harbour being almost made on purpose for it; but yachting is only a rich man’s pleasure.  Lawn-tennis is as much in fashion here as at home, but it is not cultivated with the same ardour.  The best players in Sydney and Melbourne would not be considered as more than third-rate at home.  Bicycling is gaining in favour in Melbourne and Adelaide; Sydney is rather hilly for it.  There are polo and gun clubs in all three towns, but they are, of course, small and aristocratic rather than popular.

Fox-hunting there is none; but there are hunt clubs in the principal towns who run after a drag—­in Melbourne after a kangaroo, and occasionally even after a deer.  The country is of course monotonous, and wants very good riding.  There are no sensational water-jumps even at steeplechase meetings, the colonial horse not being accustomed to water.  But it wants a good horse to get over the unvarying succession of post and rail fences.  People who talk about the jumps in steeplechases at home being hard should try a run over a colonial course of 4-feet-6-inch post and rails.  The horses are accustomed to it, but not so always the riders.  Up in the bush there is plenty of kangaroo-hunting to be got at almost any station.  The squatters often pay a shilling a head for kangaroos, and very fair sport they afford when not too numerous.  The wallaby is a smaller kind of kangaroo which is also hunted.