For its size, I consider Adelaide the beet-built town I know, and certainly it is the best laid out and one of the prettiest and most conveniently situated.  It nestles, so to speak, at the foot of a range of high hills on a plain, which extends seven miles in length to the seashore.  The approach by rail from either Port Adelaide or Glenelg is uninteresting, but directly you get out at the station the first impression is pleasing.  The streets are broad and laid out in rectangular blocks as in Melbourne, and the white stone used for most of the buildings makes the town look particularly bright and lively, showing off the bustle and traffic to advantage.  In the background are the hills, while on one side is the suburb of North Adelaide, on an incline divided from the city by a broad sheet of artificial water, running in the bed of the river Torrens through a half-mile deep belt of ‘park-lands,’ which encircle the square mile forming the city proper, and separate it from the suburbs.

The conception of this belt of verdure, on which none but public buildings may be erected, dividing the working part of the town from the residential part, has always seemed to me a masterpiece of wisdom in city planning, and hardly less admirable are the five open reserves inside the city which serve as its lungs.  Ultimately the city proper will probably be almost entirely reserved for business purposes.  Already very few people live within the belts who can help it, although high prices are given for sites for residences on each of the four terraces fronting the belts.  Except that Adelaide is perfectly flat, while Melbourne is built on two sides of a valley, Adelaide may not inaptly be described in the words of a visitor who was returning to England by the Peninsular and Oriental route, as ‘a smaller but better Melbourne.’  The style of architecture is not quite so florid, but the extreme squatness of the buildings is far more noticeable here.  It is no merely that the buildings are actually lower, but the look lower from being built on the flat.

Of the public buildings, the finest is the Post Office, which, though it wants an extra story to make it dignified, is, in my opinion, preferable to either the Melbourne or Sydney Post Offices.  The new Institute, the Anglican Cathedral, which is lofty, the Town Hall, the Supreme Court, the Banks of South Australia, of Adelaide, and the English and Scottish Bank, and the new vice-regal residence on the hills, are all fine buildings, which would attract favourable notice in Melbourne or Sydney.  Nominally there are three theatres, practically only one, but that is undoubtedly the prettiest and best in Australia.  But the pride of Adelaide is its Botanic Garden, which, though unpromisingly situated on a perfectly level spot, with no water at hand, has been transformed, by means of artificial water and artificial hillocks, into the prettiest garden in the world The area is only forty acres, but every inch has been turned to the utmost advantage, and this is really a garden, while the Sydney Gardens—­mark the plural—­are more park-like, and those of Melbourne can hardly be called gardens, in the strict sense of the word.