The people of Sydney ought to be afraid of the sharks, but for some reason they do not seem to be.  On Saturdays the young men go out in their boats, and sometimes the water is fairly covered with the little sails.  A boat upsets now and then, by accident, a result of tumultuous skylarking; sometimes the boys upset their boat for fun—­such as it is with sharks visibly waiting around for just such an occurrence.  The young fellows scramble aboard whole—­sometimes—­not always.  Tragedies have happened more than once.  While I was in Sydney it was reported that a boy fell out of a boat in the mouth of the Paramatta river and screamed for help and a boy jumped overboard from another boat to save him from the assembling sharks; but the sharks made swift work with the lives of both.

The government pays a bounty for the shark; to get the bounty the fishermen bait the hook or the seine with agreeable mutton; the news spreads and the sharks come from all over the Pacific Ocean to get the free board.  In time the shark culture will be one of the most successful things in the colony.

CHAPTER XIV.

We can secure other people’s approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

My health had broken down in New York in May; it had remained in a doubtful but fairish condition during a succeeding period of 82 days; it broke again on the Pacific.  It broke again in Sydney, but not until after I had had a good outing, and had also filled my lecture engagements.  This latest break lost me the chance of seeing Queensland.  In the circumstances, to go north toward hotter weather was not advisable.

So we moved south with a westward slant, 17 hours by rail to the capital of the colony of Victoria, Melbourne—­that juvenile city of sixty years, and half a million inhabitants.  On the map the distance looked small; but that is a trouble with all divisions of distance in such a vast country as Australia.  The colony of Victoria itself looks small on the map—­looks like a county, in fact—­yet it is about as large as England, Scotland, and Wales combined.  Or, to get another focus upon it, it is just 80 times as large as the state of Rhode Island, and one-third as large as the State of Texas.

Outside of Melbourne, Victoria seems to be owned by a handful of squatters, each with a Rhode Island for a sheep farm.  That is the impression which one gathers from common talk, yet the wool industry of Victoria is by no means so great as that of New South Wales.  The climate of Victoria is favorable to other great industries—­among others, wheat-growing and the making of wine.

We took the train at Sydney at about four in the afternoon.  It was American in one way, for we had a most rational sleeping car; also the car was clean and fine and new—­nothing about it to suggest the rolling stock of the continent of Europe.  But our baggage was weighed, and extra weight charged for.  That was continental.  Continental and troublesome.  Any detail of railroading that is not troublesome cannot honorably be described as continental.