The bane and bottomless deep for the corporation’s narrow budget was Elizabeth-street, where a little “casual” called “The Williams,” of a mile’s length, from the hardly perceptible hollows of the present Royal Park, played sad havoc at times with the unmade street.  It had scooped out a course throughout, almost warranting the title of a gully, and at Townend’s corner we needed a good long plank by way of a bridge.  At the upper end of the street was a nest of deep channels which damaged daily for years the springs and vehicles of the citizens.  The more knowing of us who lived northwards dodged these evils by a particular roundabout via Swanston-street.  Up almost to gold diggings and Victorian Parliaments did the great Sydney-road begin thus inauspiciously, and hardly less pertinaciously disconcerting was the Brunswick swamp, three miles further on.  Melbourne missed a great chance in filling up with a street this troublesome, and, as a street, unhealthy hollow.  Dr. Howitt used to tell me he never could cure a patient, resident there, who had become seriously unwell.  A reservation of the natural grass and gum-trees between Queen and Swanston streets would have redeemed Melbourne up to the first rank of urban scenic effect, and the riotous Williams might, with entire usefulness, have subsided into a succession of ornamental lakes and fish ponds.

EARLY SUBURBAN MELBOURNE.

“Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness.”  —­Cowper.

“Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.” -Gray.

In 1844 I lived in a little cottage at South Yarra, on the Dandenong or Gardiner’s Creek-road, then only a bush track, although considerably trodden.  I had not many neighbours.  Mr. Jackson, at the far end, had bought Toorak, but not yet built upon it; and the near end was graced by Mr. R.H.  Browne’s pretty villa, in its ample grounds, sold shortly before to Major Davidson, and constituting the palace of its time along the road.  There was a trackless forest opposite us, and more than once I missed my way in trying to make a straight cut to the present St. Kilda.  One Sunday morning I made a discovery—­a small sheet of water, glittering in the sunshine, and I long gazed admiringly on the countless insects and plants about its edges.  It was confessedly neither broad nor deep, and a certain tag-rag indefiniteness of outline gave occasion afterwards to envious anti-Prahraners all about to make it out as only a swamp.  The little thing had much badgering to endure in this way in Prahran’s early progress.  Later on, I saw it as a sort of central reserve of the ever-rising Prahran.  But still later it was drained off and turned about its business, as either a profitless nuisance, or a too costly ornamentation:  sic transit, etc.