Old colonist honours.

Labours and honours opened at once.  The day of my arrival I was to be the guest of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce for the honour of a dinner to their first President.  My friend Mr. Cowderoy, the secretary, had telegraphed me to Hobart, in the hope that I might arrive in time to secure the dinner taking place prior to the Exhibition opening, with all its proposed engrossing after festivities.  Mr. Robert Reid, whose acquaintance I had made at the grand Colonial Exhibition two years before, was now President of the Chamber, and received me most cordially.  For the following day again there was the opening of the Exhibition, at which I was to march in the procession through the Avenue of Nations alongside of Mr. Francis Henty, now the sole survivor of the illustrious brotherhood who founded Victoria fifty-four years before.

So far from anticipating such honours, I had been preparing myself to plead, on any public occasion that might offer, the cause of the early pioneers; for although, as I proposed to put it, we were but the babes, and have since been succeeded by the men, we were surely to count for something, as without the baby there could never have been the man.  But all fears on that head were promptly dispersed, and at every turn honours were poured out upon the “old pioneers” of the days of small things.  I had repeatedly to confess, for myself as one of them, that it was a most pleasant and fortunate accident to have been an early colonist.

But one disadvantage of these honours and attentions is that they are apt to excite the envy of your fellow-mortals.  Human nature, even the very best, can never be perfect.  My old friend James Stewart Johnston challenged my right to appear in the grand procession, where he and a good half-dozen other “old colonists” had equal rights.  I replied soothingly, regretting that so glorious a band of early warriors, who had borne nobly all the rough battle of early progress (how eloquent people can be in their own praise!) should not have been super-added to honour and adorn the procession.  But this not satisfying him, I was driven to bay, and fired my reserved shot, to the effect that I was the only old colonist who had come twelve thousand miles on purpose to attend the opening.  That shut him up.

The suburbs.

A busy time of public entertainments followed, during the intervals of which I visited energetically persons and places of old association.  The Melbourne suburbs were quite as surprising as the city itself.  Almost countless miles of streets had taken the place of the country roads or mere bush tracks of my recollection.  While I stood wondering at these changes, I had to regret that the old features had so completely disappeared that I was at home nowhere, save that in an otherwise entirely unrecognizable area there would still appear the old name, such as the Sydney, the Richmond, or the Toorak Road.  I had to be content with this scant remnant of the past, and to begin acquaintance with an entirely new set of occupant streets and dwellings.