In the museums you will find acres of the most strange and fascinating things; but all museums are fascinating, and they do so tire your eyes, and break your back, and burn out your vitalities with their consuming interest.  You always say you will never go again, but you do go.  The palaces of the rich, in Melbourne, are much like the palaces of the rich in America, and the life in them is the same; but there the resemblance ends.  The grounds surrounding the American palace are not often large, and not often beautiful, but in the Melbourne case the grounds are often ducally spacious, and the climate and the gardeners together make them as beautiful as a dream.  It is said that some of the country seats have grounds—­domains—­about them which rival in charm and magnitude those which surround the country mansion of an English lord; but I was not out in the country; I had my hands full in town.

And what was the origin of this majestic city and its efflorescence of palatial town houses and country seats?  Its first brick was laid and its first house built by a passing convict.  Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place.  It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.  And all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones.  It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.

CHAPTER XVII.

The English are mentioned in the Bible:  Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

When we consider the immensity of the British Empire in territory, population, and trade, it requires a stern exercise of faith to believe in the figures which represent Australasia’s contribution to the Empire’s commercial grandeur.  As compared with the landed estate of the British Empire, the landed estate dominated by any other Power except one —­Russia—­is not very impressive for size.  My authorities make the British Empire not much short of a fourth larger than the Russian Empire.  Roughly proportioned, if you will allow your entire hand to represent the British Empire, you may then cut off the fingers a trifle above the middle joint of the middle finger, and what is left of the hand will represent Russia.  The populations ruled by Great Britain and China are about the same—­400,000,000 each.  No other Power approaches these figures.  Even Russia is left far behind.