nd be run in and locked up
with difficulty, within sound of a church-going bell.

The Bourke Christmas is a very beery and exciting one. The hotels shut
up in front on Christmas Day to satisfy the law (or out of consideration
for the feelings of the sergeant in charge of the police station), and
open behind to satisfy the public, who are supposed to have made the
law.

Sensible cold dinners are the fashion in Bourke, I think, with the hose
going, and free-and-easy costumes.

The free males take their blankets and sleep in the "park;" the women
sleep with doors and windows open, and the married men on mattresses on
the verandas across the open doors--in case of accidents.

Christmas in Sydney, though Christmas holidays are not so popular as
Easter, or even Anniversary Day, in the Queen city of the South. Buses,
electric, cable and the old steam trams crowded with holiday-makers
with baskets. Harbour boats loaded down to the water's edge with harbour
picnic-parties. "A trip round the harbour and to the head of Middle
Harbour one shilling return!" Strings of tourist trains running over
the Blue Mountains and the Great Zigzag, and up the coast to Gosford and
Brisbane Water, and down the south coast to beautiful Illawarra, until
after New Year. Hundreds of young fellows going out with tents to fish
in lonely bays or shoot in the mountains, and rough it properly like
bushmen--not with deck chairs, crockery, a piano and servants. For you
can camp in the grand and rugged solitude of the bush within a stone's
throw of the city, so to speak.

Jolly camps and holiday parties all round the beautiful bays of the
harbour, and up and down the coast, and all close to home. Camps in the
moonlight on sandy beaches under great dark bluffs and headlands, where
yellow, shelving, sandstone cliffs run, broken only by sandy-beached
bays, and where the silver-white breakers leap and roar.

And Manly Beach on a holiday! Thousands of people in fresh summer dress,
hundreds of bare-legged, happy children running where the "blue sea over
the white sand rolls," racing in and out with the rollers, playing with
the glorious Pacific. Manly--"Our Village"--Manly Beach, where we used
to take our girls, with the most beautiful harbour in the world on one
side, and the width of the grandest ocean on the other. Ferny gullies
and "fairy dells" to north and south, and every shady nook its merry
party or happy couple.

Manly Beach--I remember five years