hole city go mad? Stark, staring, raving
mad--Mad Melbourne--and yet a Maltese terrier is quarantined in the same
port for six months!

[Illustration: QUARANTINE ISLAND.]

Yet lunatics arrive and make lunacy rampant, and a whole city is left
after such a visitation an asylum of melancholia--Mad Melbourne. Lunacy
frequently takes the form of egotism. Peasants imagine themselves
princes; Calibans believe themselves to be Adonises; beggars imagine
themselves millionaires. It is a harmless vanity and hurts no one, but a
mad city may ruin thousands by suddenly imagining itself a gold mine.
Melbourne a few years ago imagined it suddenly became the hub of the
universe. The world and his wife had but one burning desire--that was to
live in Melbourne. Some lunatic started this ridiculous idea, and the
boom spread like lightning. Melbourne was by this magic boom turned into
an Aladdin cave. No prairie fire ever started with such suddenness,
with such fury, burning up, as it leapt and galloped along, all the
reasoning powers and common sense of the people. Those who cleared a
space around them to avoid destruction were tongued by the fire of
speculation, and before they could move away were irreparably lost.
Great and small, old and young, were carried away in the blaze of
speculation. The frightened reptiles and beasts running in front to
escape it were, it was thought, miserable fools who had not the pluck or
sense to aid in setting speculation in Melbourne on fire. A fanciful
picture on paper this? True, so was the great boom of 1887 merely a
fanciful picture on paper. Had it been otherwise banks would not have
failed, nor would families have been ruined wholesale, nor would trade
and speculation have been left charred roots and stubble on the scene of
folly--Mad Melbourne.

It is difficult to say how it began--it is unnecessary to say how it
ended. I am told that at the height of the boom Melbourne went
frantically and absolutely mad. Poor men and women rushed about fancying
that they had suddenly become millionaires. In the few hours between
breakfast and lunch they had bought a piece of land for L1,000, and in a
few hours had sold the same block for L10,000--on paper. They then heard
that the purchaser had re-sold it for L20,000 before dinner, they bought
it back for L30,000, and re-sold it over supper again for L50,000, a
good day's work--on paper. Everyone did the same--all were mad. Money
flowed in from the Old Country