istricts, affording the best of pasturage
and showing upon a large scale the careful cultivation of root-crops,
corn, oats, wheat, and barley. Government owns and operates the railroad
with a fair degree of liberality, though the prices charged for
transportation are much higher than with us in America. The cars are
often of the English style, formed into coaches which are cheaply
upholstered, though they are reasonably comfortable.

It is but little more than half a century since an Englishman named John
Batman ascended the Yarra-Yarra and bargained with the chiefs of the
native tribe located here, to sell "to him and his heirs forever" so
many thousand acres of land as now embrace the area occupied by the city
of Melbourne and its immediate environs, covering six or eight miles
square. For this grant of land Batman paid the chiefs in goods, which
are said to have consisted of one dozen cotton shirts, a dozen colored
woollen blankets, a handful of glass-bead ornaments, twelve bags of
flour, and two casks of pork. These were all otherwise unattainable
articles to the savages, who, however, had land enough and to spare. It
is said that the aborigines pleaded hard for one or more guns to be
added to the payment, but Batman was too wary to supply them with
weapons which they could in an emergency turn against himself or other
white men. The Englishman came and settled upon his purchase, built a
stock-house, and proposed to surround himself with friends in order to
form a sort of small independent State. But only a brief period
transpired before an authorized agent of the English Government appeared
upon the spot and declared the bargain between Batman and the savages to
be null and void; in justice, however, to the purchaser, Government paid
him some thousands of pounds sterling, and he turned over all his right
and title to the authorities accordingly. Neither party could possibly
have anticipated that in so few years this land would be valued at many
millions of pounds sterling. Five years ago a monument was erected to
Batman's memory, he having died in 1839; this monument stands in the
old cemetery of Melbourne. To-day the site once so cheaply purchased,
with the population now upon it, is classed by English writers as
forming, in point of wealth, numbers of inhabitants, and general
importance, the tenth city in the world!

The first sight of Melbourne was quite a surprise to us, though we
thought we were fairly inform