ten shillings a night.
Hotel-keepers made fortunes, or at least some of them did, and others
might have done so if they had taken care of their money. I have heard
of one hotel-keeper who had his house crammed full of patrons, none of
them paying less than ten shillings a night for their lodging, while he
had seventy-five lodgers in his stables, each of them paying five
shillings apiece.

"A great many people spread tents on the waste ground outside of the
city to save the expense of lodgings. They did not succeed altogether in
doing so, as the government required them to pay at the rate of sixty
dollars a year for the privilege of putting up a tent. Everybody was
anxious to get away from Melbourne as quickly as possible, but they
underwent great delays in getting their goods out of the ships."

"I suppose you had no railways at that time to facilitate travel," one
of the youths remarked.

"No; there were no railways and the only way of travel was by the
ordinary route, and very ordinary it was in many places. It was not a
graded and macadamized road such as you find in England, but simply a
rough pathway, principally of nature's manufacture. It was full of ruts
and gullies, very muddy in the rainy season, and terribly dusty in the
dry times. Travelers went to the mines in all sorts of ways, some on
foot, and some by ox and horse wagons, and if they had plenty of money,
and were determined to have luxury and speed at whatever cost, they
traveled by stage-coach. An American firm, Cobb & Company, came here in
the early days and established lines of stage-coaches, first from
Melbourne to the mines, and afterwards all over Australia. Cobb's
coaches are still running on some of the interior routes that are not
covered by railway, but wherever the locomotive has put in its
appearance it has forced them out of the way."

"I have read somewhere," said Harry, "that traveling on the road to the
mines was not very safe in those days."

"That depended somewhat on the way one was going," was the reply.
"Travelers going towards the mines were not very liable to attack, as
they were not supposed to have any money, but it was not so with those
coming from the mines to the coast. The natural supposition was that an
individual moving in the direction of Melbourne had 'made his pile' and
was on his way home. The country was infested with ex-convicts and men
who had escaped from convict service in Australia and Tasmania. They
were k