Six Letters From the Colonies

Six Letters From the Colonies is a Historical book. The first three of these Letters are reprinted, with slight alterations, from the Eastern Morning News. The last three were written after my return to England As I have not cared to keep up the fiction of having wntten them from Australia, they may contain some references to events subsequent to my return. It is often objected, and truly enough, that travellers, who spend only so short a time as I have in fresh countries, are not justified in expressing deliberate opinions about them ; but this docs not apply where a writer gives his impressions as such, and not as matured opinions, or where he expresses the opinions of 'other people who, by long residence or otherwise in a particular countryy, have had every opportunity of forming them. Voyage to Australia has in these days become so ordinaty an affair that it may seem to require an apology to attempt to describe one, but a voyage in a sailing ship is so different from that in a steamer that it may interest some people. It is, as 3 rule, only those who go abroad for their health who prefer a sailing ship, on account of the great length of the voyage, in allusion to which steam people call sailing ships " wind jammers", while the sailors retort on steamers by dubbing them "iron tanks" and "old coffins. " There is no doubt that the picturesqueness of a sea voyage is quite destroyed by a steamer. There are no, or very few, regular sailors on board so much of the work is now done by steam. There are no " chanties " or sailors' songs, which help the work to go easily.