rvals in the tunnel, and connected by wires with a galvanic battery
placed a long distance off. The operation of firing the mine was made a
public occasion, and Lady Belmore agreed to go up to the mountains and
perform the ceremony of removing the hill. When all was ready, she
touched the knob which brought the two ends of the wire together. A dull
and rumbling sound was heard, the solid rock heaved slowly upward, and
then settled back to its place, broken in a thousand pieces, and covered
with rolling clouds of dust and smoke. All that the workmen had then to
do was to carry away the immense pile of stone, and the course was clear
for laying the rails.

When the line reached the other side of the Blue Mountains there were
great difficulties in the descent, and here the engineers had to lay out
zigzags of greater extent than the former. By these the trains now
descend easily and safely from the tops of the mountains down into the
Lithgow Valley far below.

[Illustration: THE TOWN HALL, SYDNEY.]

By the southern railway to Albury, crowds of people are daily whirled in
a few hours to places which, forty years ago, were reached by Sturt, and
Hume, and Mitchell, only after weeks of patient toil, through unknown
lands that were far removed from civilisation.

#4. Sydney Exhibition.#--So on every hand the colony made progress. Her
railways expanded in scores of branches; her telegraph lines stretched
out their arms in every direction; her sheep increased so that now there
are nearly sixty millions of them; her wheat and maize extended to more
than half a million of acres; her orangeries and vineyards and orchards,
her mines of coal and tin, and her varied and extensive manufactures,
make her people, now numbering a million, one of the most prosperous on
the face of the earth. Her pride was pardonable when, in 1879, she held
an international exhibition to compare her industries side by side with
those of other lands, so as to show how much she had done and to
discover how much she had yet to learn. A frail, but wonderfully pretty
building rapidly arose on the brow of the hill between Sydney Cove and
Farm Cove; and that place, the scene of so much squalor and misery a
hundred years before, became gay with all that decorative art could do,
and busy with daily throngs of gratified visitors. The place had a most
distinguished appearance; seen from the harbour, its dome and fluttering
flags rose up from among the luxuriant fol