d experiments in regulating the liquor
traffic; in closing shops at an early hour; in irrigating the waterless
plains of the north-west, and in educating farmers and others into the
most approved methods of managing their businesses. What is to be the
eventual result no one can as yet very definitely prophesy. But the eyes
of many thoughtful persons throughout the world are at present turned to
Victoria to see how those schemes are working which have been so
zealously undertaken for the good of the people.

[Illustration: THE TOWN HALL, MELBOURNE.]

[Illustration: THE PORT OF MELBOURNE.]

Up till 1890 the progress of the colony was astonishing. Its central
half forms a network of railways. Its agriculture and its trades have
doubled themselves every few years; and though a period of restless
activity and progress was in 1890 followed by a time of severe
depression, the community, like all the other Australian colonies,
has great times of prosperity in store for it.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE TIMES OF THE MAORIS.

#1. The Maoris.#--So far as we know, the original inhabitants of New
Zealand were a dark-skinned race called Maoris, a people lithe and
handsome of body, though generally plain of features: open, frank and
happy in youth, grave and often melancholy in their older years.

They numbered forty thousand in the North Island, where the warmth of
the climate suited them, but in the South Island there were only two
thousand. They were divided into tribes, who fought fiercely with one
another; cooked and ate the bodies of the slain, and carried off the
vanquished to be slaves. They dwelt in houses sometimes neatly built of
wooden slabs, more often of upright poles with broad grass leaves woven
between them. The roofs were of grass, plaited and thatched.

To these abodes the entrances were only some two or three feet high, and
after crawling through, the visitor who entered at night would see the
master of the house, his wives, his children, his slaves, indeed all his
household, to the number of twenty or thirty, lying on mats in rows down
either side, with their heads to the walls and their feet to the centre,
leaving a path down the middle. In these rooms they slept, with a fire
burning all night, till, what with the smoke and the breaths of so many
people, the place was stifling. The roofs were only four feet higher
than the ground outside, but, then, inside, the earth was hollowed a
foot or two to make the