hen Mr. Wallis
arrived. Surely never had an elderly gentleman taken to sightseeing with
the avidity displayed by this one, and every one of the seven Plumsteads
voted him to be "a jolly decent sort".

His first move this morning was to take them across the harbour in a
steam ferry to a small jetty opposite the Circular Quay, where they
transhipped to a tiny tug which took them to Farm Cove, round Clark
Island, and past the other sights of that most wonderful harbour; and
all the time he told them thrilling stories of the early days of the
Colony. He told them of the voyage of Captain Phillips, who set out from
Portsmouth in May, 1787, and arrived, with eleven ships, in Botany Bay
in January, 1788, only to find that Botany Bay was by no means what it
had been represented, and, instead of the land being a series of
beautiful green meadows sloping gently up from the shore, there was
nothing but swamp and sand.

"What an awful voyage! I don't think that we will complain about our few
weeks on board after that!" cried Sylvia, who was sitting close to Mr.
Wallis on the deck of the tug, while Rupert sat on the deck at his feet
and Rumple hovered in the background, all of them intent on getting all
the information they could about the new and wonderful country to which
they had come.

"The voyage now is nothing but a pleasure trip compared with what it
used to be in the days of the old sailing vessels," said Mr. Wallis, who
was immensely flattered at the attention given to his stories. He had
always been very fond of telling people things, only the trouble was
that so few seemed to care for what he had to tell; but these children
simply hung on his words, and so he was inspired to do his very best to
satisfy their thirst for information.

"Botany Bay is south of Sydney Harbour, isn't it?" asked Rumple,
producing the dirty notebook and preparing to take notes on a liberal
scale.

"Yes, and because it is so open to the east there is no protection from
the Pacific swell. Captain Phillips saw that it would be impossible to
found a colony there, and so he set out with one of his ships to find a
better harbour farther along the coast," went on Mr. Wallis. "And it is
said that a sailor named Jackson discovered the entrance to what is now
known as Sydney Harbour, and it was named Port Jackson in honour of
him."

"I wish that I could discover something that could be named after me,"
said Rumple with a sigh. "Port Plumstead, or e