than was played during the first two days of our race meeting before a
crowded and critical audience, and never, we can state from a somewhat
extended experience of matters dramatic, did they gaze on a more
finished actor than the gentleman who performed the leading part.
Celebrated personages have ere now graced our provincial boards. On the
occasion of the burning of the Theatre Royal in Sydney, we were favoured
with the presence in our midst of artists who rarely, if ever before,
had quitted the metropolitan stage. But our "jeune premier" in one sense
has eclipsed every darling of the tragic or the comic muse.

Where is there a member of the profession who could have sustained his
part with faultless ease and self-possession, being the whole time aware
of the fact that he smiled and conversed, danced and diced, dined and
slept (ye gods! did he sleep?), with a price upon his head--with the
terrible doom of dishonour and inevitable death hanging over him,
consequent upon a detection which might occur at any moment?

Yet was there a stranger guest among us who did all this and more with
unblenching brow, unruffled self-possession, unequalled courtesy, who,
if discovered, would have been arrested and consigned to a lock-up, only
to be exchanged for the gloom and the manacles of the condemned cell.
He, indeed, after taking a prominent part in all the humours of the
vast social gathering by which the Turon miners celebrated their annual
games, disappeared with the almost magical mystery which has already
marked his proceedings.

Whom could we possibly allude to but the celebrated, the illustrious,
we grieve to be compelled to add, the notorious Starlight, the hero of a
hundred legends, the Australian Claude Duval?

Yes, almost incredible as it may seem to our readers and persons at
a distance imperfectly acquainted with exceptional phases of colonial
life, the robber chief (and, for all we know, more than one of his
aides-de-camp) was among us, foremost among the betting men, the
observed of all observers in the grand stand, where, with those popular
country gentlemen, the Messrs. Dawson, he cheered the winners in the two
great races, both of which, with demoniac luck, he had backed heavily.

We narrate as a plain, unvarnished truth that this accomplished and
semi-historical personage raced a horse of his own, which turns out now
to have been the famous Rainbow, an animal of such marvellous speed,
courage, and enduranc