training. I feel fit to go for a man's life. Just feel this,
Despard,' and he holds out his arm to the camp swell. 'There's
muscle for you!'

'Plenty of muscle,' says Mr. Despard, looking round. He was a swell
that didn't work, and wouldn't work, and thought it fine to treat
the diggers like dogs.... 'Plenty of muscle,' says he, 'but devilish
little society.'

'I don't agree with you,' says the other honourable. 'It's the most
amusing, and, in a way, instructive place for a man who wants to
know his fellow-creatures I was ever in. I never pass a day without
meeting some fresh variety of the human race, man or woman; and
their experiences are well worth knowing, I can tell you. Not that
they're in a hurry to impart them; for that there's more natural
unaffected good manners on a digging than in any society I ever
mingled in I shall never doubt. But when they see you don't want to
patronise, and are content to be as simple man among men, there's
nothing they won't do for you or tell you.'

'Oh, d----n one's fellow-creatures! present company excepted,' says
Mr. Despard, filling his glass, 'and the man that grew this
"tipple." They're useful to me now and then, and one has to put up
with this crowd; but I never could take much interest in them.'

'All the worse for you, Despard,' says Clifford: 'you're wasting
your chances--golden opportunities in every sense of the word.
You'll never see such a spectacle as this, perhaps, again as long as
you live. It's a fancy-dress ball with real characters.'

'Dashed bad characters, if we only knew,' says Despard, yawning.
'What do you say, Haughton?' looking at Starlight, who was playing
with his glass, and not listening much, by the look of him.

In his latest novels Boldrewood reverts to his familiar themes. _The
Sphinx of Eaglehawk_, the shortest of all his works, might have been an
excerpt from The _Miner's Right_; and the scene of _The Crooked Stick_
is an inland station in New South Wales in the days of bushranging and
disastrous droughts.

The materials employed in the latter story reproduce the principal
features of almost a score of other Australian novels published within
the last few years. The love-affairs of a beautiful, impulsive girl,
sighing for knowledge of the great world beyond the limits of her narrow
experience; the influence upon her of a fascinatin