northeast and over the border--to Buffalo, New York.

But the explanation was simple. Years ago the fabulously rich silver
discovery at Broken Hill burst suddenly upon an unexpectant world. Its
stocks started at shillings, and went by leaps and bounds to the most
fanciful figures. It was one of those cases where the cook puts a
month's wages into shares, and comes next month and buys your house at
your own price, and moves into it herself; where the coachman takes a few
shares, and next month sets up a bank; and where the common sailor
invests the price of a spree, and the next month buys out the steamship
company and goes into business on his own hook. In a word, it was one of
those excitements which bring multitudes of people to a common center
with a rush, and whose needs must be supplied, and at once. Adelaide was
close by, Sydney was far away. Adelaide threw a short railway across the
border before Sydney had time to arrange for a long one; it was not worth
while for Sydney to arrange at all. The whole vast trade-profit of
Broken Hill fell into Adelaide's hands, irrevocably. New South Wales
furnishes law for Broken Hill and sends her Judges 2,000 miles--mainly
through alien countries--to administer it, but Adelaide takes the
dividends and makes no moan.

We started at 4.20 in the afternoon, and moved across level plains until
night. In the morning we had a stretch of "scrub" country--the kind of
thing
which is so useful to the Australian novelist. In the scrub the hostile
aboriginal lurks, and flits mysteriously about, slipping out from time to
time to surprise and slaughter the settler; then slipping back again, and
leaving no track that the white man can follow. In the scrub the
novelist's heroine gets lost, search fails of result; she wanders here
and there, and finally sinks down exhausted and unconscious, and the
searchers pass within a yard or two of her, not suspecting that she is
near, and by and by some rambler finds her bones and the pathetic diary
which she had scribbled with her failing hand and left behind. Nobody
can find a lost heroine in the scrub but the aboriginal "tracker," and he
will not lend himself to the scheme if it will interfere with the
novelist's plot. The scrub stretches miles and miles in all directions,
and looks like a level roof of bush-tops without a break or a crack in it
--as seamless as a blanket, to all appearance. One might as well walk
under water and hope to g