our overcoats. We could venture into the bath in the morn-
ings again. For many nights it had been cloudy, but now
the sky again cleared. The nebula in Orion shone like a
patch of the Milky Way. The black chasm at the south-west
angle of the Southern Cross showed blacker from the con-
trast, the more brilliant the stars. So black it was that one
would have called it a passing cloud; but the clouds went
and came, and the inky spot remained unchanged, an opening
into the awful solitude of unoccupied space.

At length the last day came. In a few hours we were to
sight Kangaroo Island. Books were packed away, and prep-
arations made to leave--my last reading was 'Œdipus Colo-
neus,' the most majestic of all the Greek plays. Human im-
agination has conceived nothing grander, nothing so grand,
as the mysterious disappearance of the blind old king, the
voice calling him to come which no mortal lips had uttered,
the sight which only Theseus was allowed to look on, and
Theseus, shading his eyes with his hand before a scene too
awful to be described. It was the highest point achieved by
the Greek branch of Adam's race. The Australians, among
whom I was so soon to find myself, were the latest develop-
ment of the same family. Among them there would be no
Œdipus, no Theseus, no Sophocles, yet whatever has come
out of man has its root in man's nature; and, if progress was
not a dream, who could say what future of intellectual great-
ness might not yet lie before a people whose national life was
still in its infancy?

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