Page:Old Melbourne Memories.djvu/198

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182
OLD MELBOURNE MEMORIES
chap.

portion of the ground, that they might have laid out their cash to greater advantage, and that they have waited a good while for that advance in prices which will recoup everything.

Heidelberg, thus sponsored, took rank as a fashionable suburb, and divers personages, according to an inevitable natural law, were attracted thereto. Captain George Brunswick Smyth, formerly of her Majesty's 50th Regiment, purchased Chelsworth. Mr. David M'Arthur came next to him. Then Waverley and Hartlands, the Rev. John Bolden, Mr. Hawdon at Banyule, and later on Dr. Martin, beyond him again.

Still more distant, on the Rosanna estate, dwelt no less a potentate than Mr. Justice Willis, the Supreme Court Rhadamanthus of the day, who must have expended considerably more than half his time in driving in his carriage and pair into Melbourne and back along the miry, almost impassable track into which the winter rains invariably converted the road.

This not undistinguished legal celebrity we had known in Sydney, and he presented himself to my youthful intelligence as a good-natured, mild-mannered old gentleman, with whom I used to go quail and duck shooting in the meadows bordering the Yarra on Mr. Hawdon's and neighbouring estates. On these occasions the late Mr. Archibald Thorn, who rented part of Banyule from Mr. Hawdon, often accompanied us. And a very deadly shot he was.

The Judge shot fairly well, and after a decent morning's sport was genial and gracious in a marked degree. But when he doffed the russet tweeds and