- come one of the great cities of the world. Its houses
are nearly all built of a native stone of yellow cast. Through this wonderful harbor we steamed slowly, and finally landed at noon, as the captain said we would.
Tuesday, January 7.—This morning we employed
a messenger boy to show us around Sydney. The boy
is fourteen years old, and was educated in English
schools. He talks no other language than English,
but we could not understand half he said: there is this
marked difference in American and English pronunciation.
Sydney is an English city, and its signs are in
English, but we do not understand many of them.
Australia is not only an English colony, but the people
of its larger towns have a dialect of their own. Sydney
is a fine city, but looks more like Manchester or
Liverpool than it looks like London. There are no
sky-scrapers here, in the American sense; one of the
Sydney newspapers wanted to build a sky-scraper,
and occupy it as an office, but Parliament would not
permit it. Everywhere you see American goods, and
signs calling attention to them, and Bud Atkinson's
American Wild West is giving exhibitions daily in one
of the parks. It seemed queer to me that an exhibition
of this character should be granted permission to exhibit
in one of the parks; imagine an Australian Wild
West in Central Park in New York. And I do not recall
Bud Atkinson as a noted American in the Wild
West line. This show came over a month ago, in the
ship ahead of ours. I should say a jump of three weeks
