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T h e n o w great wood-blocked causeway at the intersection of Collins and Elizabeth Streets was during the early years a queer thoroughfare. T h e four half-acre corner allotments were purchased respectively for ^ 3 2 , £,o, ^ 4 2 , and ,£50, no doubt the full value at the time. T h e most remarkable corner in Elizabeth Street is its north-east junction with Little Collins Street. T h e half-acre was bought for ,£28, and the corner was devoted to mercantile purposes by Campbell and Woolley, importers. T h e store was about half up on the arrival of Father Geoghegan, the first R o m a n Catholic priest, in July, 1838, and he obtained permission to solemnize therein the first mass offered in the colony. About the General Post Office corner, a " cock-and-bull" story occasionally crops up to the effect that the place belongs to a pauper cripple, w h o acquired it legally in the days of yore, but the intervention of some legal or illegal hitch ousted him from his rights. There is little doubt of such a supposition being groundless. At the period of the early land sales the place was such that no sane m a n would put a shilling in it, and as no one even thought of then purchasing it, the block appears on the old charts of Melbourne, shaded off as a red blank, the indication of the unbought portions of the township. It was a species of bog, and, according to tradition, during the winter of 1837, a bullock team, including a drunken driver, got swamped there one evening after sundown whilst en route for Flemington, and no traces of them were ever brought to the surface. This latter is, no doubt, a stretch of the imagination. T h e half-acre whereon is n o w the Theatre Royal was knocked d o w n for ,£95. It was used as a timber yard until the Fates decreed it to form the principal Metropolitan h o m e of the drama. From Swanston Street northward was for a length of time reckoned at little value, for not only trading, but even habitable purposes. It was an extensive upland of forest country, rent by water-worn gorges, and deemed valuable only for its supposed stone-quarrying resources. O n e of the most pleasurable pedestrian excursions that could be indulged in, was an afternoon stroll away over the ground now occupied by the Court House and Gaol Reserve, and away by the Cemetery towards Brunswick, so called by Mr. W . F. A. Rucker. T h e first building erected in East Collins Street was the Scots' School, in 1838, primarily used also as a Kirk. Lower down, on the south side, where The Argus n o w forges and launches its typographical thunderbolts, was the first Baptist place of worship, a capacious tent, wherein the first service was held. O f this half-acre freehold M r . T h o m a s Napier became the owner, and his heirs are still the ground lessors. H e lent the land temporarily to the Baptists, and subsequently had a building put up there, an apartment of which was dignified as Napier's Large R o o m , the scene of some early religious services and society meetings. W h e n William Kerr started the Melbourne Argus in 1846, the place was converted into a newspaper office; and when this journal died and the present Argus sprung like a Phcenix from its ashes, the premises and the newspaper clove together, enlarging every year, and growing so attached to each other that it would be difficult to calculate upon the particular period (if ever) when they will dissolve partnership. Crossing obliquely from The Argus, w e c o m e to a place which, before a stone of a T o w n Hall was laid there,figuredas a locality of some note. T h e bole of a large g u m tree remained there a few feet over the ground for years. This was thefirststump utilized for orating purposes. F r o m a platform attached to the stump, during the Anti-transportation campaign, the Tribunes of the period discharged their philippics against the threatened pestiferous invasion. Directly opposite was the half-acre known almost from time immemorial as Germain Nicholson's Corner, purchased for ^ 4 5 . Old Melbourne could boast of (so-called) "Terraces," some particulars of which are worth rescuing from oblivion. T h e first erected in Stephen Street c o m m e n c e d at the corner of Little Bourke Street, and known as "Cleveland Terrace," but was afterwards k n o w n as "Porter's Cottages," after their owner, Mr. George Porter. If the memoirs of " Porter's Cottages" could be written, many a quaint and thrilling tale of Melbourne life would they unfold. T h e premises were in 1881 turned into a Hippodrome, under lease to a company of which an enterprising medico was the principal. Latrobe Parade, a nomenclative compliment to the Provincial Superintendent, and still known as such, is a lane extending from Collins Street East to Little Flinders Street, between Stephen and