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In these "Tales of the Austral Tropics" will be found the strange romances which write themselves, often in letters of blood, amid the half-unknown, mysterious regions of Tropical Australia. That they are not less true than terrible, I take it upon myself to affirm. That such is far from being the case with the larger proportion of literary manufacture professing to describe Australian life and character, I most distinctly assert. "Those who know seldom write, and those who write don't know," remarks the veteran colonist with accentuated emphasis. But this author's name is a household word among bushmen and bookmen from Albany to Thursday Island, from "The Gulf" to the Snowy River--

Alike to him the sea, the shore,

The pen, the bridle, and the oar.

To him, familiar as highways are the endless solitudes of the "Never Never Country"--he has tempted the Desert Sphinx, gazed upon gold matrix and opal hoards which gleamed in mockery of the exhausted wanderer. Trusted for dear life in forest glades to a steady eye and a true rifle. Listened in a canoe on the Coral Sea to the moaning of the approaching tempest.

Long a leading actor upon Dame Nature's stage, he has turned scene-painter for the nonce, and limned with lifelike effect the drama of the Waste.

ROLF BOLDREWOOD.