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Upon revising the last sheet of this small book for press I could not help feeling that some little explanation was needed of its appearance at all. For assuredly, when I accepted the commission of the Editor of the London Standard to write for him a series of articles giving my impressions of Australasia during my forthcoming lecturing tour, I had no idea or intention of subsequently publishing those articles in this form. The onerous nature of my lecture engagements and the rapidity of my passing from place to place precluded any idea of giving such careful attention to form, sequence, and detail that I believe a book demands.

But to my surprise and gratification, while the articles were appearing, always in a more or less abbreviated form according to the exigencies of space, the Editor wrote and informed me that there was a strong demand that the articles should be published in book form. I demurred on several grounds, but principally because they were the slightest journalistic impressions, that they necessarily contained many repetitions as the same features struck me obtaining in various places, &c. These objections, and others which I would rather not quote, were overruled, however, and so the book is here. And I send it out without any misgivings, because even if the critics do feel it their duty to go for me, they have in all my seventeen previous books been so uniformly kind, fair, and generous that a reversal of the treatment may perhaps have a bracing effect, though, like the nigger, "I dreads de process."

F. T. BULLEN.

Melbourn, Cambridgeshire.

1907.