Adelaide always look to me as if some one had taken his seat upon the top of them and squashed them down. Sydney is taller and more irregular. It climbs up and down a whole series of hills, and protrudes at all kinds of unexpected points. The city proper has no very definite boundaries, and you hardly know where the city begins and the suburbs end.

Of the public buildings of Sydney, the handsomest are the Treasury, the Colonial Secretary's office, and the Lands Office, each four or five stories high, and close to the water's edge. The Colonial Secretary's office is only second to the Melbourne Law Courts amongst the completed buildings of Australia. It is lofty, massive, and dignified outwardly, elegant and spacious inside, although it has been fitted up in the most incongruous fashion with odds and ends of third-rate statuary, imitation bronzes, etc., until it looks like an old curiosity-shop. The University, though comparatively an old building, still holds its ground amongst the best, and may well be proud of its splendidly proportioned hall, built in fifteenth-century Gothic. The Roman Catholic Cathedral, which has just been opened, is also well proportioned. The length is 350 feet; width within transept 118 feet; width of nave and aisle 74 feet; height about ninety feet. There is to be a central tower 120 feet high, and two towers with spires which will rise to a height of 260 feet. The Anglican Cathedral, though not large, is a handsome building with two towers, in fourteenth-century Gothic. The Post Office will for many years remain a fragment of what may or may not be a handsome building. The Town Hall has evidently been built with the idea of at all hazards making it larger than the Melbourne Town Hall. So far it is a success. But architecturally it is nothing more than a splendid failure--over-decorated and ginger-bready. Curiously enough it is built upon the site of the burial-place of the early settlement---forming a sort of Westminster Abbey for the first settlers. There are four theatres, but none well fitted or decorated. Palatial hospitals and asylums of course abound, but the Parliament House is wretchedly small.

Unfortunately Sydney has very few reserves, and those few she keeps in bad order, with the exception of the Botanical Garden, situated on an arm of the land almost entirely surrounded by water. It is the most charming public garden I have ever seen; inferior to that of Adelaide in detail, but superior in the tout ensemble. Almost equally beautiful is the situation of Government House, a comfortable Tudor mansion, but rather small for purposes of entertainment.

Amongst the commercial buildings, the new head offices of the Australian Mutual Provident Society are pre-eminent. They cost no less than £50,000. The banks are not equal to either the Melbourne or the Adelaide banks. But the insurance offices, warehouses, etc., though not nearly as numerous, are quite up to the Melbourne standard in size, although for the reasons already given they do not show to so great an advantage as their merit deserves. Of the appearance of the shops I have already written in my letter about Melbourne. They are not so fine as in Melbourne nor so well stocked, and are pretty much on a level with those in an English town of the same size.

The names of the principal streets proclaim the age of the town. George Street and Pitt Street are the two main thoroughfares, and there are Castlereagh, Liverpool, and William Streets, while King, Hunter, Bligh, Macquarie, and Philip Streets, and Darlinghurst preserve the names of the first governors. The suburbs first formed preserve the sweet-sounding native names--Wooloomooloo, Woolahra, Coogee, Bondi. Of a later date are Randwick, Newtown, Stanmore, Ashfield, Burwood, and Petersham--the last four along the railway line.

The good people of Sydney do not spend their money so much upon outward show as the Victorians. Hence the number of large houses in the suburbs is very much smaller. But whereas the country around Melbourne for miles is mostly flat as a pancake, the suburbs of Sydney literally revel in beautiful building sites. For choice, there are the water frontages below the town or up the Parramatta river, which is lined with pretty houses, whose inhabitants come up to Sydney every morning in small river steamers. The principal suburbs, however, are much closer to the city than in Melbourne, being connected by steam tramways instead of railways. New suburbs are also springing up along the railway lines, but until the railway station is brought into the centre of the town, they can never be nearly so populous as the Melbourne suburbs.

ADELAIDE.

I began with a comparison between Melbourne and Sydney, towns of 280,000 and 220,000 inhabitants respectively. The capital of South Australia, Adelaide, with its 70,000, stands, of course, upon an entirely different level; but it possesses, to an even greater degree than Sydney, all the peculiar characteristics of a capital city. If any comparison can be made between Adelaide and its sister capitals, it is with Melbourne rather than with Sydney. Adelaide is a thoroughly modern town, with all the merits and all the defects attaching to novelty. It does not possess the spirit of enterprise to so adventurous a degree as Melbourne, but neither does it approach to the languor of Sydney. In this respect it has discovered a very happy middle course. There is certainly something very provincial about the attitude of the town towards the rest of the world, but this helps to make it the more distinctive, and conduces largely to its progress. It 'goes without saying' that there cannot be the same number of large buildings as in the larger cities, that their proportions cannot be so large, that there cannot be the same facilities for business or for pleasure. But the emulation produced by the achievements of its big neighbours has resulted in making Adelaide a far more advanced town for its size than either of them. Proportionately to population, everything in Adelaide ought theoretically to be on a fourth scale of its like in Melbourne. As a matter of fact, most things are on more than half-scale, many on a two-thirds, and a few things, such as the Botanic Garden, the Exchange, the Banks of South Australia and Adelaide, are unsurpassed.

For its size, I consider Adelaide the beet-built town I know, and certainly it is the best laid out and one of the prettiest and most conveniently situated. It nestles, so to speak, at the foot of a range of high hills on a plain, which extends seven miles in length to the seashore. The approach by rail from either Port Adelaide or Glenelg is uninteresting, but directly you get out at the station the first impression is pleasing. The streets are broad and laid out in rectangular blocks as in Melbourne, and the white stone used for most of the buildings makes the town look particularly bright and lively, showing off the bustle and traffic to advantage. In the background are the hills, while on one side is the suburb of North Adelaide, on an incline divided from the city by a broad sheet of artificial water, running in the bed of the river Torrens through a half-mile deep belt of 'park-lands,' which encircle the square mile forming the city proper, and separate it from the suburbs.

The conception of this belt of verdure, on which none but public buildings may be erected, dividing the working part of the town from the residential part, has always seemed to me a masterpiece of wisdom in city planning, and hardly less admirable are the five open reserves inside the city which serve as its lungs. Ultimately the city proper will probably be almost entirely reserved for business purposes. Already very few people live within the belts who can help it, although high prices are given for sites for residences on each of the four terraces fronting the belts. Except that Adelaide is perfectly flat, while Melbourne is built on two sides of a valley, Adelaide may not inaptly be described in the words of a visitor who was returning to