The day after their return to Melbourne, our friends were treated to an entertainment which, as Harry said, “was not down on the bills.” It was what the Melbourneites called a “southerly burster,” a storm which is peculiar to Australia, and particularly to the southern portion of it. They had already experienced showers of such force that the gutters of the streets were filled to a depth of a foot and more, and sometimes the whole street was covered. Most of the street crossings are bridged so that the water can run away with comparative ease.

The water at such times flows with terrific force. Men attempting to cross the gutters, who make a misstep, are lifted off their feet and are instantly swept down by the current, and in case they should be carried under one of the crossings they are liable to be drowned.

We will listen to Harry as he described in his journal their experience with a southerly burster.

“When we arose in the morning,” said Harry, “the weather was delightful and we thought it would be a fine day for an excursion. There was not a cloud in the sky and the breeze was blowing from the northeast. A barometer hung in the hallway of the hotel, and Dr. Whitney remarked, as he came out from breakfast, that it was falling rapidly. A gentleman who was standing by his side heard the remark and said:—

“‘I think we are going to have a burster; that is the way it usually begins. If you have any engagements to go out to-day and they are not absolutely imperative, you had better postpone them.’

“Ned and I overheard what he said and wondered what a burster was. We said nothing, however, as we expected to find out by practical experience.

“All through the forenoon the barometer continued to fall. The sky remained clear until a little past noon, and the wind blew gently from the northeast as before. Suddenly we saw a white cloud rolling up from the northeast and spreading over the heavens until they were completely covered. Masses of dust came with the wind, which increased in force for a time and then lulled a little.

“Suddenly the wind went around to the south and blew a gale, yes, a hurricane. It started off at about thirty miles an hour, but before it ended its visit it was blowing fully seventy miles an hour, at least that is what the papers said next day. I am told it sometimes reaches a velocity of one hundred miles an hour, and has even been known to exceed one hundred and forty miles. These tremendous winds do a great deal of damage. They drive ships ashore or overwhelm them at sea; they devastate fields and forests and level a great many buildings.

“The barometer fell rapidly in the forenoon, as I have mentioned; it was the thermometer’s turn in the afternoon. The mercury stood at about ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of the forenoon, and it remained so until the wind chopped around to the south. An hour after the change of wind it stood at seventy degrees, and an hour later at fifty. I am told that it sometimes drops thirty degrees in half an hour, but such occurrences are unusual.

“This is a good place to say that sudden changes in the temperature are very common in Australia, and that the change from midday to midnight is far greater than any to which we are accustomed in the United States. When we have a change of twenty or thirty degrees in a single day we regard it as unusual. What would you say to one hundred and ten degrees at noon and fifty degrees at midnight? This is quite common in the interior of Australia and not at all infrequent on the coast.

“The thermometer runs very high in this country, and it is not at all rare for it to indicate one hundred and twenty-five or one hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit. One traveler has a record of one hundred and thirty-nine degrees in the shade and one hundred and seventy-two in the sun. I am told that in South Melbourne the thermometer once made an official record of one hundred and eleven degrees in the shade and one hundred and seventy-nine degrees in the sun.

“So great is the heat of the sun at midday that travelers generally try to avoid it if they can do so. It is the plan of most people who travel on horseback, in wagons, or on foot, to start before daylight, and keep going until nine or ten o’clock. Then they halt and rest until three or four o’clock in the afternoon, when they move on and continue until late in the evening. Of course, the railways are not run on that principle, as the locomotive is not supposed to be affected by the outside temperature.

“But I am getting away from the southerly burster. The wind blew like a hurricane. It kept up this rate for about three hours, filling the air with dust so that we could not see across the street. Though the doors and windows were tightly closed, the dust found its way inside the house and was present everywhere; every article of furniture was covered with it.

“We found it in the food, we found it in our beds, and the next day when I opened my trunk to take out some articles of clothing, I actually found that the dust had worked its way inside in a perceptible quantity. One of the waiters of the hotel said, that always after a burster they found dust inside of bottles of mineral water which had been tightly corked up to the time of opening. I am inclined to doubt the truth of his assertion, particularly as he offered no documentary evidence to confirm it.

“Along towards night it came on to rain, and, oh, how it did rain! It poured as though the flood gates of the skies had all been opened at once. It rained not only cats and dogs, as the old expression has it, but lizards, scorpions, snakes, and I don’t know what else, at least it did figuratively. The gutters of the streets were filled, and then we were able to see how easy it was for a man, and especially for a child, to be drowned in them. I have seen it rain hard in a good many places, but am sure I never saw it rain harder than it did at the end of that southerly burster.“I remarked as much to a gentleman whose acquaintance we had made in the hotel, and he answered:—

“‘Oh, nonsense. That is no rain at all.’

“‘No rain at all,’ I answered. ‘Do you have worse rains than this in Australia?’

“‘Why, certainly we do,’ he replied. ‘I have known it to rain so hard that this would be a sprinkle by comparison. I remember the 25th of February, 1873, when nine inches of rain fell here in Melbourne inside of nine hours. An inch of rain in an hour is a good deal, isn’t it?’

“Ned and I admitted that it was, and then our informant continued:—

“‘I happened to be in Newcastle early in 1871, when they had the greatest rainfall that I ever saw or heard of in any country. In less than three hours ten and a half inches of rain fell, and the story was that it was so thick that the fishes in the harbor could not distinguish between the rain cloud and the bay, and actually swam up half a mile or so into the air. One man said that he had a barrel with both ends knocked out, and the rain went in at the bung hole faster than it could run out at the ends.’

“I asked the gentleman how long the storm lasted, and he said that twenty-one hours elapsed between the beginning and the end of it, and during that time twenty inches of water fell, and the streets of Newcastle were like small rivers.

“The gentleman remarked, in conclusion, that it was a great pity the rainfall was not distributed more evenly, both in time and amount, than it is. Some parts of the coast get a great deal more rain than they have any use for. The floods destroy a large amount of property, and the superfluous rain flows away in the rivers, inundating large areas of ground and doing more harm than good, but through the greater part of the interior the rainfall is far less than the land requires. The ground becomes parched, the streets dry up, and the grasses wither, and the whole face of nature presents a scene of sterility. Sometimes there is no rain for long periods. There have been times when not a drop of rain fell for two years, and but for the heavy dews at night, a vast extent of land would have been absolutely turned to a desert. Cattle and sheep perished by the million, of starvation and thirst. The production of grain fell off enormously and the whole country was very seriously affected.

“Ned asked if no remedy had ever been found or proposed for this state of affairs.

“A remedy had been suggested, said the gentleman, which would save herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, but it would not save from destruction the crops in the fields.

“‘What is that?’ Ned asked.

“‘It is a system of storing water throughout the interior of the country so as to save the precious fluid when the rainfall is excessive. There are many places, great numbers of them, where nature has so formed the ground that the storage of water would be comparatively easy. I have already begun it on my sheep run, and other sheep owners have done the same thing. It is an expensive work, but I believe it will pay in the end.’“‘There are three places on my land where broad valleys terminate at their lower ends between hills forty or fifty feet high. Now, by building a dam from one of these hills to the other, I can flood any one of these valleys to any depth I choose up to the height of the hills. It was only recently that I finished work at one of these places, and I have gangs of men busy with the other two. For the present I shall make my dams thirty feet high, and this will give me at each of the three places a lake of fresh water with about forty acres of surface area. If I can fill these lakes every winter with water, I think I will have enough to keep my sheep through the dry season, after making liberal allowance for loss by evaporation and in other ways. Of course, such a system of storing water is only practicable where the owner of a place has sufficient capital for the purpose. The poor man, with his small flock of sheep, can hardly undertake it.’

“‘Preliminary surveys have been made in places where it is proposed that the colonial governments should build extensive works for saving water on a grand scale. The government would be repaid, in part at least, by selling the water to private landholders in the same way that water is sold in California, New Mexico, and other parts of the United States. I am confident that you will see a grand system of water storage in full operation in Australia before many years.’”

While on the subject of rainfall, Harry asked Ned if he knew where the heaviest annual rainfall in the world was.

Ned said he did not know, but he thought that Dr. Whitney might be able to inform them.The question was appealed to the doctor, who paused a moment, and then said that “what might be considered a heavy rain in one place would be a light one in another. In Great Britain, if an inch of rain fell in a day it was considered a heavy rain; but in many parts of the Highlands of Scotland three inches not infrequently fall in one day. Once in the isle of Skye twelve inches of rain fell in thirteen hours, and rainfalls of five and seven inches are not uncommon. Thirty inches of rain fell in twenty-four hours at Geneva, in Switzerland, thirty-three inches at Gibraltar in twenty-six hours, and twenty-four inches in a single night on the hills near Bombay.

“The heaviest annual rainfall on the globe,” continued the doctor, “was on the Khasia Hills, in India, where six hundred inches, or fifty feet, fell in a twelvemonth. Just think of it; a depth of fifty feet of water yearly, and of this amount five hundred inches fell in seven months, during the southwest monsoons.”

“How do they account for such heavy rains?” Ned asked.

“It is accounted for,” the doctor replied, “by the abruptness of the mountains which face the Bay of Bengal, from which they are separated by low swamps and marshes. The winds arrive among the hills heavily charged with the vapor they have absorbed from the wide expanse of the Indian Ocean. When they strike the hills and are forced up to a higher elevation, they give out their moisture with great rapidity, and the rain falls in torrents. As soon as the clouds have crossed the mountains the rain diminishes very much. Twenty miles further inland it drops from six hundred to two hundred inches annually, and thirty miles further inland it is only one hundred inches. The same conditions prevail to a certain extent in Australia. The mountain chains are near the coast. On the side next the ocean there is a liberal rainfall, but on the other side, towards the interior, the rainfall is light. As the clouds charged with vapor come from the sea to the mountains they yield their moisture freely, but, after passing the mountains, they have little left to yield.”

The burster died away along in the evening, and, though the streets were wet in many places, our friends went out for a stroll. During their walk their attention was naturally drawn to the sky, which was now bright with stars. Naturally, their conversation turned to the difference between the night skies of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, which had not escaped their observation during their voyage from the east coast of Africa down to the Equator, and thence in the Southern Ocean. On this subject Harry wrote at one time in his journal as follows:—

“We found the famous Southern Cross a good deal of a disappointment. In the first place, it requires a considerable amount of imagination to make a cross out of it; very much more than is needed to make ‘The Great Dipper’ out of the constellation so called in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southern Cross consists of three stars of the first magnitude, one of the fourth magnitude, and three of the fifth, and, look at them whichever way you may, you can’t make a real cross out of them, either Greek or Roman. Before I investigated the subject, I thought the Southern Cross was over the south pole, but found it is not so. The constellations of the Southern Hemisphere altogether are not as brilliant as those in the northern one. If the principal object of a traveler in this region is to see the heavens, he had better stay at home.

“An interesting feature of the southern heavens is ‘The Magellan Clouds,’ two white spots in the sky like thick nebulÆ of stars. They are nearer to the pole than the Southern Cross is, and are much used by mariners in taking observations. Quite near the pole is a star of the fifth magnitude, called ‘Octantis,’ and this also is used for observation purposes. It isn’t so brilliant, by any means, as the pole star of the north, which is of the second magnitude; and, by the way, that reminds me of what Dr. Whitney told me in the desert of Sahara, that what we called the polar star in the north is not directly over the pole, but nearly a degree away. The real polar star is a much smaller one and stands, as we look at it, to the left of the star, which I had always believed to be the proper one.”

Melbourne has a Chinese quarter like San Francisco and New York, and our friends embraced an opportunity to visit it. They found the shops closely crowded together and apparently doing an active business. There were temples, shops, and a good many stores, some of them very small and others of goodly size. The sidewalks were thronged with people, mostly Chinese, and they hardly raised their eyes to look at the strangers who had come among them. Our friends took the precaution to be accompanied by a guide, and found that they had acted wisely in doing so. The guide took them into places where they would have been unable to make their way alone, and where, doubtless, they would have found the doors closed against them.

The Chinese are very unpopular in Australia and in all the colonies. The laws against them are decidedly severe, from a Mongolian point of view. Every Chinaman landing in Victoria must pay fifty dollars for the privilege of doing so, and after getting safe on the soil he finds himself restricted in a business way, and subject to vexatious regulations. John is satisfied with very little and he usually manages to get it. He is a keen trader and always an inveterate smuggler. He is very skillful in evading the custom house, and as soon as one trick is discovered he invents another and his ingenuity seems to be boundless.

One of the industries in which the Chinese excel is that of market gardening. In driving in the suburbs of Melbourne, our friends observed numerous market gardens cultivated by Chinese, and in every instance they remarked that the cultivation was of the most careful kind. John can make more out of a garden than anybody else. He pays a high rental for his ground, but unless something very unusual happens he is pretty sure to get it back again, with a large profit in addition.

In some of the colonies the restrictions are more severe than in others. In New South Wales the laboring class of white men are politically in control of the legislature, and have enacted anti-Chinese laws of great severity. The tax upon immigrant Chinese in that colony is one hundred pounds sterling, or five hundred dollars. The naturalization of Chinese is absolutely prohibited, and ships can only bring into the ports of New South Wales one Chinese passenger for every three hundred tons of measurement. The restrictions in regard to residence and trading are very severe. The country is laid out into districts, and in each district not more than five trading Chinese are allowed to live and transact business. Steamers and sailing vessels having Chinese stewards or sailors on board are subject to seizure and fines on their arrival at Sydney, and so great have been the annoyances to this class of vessels, that they have been compelled to leave in some other port, before coming to Australia, all their Chinese employees.

The hostility to Chinese labor in Australia is similar to that on the Pacific coast of the United States, and in the States of the Rocky Mountain region. It will doubtless increase as time goes on, as it increased in the United States, until it culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of a few years ago. Eventually, the Chinese in Australia will be shut out from all occupations, and expelled or excluded from the country. A good many intelligent Australians deprecate the hostility to the Chinese, but when it comes to voting, this class of citizens is in the minority.

During a part of the gold rush, great numbers of Chinese found their way to the mines, where they were perfectly contented to work in abandoned mines and wash the earth, which had already been washed by the white men. Owing to the prejudice against them and the likelihood of interference, they rarely took up fresh claims, but contented themselves with what the white man had left. Even this form of work was considered an encroachment by the white miners, who frequently attacked the Mongolians and drove them out at the point of the pistol. Many of these attacks were accompanied by bloodshed, and if the history of Australian mining were written in full, it would contain many a story of oppression, accompanied with violence.

Our friends made a visit to the famous lake district of Victoria, where they found some very pretty scenery, and from the summit of one hill counted no fewer than fifteen lakes, some of them of no great size, while the largest measured ninety miles in circumference. Harry made note of the fact that this largest lake was called the Dead Sea. It is said to be not as salt as the famous Dead Sea near Jerusalem, but it is a great deal salter than the ocean, and no fish of any kind lives in it.

“I asked a resident of the neighborhood,” said Harry, “if they had ever tried the plan of putting fish from the ocean into this Australian Dead Sea. They said they had done so, but the fish thus transported always died in a few hours, and the experiment of stocking the lake had been given up long ago.

“A curious thing that we found regarding the lakes in this part of Victoria,” Harry continued, “is that some of them are salt and some fresh, and sometimes the salt lakes and the fresh ones are quite close to each other, and on the same level. We were puzzled how to account for the peculiarity and tried to learn about it. How the circumstances happened, nobody knows exactly, but the theory is that the salt in the salt lakes comes from the drainage of the rocks, and as the lakes have no outlets, the superfluous waters are carried off by evaporation. They told us that in summer these lakes sink a good deal below the level of other times of the year, and when they did so the ground left dry was thickly encrusted with salt, which the people gathered in large quantities. The market of Melbourne is supplied with salt from these lakes, and you can readily understand that it is very cheap.

“Another peculiarity of this part of Victoria is the large quantities of potatoes that are grown there. The land often yields from twenty to thirty tons of potatoes to the acre, and an acre of ground for raising potatoes will frequently sell for four hundred dollars, while it will rent for twenty-five dollars yearly. Most of the coast ports of Australia, including the great ones of Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney, are supplied with potatoes from this region.

“The potatoes are among the finest we ever saw. They are large, rich, and mealy, and when properly cooked they are simply delicious. No other part of Australia can compete with this district in potato cultivation. The excellence of this vegetable is supposed to come from the volcanic nature of the soil. All the country round here was once in a high state of ebullition, and the lakes I have mentioned are the craters of extinct volcanoes.”