GENERAL PREFACE.

The contents of the following pages were written on board an Australian Steamer, on its homeward passage. The issue of a weekly Journal was found to conduce to mutual pleasure and amusement. It chronicled the past, furnished interest for the present, and anticipated the future. Though in its composition it had no other ends than these, it may now serve two different purposes. It will furnish to the passengers of the "Parramatta a souvenir of a sea-voyage which pleasant companions and fine weather made seem too brief; its pages may in future days bring to remembrance bygone time, as the tender fragrance of dried rose leaves will suggest the memory of the garden where the roses grew, and the fair hand which gathered them from the tree.

Whilst for those who are about to embark on a long voyage it may depict the pleasures which lie before them, and the kind of life in which they will soon partake.

From the general reader or the critic, if it should encounter any of these, it would claim leniency. It would plead the disadvantages of a steamer for composition and the distraction of sea life, and finally entreat him to attribute its defects to its surroundings, and its merits, if he be pleased to acknowledge any such, to its writers.

E. C. G.