Hobart Town, the capital of Tasmania, is a quiet, hospitable little town, but a very hotbed of aristocracy—­the single spot on the Australian continent where English exclusiveness can, after the gay seasons of the large cities, retire to aristocratic country-seats, to nurse and revivify its pride of birth, without fear of coming in contact with anything parvenu or plebeian.  The town is prettily laid out, with a genuine Gothic chateau for its government palace, and elegant private residences.  It seems tame and deserted when visited from Sydney or Melbourne, but offers just the rest and refreshment one needs after a season of exhausting labor in the mines of Ballarat.

The rapid growth of the Australian colonies, their remoteness from the mother country, and the vastness of the territory over which they are spread, naturally suggest the question whether they are destined to remain in a condition of dependence or are likely to follow the example of their American prototypes.  On this point the opinion of the count of Beauvoir is entitled to consideration, as that of an impartial as well as intelligent observer.  He had expected, he tells us, in visiting the country, to find it preparing for its speedy emancipation; but he left it with the conviction that, far from desiring a severance of the connection, the colonists would regard it as a blow to their material interests—­the one event, in fact, capable of arresting their unparalleled progress.  It can only occur as the result of a European war in which the power of England shall be so crippled as to disable her from protecting these distant possessions, casting upon them the whole burden of self-defence, and forcing them to assume the responsibilities of national existence.

THE GOLDEN EAGLE AND HIS EYRIE.

[Illustration:  On the way to the wood-drift.]

A somewhat tedious journey of thirty hours from Paris brought me one fine afternoon in the early part of July to Kulstein, an ancient fortress forming the frontier-town of the North Tyrol, toward Bavaria.  While occupied in passing my portmanteau through the prying and unutterably dirty hands of the custom-house officials I was accosted by a man dressed in the garb of a Tyrolese mountaineer—­short leathern breeches reaching to the knee, gray stockings, heavy hobnailed shoes, a nondescript species of jacket of the roughest frieze, and a battered hat adorned with two or three feathers of the capercailzie and a plume of the royal eagle.  Old Hansel was one of the gamekeepers on a large imperial preserve close by, with whom some years previously I had on more than one occasion shared a hard couch under the stunted pines when inopportune night overtook us near the glaciers while in hot pursuit of the chamois.