Excerpt from A Colonial Tramp, Travels and Adventures in Australia and New Guinea, Vol. 1 of 2 The year 1886 opened up about as inauspiciously as it possibly could open, both as regards the weather and as regards my own hopes and prospects. Ice and snow alternated with fogs and gloom, which, beginning in November, progressed from bad to worse, until life became a misery to those who had to endure the hard ships oi the snow or slush-lined streets. Personally, it was a constant series Of dampening dis appointments. I had made a set of plans, as early as October, to accomplish Australasia in a given time, and four months had been wasted in re-arranging, altering, re-planning new routes, trying to curtail time, and waiting, in an oscillating state between faint hope and chill despair, until at last I had almost become passive and careless as to the result of my four months of planning and alteration the enthusiasm with which I first plunged into the work being nearly frozen to death. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.