"The height to the crown of the head," said Mr. Manson, "is twenty-four feet, and the tuft of coast scrub that has found sufficient soil to cling to it in the cleft of the rock increases the resemblance to a head by representing hair. The guns are more realistic when viewed from another angle; near them are some spherical blocks of sandstone that might almost serve as cannon-balls. The head has been named the 'Sentinel,' and is also called the Sphinx; it is on the southern coast of Victoria, and about eight miles from Lorne, which has a growing popularity as a watering-place. The rocks resembling cannon are known as 'The Artillery Rocks.'"
Frank and Fred hoped they would have an opportunity to visit this natural curiosity, but circumstances did not favor them, as Lorne was too far away from the route of travel to justify the detour.
The day after their visit to St. Kilda they were taken on a steamboat excursion to Geelong, a pretty and well-built city on the shores of an arm of Port Phillip Bay, and about forty-five miles from Melbourne. It is famous for its woollen mills, tanneries, and other manufactories, and at one time its inhabitants firmly believed that it would be a successful rival of Melbourne on account of the superior advantages of its harbor and its greater nearness to the ocean.
It is said that the Geelong people caused a railway to be built between that city and Melbourne in the expectation that all the wool shipped at Melbourne would be brought to their city, which would also be the landing-place of all the goods destined for Melbourne. The result was exactly the reverse, the railway serving to take from Geelong most of the foreign trade it already possessed and carry it to Melbourne. Cargoes of wool are shipped from there still, but they are few in number when compared with those from Melbourne.
THE ARTILLERY ROCKS, NEAR LORNE, ON THE COAST OF VICTORIA.
Before the mail closed for America, Frank and Fred busied themselves with a large number of papers, which they sent to friends at home. They included the Age and the Argus, dailies which reminded them of The London Times or Daily News, The Illustrated Australian News and The Illustrated Sketcher, pictorials making their appearance monthly, a dozen or more weekly and monthly papers, some of them of Brobdingnagian proportions, and representing all shades of religious, social, and political feeling, and a quarterly called The Imperial Review. In a letter to his mother Frank said they had visited the office of The Melbourne Age at the invitation of one of its proprietors, and had come away with the belief that few people in the northern hemisphere had a just appreciation of the journalistic skill and enterprise of the antipodes.
