In Prosecuting It, However, So Many Difficulties Occurred, That We Were Fain To Circumscribe Our Original Intention; And, Instead Of Eight Houses, Content Ourselves With Four.

And even these, from the badness of the timber, the scarcity of artificers, and other impediments, are, at the

Day on which I write, so little advanced, that it will be well, if at the close of the year 1788, we shall be established in them. In the meanwhile the married people, by proceeding on a more contracted scale, were soon under comfortable shelter. Nor were the convicts forgotten; and as leisure was frequently afforded them for the purpose, little edifices quickly multiplied on the ground allotted them to build upon.

But as these habitations were intended by Governor Phillip to answer only the exigency of the moment, the plan of the town was drawn, and the ground on which it is hereafter to stand surveyed, and marked out. To proceed on a narrow, confined scale, in a country of the extensive limits we possess, would be unpardonable: extent of empire demands grandeur of design. That this has been our view will be readily believed, when I tell the reader, that the principal street in our projected city will be, when completed, agreeable to the plan laid down, two hundred feet in breadth, and all the rest of a corresponding proportion. How far this will be accompanied with adequate dispatch, is another question, as the incredulous among us are sometimes hardy enough to declare, that ten times our strength would not be able to finish it in as many years.

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