costly ornamentation: sic transit, etc.

The following year, 1845, in which my worthy old friend Alfred Ross
joined me in business in the Market-square, then a place of the very
smallest pretensions compared to now, I rented, with him, the allotment
next beyond the Major's. It had been vacant since its previous occupancy
three years before by Mr. P.W. Welsh, already spoken of--one of the
earliest and largest, best known, and least fortunate of Melbourne's
early merchants. That the bad times that had brought many of us to the
ground had then not quite passed, although they had by this time
evidently "bottomed," may be judged by the fact that we got a fairly
habitable large cottage, with twenty-five picturesque acres, and the
remains, such as they were, of a garden, for 30 pounds a year. Five
years earlier some thousands a year would have been needed to live in
such a place. Eight years later it was worth, for mere site value,
probably 30,000 pounds. I am afraid to say what it may now be worth.
Probably most of it is long ago "cut up" into streets and town lots,
like "Major Davidson's paddock" alongside, which, consisting of some
twelve acres next the Dandenong-road, realized in 1854, under gold
discovery stimulus, no less than 17,000 pounds. Such are a few specimens
of colonial ups and downs!

Here, too, we made acquaintance, pleasant and long protracted, with our
neighbours, the gallant Major--since Colonel--Davidson, his quiet and
amiable wife, and "Missie," as she was called, their only child, then of
seven years, but in due time a surpassingly accomplished young lady, who
was married to the son of Colonel Anderson, and still survives in
London. She has confessed to me since that she used then to look up to
me with great awe and regard--not merely, I hope, because I was so much
the senior.