Melbourne is not a cosmopolitan city. It neither lies in the direct route of globe-trotters, who will, indeed, often miss the whole of Australia and pass on to New Zealand or the Pacific Isles, nor does it possess many natural interests or curiosities. It is a level-headed place, too, and, though it amuses itself well enough, it does not cater for that class of people who will search the world over for a new sensation or exotic pleasure. If strangers come to Melbourne it is for the most part either to find work and carve out a new future for themselves, or to escape from the responsibilities and duties which they have pressed too insistently on them in the Old World. In either case they find that their aim is best accomplished by identifying themselves as much as possible with the life of the country and people, which is, indeed, so vital and compelling that it quickly robs them of all national characteristics, so that they, or at any rate their children, very soon become completely Australian. It is very difficult for us, who in England count time by centuries, to realize during how very few years Australia has existed for the white man, and for how still shorter a period Victoria has had a separate existence to New South Wales. Indeed, only in the year 1855 was it declared a State, while but twenty years earlier, in 1835, Melbourne was for the first time occupied by white people.

That any country at the most between seventy-five and eighty years old—the average life-span of one man—should have formed out of the conglomerate masses of different classes which have poured into it from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and in a lesser degree from France and Germany, such a truly distinctive race is scarcely believable, while if it has a little outgrown its strength, if it does suffer at times from that complaint which its own people designate as “swelled head,” is it to be wondered at? For there it is, in spite of all, an indisputable fact, a nation in all its characteristics, and not a dependency.

That there must be some strange, ever-moving yeast at work, either in the climate or the circumstances of life, which shows an overpowering tendency to draw all within its grasp; to work on it and with it; to amalgamate it into the general mass, I can quite believe; and this yeast is the spirit of Australia. Something stronger than the entire pull of home apron-strings, of gratitude, of association, and of blood.

It all tends perhaps to the loss of individuality, but individuals are not needed in a new country; what is needed is one great family which will present as a whole an unbroken phalanx to the world. Exceptions, however brilliant, do but break the ranks; no one has time to bother with, or be bothered by them. One must keep step with the regiment, or one will be left behind to die of privation.

Yet it is, on the whole, that very necessity for ever pushing onward, for hewing wood and drawing water to keep this marvellous new household going, that makes Melbourne such a cruelly hard place for the merely intellectual man or woman, the writer, the artist, the poet, the dreamer. Between the upper and nether millstone of the merchants, professional classes, and landowners, and the artisans, mechanics, and labourers, they are crushed so closely that their very existence is apt to remain unnoticed. It is no good blaming these people; it is not their fault; it is part of the rough, crude necessity of nation-building; we start by giving a naked man a shirt; there is no time to worry over people who offer to hemstitch frills for it, even gratis, while he is shivering.

All this is why I say Melbourne is not cosmopolitan. Sydney, older and more settled in her ways, perhaps also more languid from the effects of her relaxing climate, is far more so, but in no city anywhere near its size have I heard foreign languages so little spoken as in Melbourne. The newcomer must learn to speak with the tongue of the people, not they with his; in more senses than one. They have no time for “frills,” and as the spirit of the strange country is usually stronger than the homesick spirit of the stranger within its gates, it is the stranger who gives way. That is if he be anything but Irish. Generally speaking, Australia can do little with the Irish; as some old proverb has it: “You can’t hang soft cheese from a hook on the wall.” The summit of the ambition of most Irish colonists is to attain to the dignity of keeping a public-house. There are exceptions, of course. I have in my mind’s eye, as I write, a family of whom the two brothers hold the highest position in Melbourne—but it is not often the case. There is a free and easy feeling about the life which appeals to Pat. He has few ideals; he is too easily contented, and inclined to let things slide. Sad to say, if he loses these faults he loses most of his virtues with them. The successful Irishman in Australia is for the most part something of a toady—hard, and mean, and shifty. I am half Irish myself, and I have the strongest affection for the people. When I first landed in Melbourne I caught eagerly at even the hint of a brogue, or Hibernian name; but only in the poor, the struggling, the unsuccessful, did I ever find the true spirit of Ireland.

I remember driving home from dinner one night, and as I paid the cabman on my return home, remarking his brogue, I asked him how long he had been in Australia.

“A matter of twenty years,” he said, and he had come from such and such a place; in fact, his father, and great-grandfather, and progenitors for centuries back, had, as I found, worked for my own mother’s people, and his joy was unbounded at being able to talk over the old days and the Old Country.

Nearly a year later I was dining at the same house, and a cab was sent for to take me home. My host went out to interview the cabman, and describing my destination, asked if he knew it, whereupon, with a rolling brogue, all of honey and butter, came the answer: “God Almighty, shall I ever forget that. Sure I drove a young lady there from County Galway.”

It is odd how the brogue holds in Australia, so that it is as pronounced in people that have been out here fifty years as if they had landed this week. If you are ever in Melbourne, and want to hear such a round rich brogue as you will seldom chance on, even in the Ireland of to-day, drive out to Heidelberg, one of the loveliest of Melbourne’s offshoots, and ask to be directed to Flynn’s Hotel, a matter of a mile or two farther on. There you will find a little old man and his wife—if they are still alive, and God grant they are, for they are true Irish, warm-hearted, hospitable, and altogether delightful—whose language and outlook on life are still absolutely typical though they landed in Melbourne as much as fifty-five years ago, when the town itself was all canvas or weather-board, and a thickly-wooded creek ran down to the River Yarra, where the cable trams now rush through Elizabeth Street, one of the principal thoroughfares of the whole city.

Still, in spite of all their undeniable cleverness and charm, the Irish do not, as a whole, attain to any high or permanent place in the country, even their adherence to their national characteristics representing a fluidity of will rather than a real spirit of patriotism; they will run into any mould so easily, and out again so easily, that no change is permanent. There is about them none of the passionate desire to remain unchanged, which was shown once in a young Frenchman’s answer to my question, as to whether he liked Melbourne. “I am afraid,” he said; he used no adverb, but the intonation of his voice expressed all he meant in that one word “afraid,” “that I may grow to like it.” He felt the yeast working; he felt himself being chewed up, as it were, in the hungry and compelling maw of the new country, and all that was French in him fought desperately against the process. The Chinaman, of course, remains mysterious, immutable, unmatched; perhaps that is the secret in some measure of his unpopularity, but his unchangeableness lies in his decision, and the Irishman’s in his want of it.Still, there is one place in Melbourne where people seem to revert back to their original state: where the Frenchman, the German, the Greek, the Italian, and Russian throw off the garment of Australianism, and eat, look, and speak like men of their own country, glorying in it, too. It is as though a little patch had been cut clean out of Soho, and plantÉ lÀ in the midst of this prosaic city. The great and good of Melbourne do not know of its existence, by which I mean the great-and-good in family masses, all hyphened together; but still, there is potential greatness to be met with there, and active goodness, and light-heartedness, and charm—that undefinable, subtle quality in which a balance at the bank mercifully plays no part. And yet it is only a little Italian cafÉ—what, in my ultra-English days, I might have called “a common little cafÉ.”

When first I knew it, it was situated in a low, straggling building in a rather undesirable street. There were two private rooms in front where the family lived. I know that because I once penetrated into one of them to see a sick baby. Between these was a narrow passage leading to a large room, with one long table running down the centre, the kitchen, at the door of which one usually lingered to have a few words with the hostess, and a smaller dingy room lying to the side. At the end of the long room was a window, and a door opening into a courtyard, patched with yellow light and velvety black shadows; and shaded for the most part with a trellis of vines, most delicately and deliciously green in the spring and early summer, and great dark casks, which had come filled with red wine straight from Italy, the very blood of the country, and about which the old host was for ever busied with a funnel and many bottles, for white or red wine was supplied free of extra charge to all the customers. After a word with the two daughters, busy over the long table at which never more than thirty were served each evening, one moved out, if one were early, as I always took care to be, to a bench in the court yard, pleasantly cool even on the hottest evening to sip one’s vermouth in the open air, and chatter to the old host, who would answer back in slow difficult English—only answering, volunteering no remark. Not that it mattered, for the peace, the sense of having slipped all the burdens of the day off one’s shoulders on to that single meagre door step, made one discursive; besides, a little later on there would be so many people talking, so much to listen to, that one’s chance would be gone.

Then the other guests began to arrive, nearly all men. An Italian, the first violin from the — Theatre; the sub-editor of one of the “dailies”; a Member of Parliament; a man with a scar on his neck, who was said to be an ex-Turkish brigand; a few art-students—one with inordinately long hair, smoothed back from his forehead and cut all to the same length at the back, so that when he grew excited over a song and shook his head violently it all fell forward, like a lion’s mane, well below his breast. Then there was a Frenchman, who owns a vineyard a little way out of Melbourne, a German merchant, and a Greek youth, but these were only a few. For the most part one could fix the people who frequented this little cafÉ with no particular place in life, their nationality alone being uppermost. There were usually a few girls, mostly of the quiet, rather wan, student type; saving one vivid creature, of immature years and marvellous maturity of intellect, whose knowledge and self-possession made one feel like a crude child; and who, if her lines had been cast in a wider sphere, and she had been less weakened by admiration, might have developed into one of those mysterious women that—at all times—have been found wire-pulling in court and diplomatic circles, even from the very back of the throne itself, using their wit and their charm with an equal sureness and audacity.

Long before the last glow of day had faded from the little vine-shaded yard—where in a swinging hammock slept the much-pampered, and continually fÊted, “Bambina” of our host’s married daughter—the long, low room inside had to be lighted by the hanging kerosene lamp, which threw the corners into an even more sombre darkness, shining but dimly from the very first through the thick veil of cigarette-smoke, the incense of modernity.

The talk was incessant, and perforce loud, for everyone joined in any topic which interested them, no matter how far down the long table it might have originated. If the young Frenchman on your right was discussing grape-growing in Champagne with the little wrinkled Spaniard, with waxed moustaches, on your left, of whom such stories were told—mon Dieu, bombs, and what not!—and their talk became wearying, what so natural as that you should join in with the fierce argument on the Fiscal Question that a member of the Upper House might be holding with the little Socialist, whose blood-thirsty policy, as exemplified by his scarlet tie, was for ever warring against his warm Irish heart; “The little Doctor,” as he is fondly called by all the habituÉs of the place, for he is decidedly a better, or at least a safer, physician of the body than the mind, while it was declared that the all-adored Bambina owed life itself to his care and skill.

A young Greek talked of Athens, all aglow with fervour, to an art-student, one of those completely self-sufficient girls who are so typical of Melbourne. “But why?” I heard her ask, with the curiously drawled accent—also typical, both question and accent; for the Australian likes all his or her information to be precise—with the reason thereof plainly showed, and “but why?” is their crushing response to most of our enthusiastic eulogiums on the old order of things.

They were an interesting couple from their very contrast; but soon, one’s wandering attention would float away on a new stream, piloted most likely by one of the best talkers of the place, a man who was so completely soaked in the spirit and literature, the eternal glow and romance, of the Renaissance, that it seemed always as if Providence must have merely amused itself, in some freakish fit, by reincarnating him here in Melbourne. An atom of imagination was enough, and one was away with him, wandering through the sun-soaked street of old Florence. Gone the babel of talk and laughter, the queer, eager faces, the shabby coats, the bright eyes, and erratic locks; the kerosene-lamps and long table, with its vases of artificial flowers, all quite gone, as one paced demurely by his side, between the stately palaces and high, huddled houses. Peeped through the interstices of the iron gates into the great courtyards at the orange-trees in their stone vases, where such or such a great Prince lived, or such a lady—of a beauty, ah yes! But as to morals—well, a shrug of the shoulders told all there was to be told with propriety. Stopped at this corner, or that, where such and such a party-broil took place, or stood agaze at so-and-so, who wrote those sonnets, or so-and-so who painted so divinely. Then pressed back into a deep doorway while Lorenzo himself—Lorenzo the Magnificent—swept past, with all his gay and courtly suite, to see how the new frescoes came on, which were to make that young Michael and his great master famous throughout the entire world, or so said Lorenzo, bracketing himself and the artist urbanely together. Such a whiff of perfume, such a rustle of stiff brocaded silks, and flow of silver laughter as they passed; then, with a sudden rasping sound, which brought one back with a jerk to the world of reality, the chairs were pushed back over the boarded floors; there was a crash of notes at the piano, and someone would begin to sing. Perhaps the heart-rending words and melody of “A wearing o’ the green,” perhaps the “Marseillaise,” or just as likely “Little Mary.” The coffee was brought, the table cleared. Delicately burning his spoonful of eau-de-vie over his coffee, the Frenchman on my right would throw out some words on Arragon that set my other neighbour aflame, and a hot argument would ensue, each man speaking his own language with a wealth of expletives and abandonment of gesture. Feeling the fiery breath flame on either cheek, and catching the eye of our old hostess who, the night’s work done, had joined her guests, knitting in hand, I would nod my response. For those eyes, so human, tolerant, and wise, said as plainly as any words could, “What children those men are! what ‘blaguers!’” then draw back my chair, and place it near to hers; when we would talk, sober women’s talk—reasonable and profitable—of the cost of food under the new tariff, and how the spaghetti had been cooked in that fresh fashion at dinner. And if I asked the man to the right of that big man—the German there—for a little tarragon for the vinegar, he would surely give it, for he had a large garden, and then the Signora would present me with a bottle. And of the Bambina, what gave it that little cough—cigarette smoke! But he had breathed little else since he was born!

Someone would perhaps bang a fist down on the table, and fling the single word “separation” like a lighted torch among tinder, or the big German make bragging assertions as to the superiority of Goethe over Shakespeare. One caught the choicest morsels from that week’s Bulletin with which the art-students regaled each other, for the Bulletin is the bible of the Australian Bohemian. Or the murmur of the perennial discussion on the Armenian question, in which the big Turk ensnared all newcomers; less effective than it might have been owing to the fact that in moments of excitement he forgot all the little English that he ever had, and reverted to his mother-tongue, which no one else at table could understand. But all this was mere sound and fury, leaving our little oasis of quietude quite untouched. Then an immense man, who looked like a Portuguese, but was in reality a half-caste Chinaman, would most likely draw his chair up to mine, and join in our talk of the Bambina, with some strange lore regarding the souls of children, and that little moment when they remember all of the life they have lived before, while the old woman dropped her knitting on her knee and listened open-eyed, till he drifted off to other subjects—art and literature for the most part. He had never been out of Australasia, and yet there seemed to be no historical spot in Europe which he did not know intimately, not a half-forgotten verse that he could not finish for me, not a writer whose works he had not only read, but whose place in literature and whose influence he clearly realized. And then sometimes he would quote Chinese poetry, accompanying it with a running translation which was a delight to the ear.

One evening I remember some insolent, loud-voiced remarks on a “White Australia” were flipped down the table in his direction, but he only shrugged his great shoulders. “We shall see,” he said; “after all it is the best who win.”

It always seemed strange—I write in the past, for, though the little cosmopolitan restaurant is still in being, the old people have relinquished their share of it, and it has changed its quarters, thereby losing some of its indefinable charm; it seemed strange, I say, to come out of such an atmosphere into the wide, dreary drabness of Lonsdale Street, so nearly repellent, indeed, in its entire lack of expression or soul, that often enough we would turn aside toward Little Burke Street, to soak ourselves afresh in that “something different” towards which we are all for ever striving.

Long ago I wrote for a Melbourne paper an article on “Lilly Bulke Street”—which, with the cosmopolitan cafÉ, was the only possible hunting-ground for “something different” in the whole city—that was translated and republished in a Chinese paper, giving me a sort of fame among its denizens; so that: “You the lady that like Lilly Bulke Street?” they would often say to me, with their slow smile of sympathy; and of appreciation, too, for a little thought, a little understanding.

Lately, since the opium laws have become so stringent, the people are shy of Europeans in their shops and “fan-tan” rooms; but only a little while before I could go anywhere I liked, and did so. Into the upper rooms of the few Chinese who were married to women of their own race, to talk, and sip tea, and play with the solemn-eyed children; even into the opium dens, where men reposed sleeping off the effects of the drug with a seraphic expression; or sat puffing, fiercely and wildly anxious for the coming of the rainbow-tinted dreams, which would, for a while, shut away from them all the hard and sordid realities of life.

After dark Little Burke is bordered, save for a few Chinese chemists’ shops and eating-houses, by jealously closed doors, through which not one single crack of light penetrates.

Some have a name above the lintel or a sentence in Chinese; and though one may not remember the name or understand the sentence, one soon knows what places are worth entering, and, pushing open the door, pass in, secure in the knowledge that though one may be met with the cold inquiring stare of many narrow inscrutable eyes—and a dead silence where there has before been a babel of voices—one will encounter no incivility, no insolent look or gesture.

Sometimes the dim, narrow door opens into an even narrower passage, or a little ante-room leading into a larger apartment, where in a recess, on a bracket—beneath which a joss-stick or so sends up a blue spiral of scented smoke—a plaster figure of Buddha, resplendent in gold and crimson, sits smiling his tolerant, far-seeing smile, out over the heads of thirty or more men all intent upon a game of fan-tan.

No European is allowed to play fan-tan with a Chinaman in Melbourne; so we must satisfy our lust of gain vicariously by watching the players, by putting ourselves in the place of first one man, then another, of all the throng who have placed their money on the table; or in the place of the loiterers who have lost all, and yet linger, gazing eagerly, with a hunger that nothing will ever satisfy, at the shifting piles of counters and coin.

There are two croupiers; one makes the stakes, entering them on a paper-pad with a long camel’s-hair brush, which he holds quite upright, and manipulates with a marvellous delicacy like a watchmaker does his tool.

The stakes are made—that is, every man playing pushes out in front of him what money he wishes to risk—maybe a sovereign, maybe a single threepenny-bit—each being entered in the first croupier’s book for fear of any dispute.

Then the second croupier shakes out of a basin a number of little greenish-white counters; and places over as many of them as possible a small metal cover with a stem to it. This done, he begins to rake towards him with an ivory paper-knife all the counters outside the cover, calling the numbers out loud as he goes. Soon all the loose counters are gathered aside, and no more bets must be made, everything depending now, for each man, on the number beneath the little cover, some having betted on the odds, some on the evens. For a moment or so the croupier hesitates solemnly, his delicately poised forefinger and thumb just touching the little brass stem, and looks around him. Feverishly the players push forward higher stakes, or stretch out eager hands to claw back what they have already placed on the table. There is an absolutely dead silence in the room; it would seem as if nobody so much as breathed. The shiny yellow faces are immobile, as if cast in metal, only the narrow dark eyes gleam, and shift, and glance.

Then, with a gesture of infinite ceremony, the little lid is lifted, and the croupier begins to rake the counters towards him one by one with his ivory knife. After the first two or three are moved the more seasoned players, who know at a glance what remains, odd or even, push forward their money and move away from the table; or draw out of their sleeves fat notebooks wherein to enter their winnings; but for us the breathless charm holds to the very end; and, till the last counter is drawn aside, we cannot be certain whether it will prove to have been ninety-seven or ninety-eight—a hundred, or a hundred and one.

One little old man I particularly remember, in a faded blue blouse, who one night began by putting down shillings and florins, and always losing. If he shifted his stake from odd to even, from even to odd, the game shifted too, till it seemed like some malignant fate. But still he went on, each stake higher than the last; from half-crowns to ten-shilling pieces, and then to sovereigns, and yet there was nothing reckless in his air, none of the fevered excitement a European gambler would show. Only an intense, silent, agonizing anxiety, which seemed to set such a strain on him that all his muscles were rigid, and he appeared like a dead man, not moving at all, excepting to automatically push forward his stakes. One felt that his blood had ceased to circulate, that his heart no longer beat. Only in his hungry eyes did there seem to remain a spark of life burning fiercely beneath the wrinkled lids, which it veritably seemed to shrivel as with fire.

At last, in a sort of desperation, he pushed forward four sovereigns—all that remained to him in the world, I believe—placing them on the even. Never, never shall I forget his face as the croupier raked aside with his ivory knife the scattered counters, then very slowly—more slowly than ever it seemed to me—with the air of performing a sacred rite, lifted the little lid. For one moment the old gambler gazed as if spellbound at the compact pile which remained; gave one awful shudder, which shook him like a reed, from head to foot, and then, turning, slipped silently away among the crowd, God only knows where, or to what—to some world of shadows, I veritably believe, that world which is so near, so easily reached, for a few short hours by the magic pipe, or for perpetuity by the merest prick of a “bare bodkin.” Still I lingered, hoping past hope for the little grey man, till the very last counter had been drawn aside—one hundred—one hundred and one—one hundred and two—one hundred and three—odds!From the gaming-houses we would drift into the eating-houses, and perchance sup on savoury ragout of duck, served in a porcelain bowl, flanked by lesser bowls, each filled with some mysterious odoriferous condiment, or venture daringly on eggs of an infinite age and most potent flavour; then pry into the kitchen, clean as a new pin, yet fragrant with all the mysterious scents of the East; peep into the great caldrons in which the brass-bound cooking vessels steamed and simmered; lift the green jade teapot out of its wadded case, and sip tea from one of the fragile little bowls, which are kept ever at hand in a basin of clear cold water.

In some of the gambling-houses men were playing a game somewhat resembling dominoes, the slips used being cut out of black wood, and marked with any number, up to twenty, of sunken red or white spots, the arrangement of which seemed capable of infinite variation; one slip perhaps showing four white, two red, and again four white; or two red, three white, two white, three red; the different colours crossing the dominoes horizontally, or diagonally, or vertically. A croupier holds all the slips and plays them, the lookers on laying the stakes; but never for one moment does he glance either at what he holds, or places on the table, for all the time his eyes are wanted in case some hand should be pushed out furtively to rearrange the stakes. His slim fingers, however, are never still; like lightning they skim over the surface of the slips he holds, and he calls out the numbers as quickly as he plays them. It seems quite impossible to believe for a moment that he can really count them, as he brushes them with a butterfly touch; even if he did it is a mystery to any Western mind how he could differentiate between the colours, but the even monotonous voice never hesitates; though perhaps, all on one slip, there may be five or six different arrangements of dots, still his voice runs on without a break—“six red, four white, three red, one white, two red”—or again, “three red, four white, eight red, one white,” slip after slip dropping with a little crack on the table, as he enumerates their marking as quickly as the words can be formed.

I once had a long talk with a Europeanized Chinaman—who often acts as interpreter in the “Lilly Bulke Street” Court cases—on this subject, and he declared that it was only a matter of practice, that the old players know at once by the feel; the red dots are a little rougher than the white, or vice versa, while they count them by a sort of instinct, and yet the extraordinary swiftness of the process still remains, and ever will remain, perfectly inexplicable to me.

This wonderful sense of touch shows itself everywhere, in all that the Celestial does; in the swift, fan-like arrangement of a hand of cards—each suit holding four times the number of ours—in the way the cooks in the eating-houses—stout high-priests, Buddhas of gastronomy—slice the infinitesimal shreds of pastry, for garnishing soup, with the most monstrous of knives; in the deftness with which the men in the herb-shops mince and shave and weigh the aromatic herbs.

These herb or chemists’ shops are fascinating. There are to be found remedies for every disease that flesh is heir to.

“That never was ther grievance hot ne cold,
There was eke every holsome spice and gras—”

says Chaucer, in his, “The Assembly of Foules”, and so it is in Little Burke Street. Chiefly I go there for camphor—granulated like brown sugar, and of a greyish tint, but of such a perfume! toothpowder made of the powdered ashes of scented geranium-leaves; and an unfailing remedy for toothache, put up in minute fairy-like bottles.

The interiors of the herb-shops are dim and mysterious; the dispensers—ever busy chopping herbs and weighing spices—and the doctor in attendance all of the most placid and confidence-inspiring solemnity.

One learned physician I particularly remember, a new-comer and speaking “velly little Eenglish.” He was quite young, as far as years go, but his smile was the oldest thing I have ever seen. It seemed, indeed, as if since the days of Confucius he must have let the corners of his mouth curve, indulgently and mirthlessly, over the furtive strivings and droll pretensions of humanity. Indeed, one feels that everyone in “Lilly Burke Street,” all the men in the china, the provision, and the herb-stores, the cook-shops, and gaming-houses, have existed since the beginning of time—till at last their souls have become indifferent alike to good and ill; life appearing, to each, but a task to be finished with, one bead in the necklace of eternity, an oft-repeated routine, where philosophy has ousted pleasure.

To pass from this sombre and leisurely old world in among the flashing lights and loud twanging voices of Greater Burke Street makes one feel as if one had been roughly flung through the centuries, regardless of time and space—just flipped off from the thumb and finger of some potent, all-indifferent Deity, leaving the greater part of one’s anatomy behind one in the process, and with it some subconscious memory, something far away and so deeply buried, beneath a weight of actualities that only in sleep, for the most part, can one catch a glimpse of its shadow, an echo of its voice; though among those inscrutable people, to whom a hundred years or a day are alike but a fragment of eternity, one may yet meet it face to face.

But the Chinamen do not all gather in Little Burke Street, nor do they confine themselves altogether to the making of that cheap furniture, for which they are equally well known and detested, for by them most of the market-gardens within easy reach of Melbourne are both owned and worked.

The Chinaman is the most careful and thrifty, the most loving, gardener in the world. It seems as if his little plot of land grows to be to him as his child—no matter how small it is. I remember once watching from my bedroom window, in one of the Melbourne Coffee Palaces of which the back overlooks Little Burke Street, a Chinaman in a blue linen coat, busied during the dinner hour, day after day, with some narcissus in blue bowls on a neighbouring roof, and marvelled at the infinite loving care with which he was tending them. As in the smaller so in the greater, though perhaps, on the whole, he is the truest artist in the minute. The Australian does not like the Chinaman; he resents his frugal ways—in a country that is certainly not frugal—his colour—his strangeness, his untiring, unswerving industry. You see a lot of white men working in the market gardens round Oakleigh and Garden Vale. They stop to talk with each other, to look round at the sky and distant landscape, to enjoy a few quiet puffs at their pipes; above all, to spit on their hands. The Chinaman never looks up, never stops from dawn to dark. He divides his ground into little oblong patches, with channels between to conserve every drop of moisture; he pampers the young weak plants, shading them from wind and sun with bits of sacking, boards, or slates; he loosens the ground unceasingly round them, and waters untiringly. I do not for a moment advocate Australians working in this manner; a man must sometimes straighten his back and look around him, must have something of a soul beyond early tomatoes and green peas; but still there is very much that he could be taught from the alien in his midst; and it is a schoolboy’s poorest excuse not to learn from a master because he is personally distasteful to him.

Australia, particularly in its up-country places, needs more vegetables most terribly, if it is to escape at all from the scourge of cancer which already lays such a heavy toll on its inhabitants; and if it needs more vegetable gardens to satisfy its human needs, it certainly needs more flower gardens for its spiritual needs, as a humanizing, home-making influence, nothing striking the new chum more forcibly than the utter lack of any attempt at beautifying the outside of up-country cottages, save with empty condensed milk and jam tins.

For many years squatters in the drought-stricken districts have employed Chinese gardeners, to whom they often owe the fact that their families grow up healthy, and their wives find some solace, some reminder of their girlhood’s home in the lonely wind-swept plains, where the poor despised John Chinaman has—with unceasing toil, with infinite manceuvring, by means of prehistoric wind-wheels and pumps old as Egypt in design—made a little oasis to blossom for them.

“I would give anything to have a Chinaman to teach my boys vegetable growing,” said the Principal of a Horticultural College near Melbourne to me some years ago. “But the Minister would never allow it, and if he did I should have the whole country about my ears.” He was right, for no freeborn Australian boy would tolerate for a minute being taught anything by an Asiatic. But are they right in this. One may perhaps despise certain traits in every race, in every phase of Nature even, but is that any proof that they have not much to teach us? And after all, as wise men of all ages have realized, it is from our enemies, not from our friends, that we learn most, and the Chinese native is after all perhaps a trifle older than the Australian—though you in my dear foster-country must really forgive me mentioning it.