‘Don’t apologise,’ laughed Alice; ‘you may as well say at once that you thought we were too much like ordinary English people to be colonists,’ and she made him a slight bow. ‘Well, so I did,’ confessed our hero, too honest to evade the expression of his opinions. ‘But you know, you’re so—well—you do expect a little difference in appearance, or manner——’ ‘Or complexion?’ continued his fair tormentor. ‘Did you think Australians were—just a little—dark?’ ‘I recant, and apologise, and sue for pardon,’ said Ernest, now completely dislodged from his pedestal, a horrid thought obtruding itself that similar discoveries would narrow his mission to most uninteresting dimensions. This ‘check to his queen’ sobered Mr. Neuchamp for several days. He began to question the probability of influencing society in Australia to any great extent, if the component parts were like the Middleton family. However, he reflected that people of cultivated tastes and unexceptionable manners were rare in any country. And when he thought of the vast interior with its scattered untravelled population, hope revived and he again saw himself the ‘guide, philosopher, and friend of a guileless and grateful people.’ There were several landed proprietors who held great possessions in Australia among the passengers, with whom he made a point of conversing whenever such conversation was possible. But here again unexpected hindrances and obstacles arose. Mr. Neuchamp found that these returning Australians were rather reserved, and had very little to say about the land in which so large a portion of their lives had been passed. They committed themselves to the extent of stating in answer to his numerous inquiries, that it was a ‘very fair sort of place—you could manage to live there.’ ‘As to the people?’ ‘Well, they were much like people everywhere else—some good, some bad.’ ‘Climate?‘ ‘Hot in some places, cold in others.’ ‘Manners?’‘Well, many of the inhabitants hadn’t any, but that was a complaint almost universal at the present day.’ The oppressed colonist generally wound up by stating that when he, Neuchamp, had been in Australia for a year or two, he would know all about it.