Another very serious feature in present-day Australian life is the craze for gambling. Of course most of us would like to make money without working for it if we could, but with the Australian this desire amounts to a perfect passion. Almost every other tobacconist’s shop is the branch office of a bookmaker, and you can go in and plank your money and take your ticket without the slightest fear of legal consequences. As for mining stocks, you scarcely hear anything else talked about unless there happens to be a horse race, a cycle meeting, or a cricket match on. This is, of course, only one of the failings of youth, and in some respects Miss Australia is very young. Still, now that she is growing up into a nation, she would do well to put something of a curb on her youthful ardour for playing. Sport of some sort is an essential both of individual and national manhood, but colonies don’t grow into nations on race-courses and cricket-fields any more than men can become permanently wealthy by laying and taking odds, or speculating in futures. III _A COSMOPOLITAN COLONY_ It must not be gathered from what I have said in the last two chapters that it is all play and no work in Australia. There is a great deal too much play, and far too keen an interest in winning money instead of making real wealth; but still Australia boasts of splendid industries which she is working to real and lasting profit. While I was in Adelaide I renewed my acquaintance with a lady and gentleman with whom I had come into contact by a lucky chance during a coaching trip through the Blue Mountains and New South Wales, while I was waiting for the steamer from Sydney to Noumea. During that trip which, by the way, is one of the most delightful that you can take in any of the Five Continents, I made the interesting discovery that they not only knew me much better than I knew them, but that they had even named their house after their favourite character in one of my stories. It was through their kindness that I had an opportunity of realising by personal experience the wonderful development of what bids fair to be Australia’s greatest and, in the best sense, most profitable industry. The commercial fabric of Australia rests upon wool, wine, wheat, and gold, and not the least of these is wine. One day I received an invitation to go and spend three days at Seppeltsfield, which is the centre of one of the largest and most flourishing wine districts in Australia. Here I became the guest of Mr. Benno Seppelt, whose father was the pioneer of wine-growing in South Australia. It was here, too, that I found the most brilliant triumph in cosmopolitan colonisation that I had seen in the course of many wanderings.