FROM the moment that the ship touches this shore—no, rather from the moment that the pilot boards her—a whiff of something, at once strange and stimulating, seems to fill one’s lungs and quicken one’s brain. The Australian pilots are a notably fine race—the younger men, those who have been born in the country—the finest type, perhaps, that it has as yet produced, with a breezy optimism, an immense faith in the land of their birth, and true affection for the Old Country, their very love for and dependence on the connecting seas helping, perchance, to annul any petty differences or jealousies; so that it is indeed well for all that they should be the very first to greet us in the new world to which we are come. From Colombo one sails eastwards to Australia, so far east that one almost reaches the west in more senses than one. There are Trade Winds, and there are counter Trades, as we know; and if Australia owes her climate and her fertility to the warm, teeming East, mentally, in the tastes and outlook of her people, she is still altogether Western; so markedly so, indeed, that, in Melbourne in particular, one is at times seized with the whimsical idea that it has something to do with the roll of the earth, and that we may yet be slid into the very lap of America, ending by being far more completely akin to that democratic country than to the slow-moving, monarchical methods of England. One must look back to one’s first clear-cut, vivid impression of a new country to realize how unnumbered are the differences, even under the many apparent likenesses, to which after a little while one becomes so used. In Melbourne the stevedores and dock-hands, who throng the ship and quay the moment she is docked, are almost as incredibly different from the same class in England as they are from the swarming blacks of Colombo. They are for the most part bigger and broader-shouldered; they look far better fed. They walk with a vigour and spring—indeed, with a sort of swagger—moving more from the hip than the English dock-hand, and less with that weary lurch of the shoulders which marks him as a creature of infinite labour and privation; while, above all, they are extraordinarily clean.