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.