I shall never forget my first impression of these men—the brilliant blue sky, the blazing sun, the great swinging cranes, and the dexterity with which they handled the enormous masses of iron-rails, etc., which we carried, apparently with so little exertion, and absolutely no bullocking; while many of them were in spotless white overalls, delightful to look upon. I had arrived out from England in a sailing-ship, long overdue, owing to a succession of adverse winds, and in consequence water had run very short, so that washing with anything but sea-water was a quite impossible luxury. Our ship was clean, for our crew had toiled nobly with paint and varnish and holystone; and the sails were washed and bleached white by the sunshine and storm of many months on the open sea, far from smoke or dust. Still, I believe that we all felt horribly grimy as the tug towed us to our place at the quay; while I, for one, was longing for a Turkish bath; and that as soon as possible, for no ordinary amount of washing as I felt would, or could, be of any use. So that perhaps, on the whole, there was a double reason for the extraordinary cleanliness of the Melbourne dock-hands striking me as it did at the time. Still, that first impression has never faded, and, to this day, I regard the Australian working man—the worker, not the waster, I mean—as the cleanest in the whole world. Some people, as I am well aware, are minutely clean in their persons, making it, indeed, a matter of religion, while some are clean in their raiment, but seldom both. Certainly the more completely a man is clothed, the more likely is it that he—or his clothes—are incompletely cleansed; his own mind, which I presume governs the washing of his body, and his wife’s mind, which governs the washing of his garments, seeming unable to work in unison. But, though the Australian labourer is quite completely clothed, and so white as to show dirt as easily as anybody—I mention this fact for the benefit of those who persistently regard him as black and naked—he and his wife appear to have somehow solved this question between them. Perhaps the reason may be found in the fact that he is better paid, and his wife is better fed than most wives of working men in the Old Country. And, then, the pipes do not freeze; while in even the tiniest three-roomed house there is usually a bath and a shower—though sometimes only in the scullery or back kitchen—with water laid on. And, after all, in a hot country cleanliness is not that affair of infinite toil that it is in a cold one; there is usually a day or so each week, even in the wettest weather, when there is enough sunshine to dry the clothes out of doors, so that one is saved the necessity of slinging them in lines across the kitchen, to drip on to the children’s heads, and lie in sullen grey pools on the floor. Yet there is the dust, which is beyond all words, and the flies, so that it is not all quite plain sailing, after all.