The people in Victoria are not cruel either to their children or their wives, even among the lowest classes, as they are in England. Ask anyone who has nursed in the slums of London—if you doubt this cruelty—how many of the women with cancer in their breasts owe it to their husbands’ playful habit of knocking them down and kicking them; or examine some of the reports of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Neither do the Australians, as a nation, ill-treat their horses or their cattle, or give way to the sexual excesses of the Latin races, but, on the other hand, they most certainly are inveterate gamblers; a far less repulsive vice than many, I admit, but all the same as far reaching as any in the trouble that it causes. Every Saturday there are races somewhere within easy distance of Melbourne, and by tram and train, carriage and motor, people flock to them. It is part of their religion, their Sabbath falling on a Saturday, like the Jews. Of course the Cup week in November is the high festival of the year, but the race for the Caulfield Cup runs it close. The Caulfield course is most beautifully situated in wide, open, common-like country, dotted with dark masses of pines, and fringed in the distance with blue tinted mountain ranges, while the air blowing from the sea, across the almost untenanted land, is extraordinarily clear and exhilarating. Then the race is run at the very apex of spring, and the day is as inevitably fine as the week of the Agricultural Show is inevitably and hopelessly wet. Everybody dons their best and newest clothes, the men for the most part showing their sense of the festive season by the exuberant colouring of their socks, which, like the burnished dove, of which Tennyson speaks, shows an even livelier purple than usual. The Australian men do not, as a rule, dress well. If they are commercial or intellectual their clothes are too loose; if they are sporting they are too tight, with overmuch of “fit” and not enough “cut.” But they make up for it with their waistcoats, and socks, and ties. I remember once being at a seaside picnic where there was a beautiful youth in a pale grey suit; his straw boating-hat was bound and banded with mauve, his tie mauve, his shirt a paler tint of the same, his socks a discreet violet. In clambering about the cliffs a bramble impertinently ripped a long tear in the nether part of his nether garments; but he bore it with the sweetest equanimity, in the full knowledge that his under-clothes, thus inadvertently exposed, were also mauve—of the palest tinted silk. It is rather the same with the women. They are very dainty in all the accessories of the toilet, colouring, and trimming, but they do not pay as much attention to cut and material as their English sisters; which is perhaps why they look infinitely better in the summer than the winter, while the girls in white muslins, and silks, and flower-trimmed hats that one sees at the Cup or a