Generally speaking, it is the New South Wales people who—apart from the Victorians—have flooded Melbourne during the Cup week, with the addition, after a good season, of a fair sprinkling of Queenslanders. But this last racing festival has been marked by a quite new influx of South Australians. Of course, some of the very wealthiest have always come up for the week; but the ordinary South Australian farmer is a slow, steady-going person who does not take any risks. Lately, however, the system of close culture, which he has practised with the greatest possible success, and a series of magnificent seasons, have not only given him a feeling of security, but have rendered him so prosperous that he and his family have flocked to Melbourne for this year’s sport with light hearts and full pockets. The New South Wales man would venture if he had as much as his train fare, and trust to luck to get back again, but one may feel sure that the South Australian is conscious of a solid balance at the bank before he will come so far away from home for his amusement, nothing showing the difference in the character of the people of the Australian States so plainly as the way in which they take their pleasure. In itself the very fact that there were some 150,000 people at the Cup this year is a very fair sign of the country’s prosperity—150,000 well-dressed and keenly alive people, all intensely alert and charged with the nervous energy that is such a characteristic of their race, all hanging like one, with heart and soul and the stored-up excitement of days and hours, on the result of two and a half minutes: no wonder that the very air seems charged with electricity so intense that the only possible relief is to be found by forgetting that we are the civilized product of an artificial age, and by yelling as a savage or a child would yell.