PEOPLE at home do not know the true meaning of the word “loneliness,” and we often hear English labourers and their wives talking of isolation, when there is a church and village only a couple of miles off, or other cottages and farms, at any rate, within walking distance of them. Indeed, we are, in general, so used to living closely huddled together that we get scared when we are alone in any large open space, with no single sign of humanity, fenced and cultivated land or smoking chimney within sight. The less educated people are the more awful this loneliness seems, till the wild cliffs of Cornwall and the moors of Yorkshire and Devonshire become to their distorted fancy fearful and pixie-haunted places. And yet even the loneliest of all these lonely spots is densely populated in comparison with the country districts in Australia where one meets with people who have lived all their lives as much as 200 miles away from any town or railway-station, and with children, and even grown-up men and women, who have never seen any white person outside their own families. If you can imagine that,—imagine that there are women who have never seen how other women dress or do their hair, and young men who have met not a single person of the opposite sex beyond their own mother and sisters; whose stores are brought to them by bullock-waggon or team from a far-distant town, having themselves never even seen a shop-window; who receive no letters because there is nobody to write them; who would not know if the whole of Europe were convulsed with war because they see no papers; who have no knowledge, no aspirations, no hope, simply because they see no outside person whose life they may compare with their own—if you can imagine this, I say, and all that it means, then you may realize a little what true loneliness is.