In sharp contrast to such places as this is to be found the bare, sun-baked, torrid region of Mildura, a place where at one time there were more aristocrats to be found than in the whole of Australia; Englishmen of good families having flocked there, some for the sake of health, some attracted by the wonderful fruit-growing capacities of the place. I remember one beautiful young man “batching” there for years—cooking his own dinner, doing the house-work, such as it was, washing up the dishes and working meanwhile like a fury on his little fruit farm—who would come down to Melbourne for the Cup looking as if absolutely fresh from Bond Street. He went home for a trip not long ago, and when he came back amused me very much by a description of a dinner which his people had given by way of welcoming him back. He was a gay person; he had been interested, and amused, and stimulated to talk by the evident interest everyone showed in his adventures, and still talking and laughing, not thinking what he was doing, as the ladies rose to leave the table, from the long force of habit he began to collect the dishes and plates, to scrape them, and pile them one on the top of the other, under the very eyes of the amazed butler and his minions. [Picture: Loading fruit on the Murray at Mildura] The first settlement of Mildura, which is on the border of Victoria and New South Wales, was in 1884, the settlement being run and the first irrigation scheme inaugurated by the famous Chaffey Brothers. In 1887 the Chaffey Brothers Company, Limited, was formed, and recognized as supreme until 1895, when the place was taken over by the Mildura Irrigation Trust. The population, which, when the first census was taken in 1891, was 2,321, has now increased by another 5,000, and may well go on increasing, for Mildura is in a thriving condition. Very nearly all the dried fruits which come from Victoria, and the greater part of the canned fruits also, have been grown in Mildura, which is very certainly the garden of the garden State. In 1908 the value of the fruit exports of Victoria—nearly all of them from there—amounted to £153,062, the dried raisins and apricots alone being worth £84,627; Mildura’s one rival in this respect being Renmark, in South Australia, Mildura heading the lists with sultanas and other raisins, and Renmark with currants and other dried fruits. Still, in 1908, dried fruits were imported from overseas to the value of £99,518, and fresh fruit to the value of £107,666, so there is still an opening for “noblemen’s sons and others” in Australia. Among these, men with the right sort of wives will certainly prove of the most value to the country; though I would not wish to be as invidious as the lady whose advertisement I once read in the _Melbourne Age_, and who proffered herself as prepared to fill the post of housekeeper to a “bachelor or gentleman.”