Then take another short train-ride, or walk to Sandringham, with its fine club-house and beautiful undulating golf-course; to Mentone; to Frankston; to a dozen other places, all within an hour’s journey—or but little more—from Melbourne. Or stay a week at Mordialloc, with its exquisitely appointed little hostel, reminiscent of all the best in our old village inns at home—a peaceful, shady place this, with a long arm of the sea winding for miles inland, dotted with white-sailed pleasure-boats, or bright green tubs, in which misanthropic fishermen sit smoking, day after day, as they watch their float—the only melancholy note in the cheerful scene. Or break away inland on to the high, bracing, open country around Oakleigh, with the blue Dandenong Ranges in the distance, and many acres of market-gardens, from which a long procession of carts trail down to the Victoria market three times a week—at an hour when all the lights of the town are still burning, to be met returning again as the inhabitants of the suburbs flock in to their work—laden high with manure from the city stables, on the top of which, more than likely, the wearied-out husbandman is sleeping peacefully, while the horses make their decorous way homeward, with a wise air too dependable to be described as human. Where there are no market-gardens on the heights there is rough common land, white with heath and kindred shrubby plants, while across the open country there blows such an air—clean, and clear, and invigorating. Still farther on the line runs right up into Gippsland, the black, luscious soil of which grows the finest grass in Victoria, a paradise of a place, where drought is hardly known—a district showing, indeed, only one blot on its scutcheon, and that—shared by almost every other dairying centre, and the work of man and not of Nature, who has, indeed, been bountiful to Gippsland—the terrible overworking of the children by their parents, in the greed for quick gain and dislike of paying out any money in wages, which is such a crying disgrace to the country.