The owners or tenants of the small villas seem to do the best with the scrap of ground that is at their disposal. But the cottagers make little or no effort to beautify their houses even when they are their own possessions; while the gardens of the wealthy people—say at Toorak, which is supposedly the most select suburb—are certainly very disappointing. One sees hideous corrugated iron fences round really fine houses, with gardens out of all proportion to their size; Gothic mansions, in a setting worthy only of a little villa at twenty pounds a year, looking like nothing so much as a very big joint on a very small dish; gardens where there is no shade nor retirement possible, and with the aggressive fence visible from every point; while the parsimony in the matter of water is almost beyond belief, fine shrubs that may have cost pounds, rare plants, and well-laid lawns, all being reduced to a khaki-coloured waste for the want of a few pounds spent in watering them. Really, I believe that if the gardens had to be watered with champagne the wealthy Melbournian would not hesitate; it is spending his money on mere water which he dislikes: that is the clouds’ job, and not his, and he spends his life waiting for them to do their duty, though he ought to know them better by now. All over the country it is the same, in the great as well as the small. People seem to resent money being spent on any form of irrigation. They will plough and sow, they will reap when the crop is ready, and in any well-conducted climate that ought to be enough. But the Australian climate, like all beauties, has its very distinct failings, and in the matter of rain it is, to say the least of it, capricious. In most countries a caprice such as this, when once fully known, is provided against. In time, perhaps, the Australians also will grow to realize their country’s shortcoming, and a vast system of irrigation be carried out that will make a veritable Paradise of Victoria; but until that is accomplished, one can only say that its agricultural qualities are, like the curate’s egg, “good in parts.” Still, something has been done, though any movement to further irrigation has received very lukewarm support from the public. As early as 1884 an artesian well was formed at Sale, which for a number of years gave out 100,000 gallons a day. When that failed—whether from the choking of sand or from corrosion of the casing I do not know—a new bore was put down; but, as the water was impure, containing too much sulphuretted hydrogen, a third had to be sunk, which now yields as much as 145,000 gallons of water a day.