These Coffee Palaces are a completely fresh experience to a new-comer, the name itself giving rise to vague dreams of dark oak beamed haunts of men such as rare Ben Jonson consorted with; but in reality they prove to be only enormous buildings, cheaper than an hotel, but otherwise much the same, saving that one pays for all one’s meals as one gets them. Also there are two dining-rooms, the only difference between them as far as I could discover—excepting the price, which is higher in the upstairs, a fact that struck me as absurdly Scriptural—being that in the one you are given a table-napkin, and in the other you are not. The true inwardness of the matter was explained to me, however, on my first day there, when I hesitated in the hall, and at last inquired the way to the dining-room of a casual passer-by, with his hands stuck into the tops of his trousers and his felt hat well at the back of his head. “That there,” he responded, jerking his thumb in the direction of a gallery, where a few of the languidly select were draping themselves over the rail—“that there’s where the toffs grub, and there aren’t nothing served there not under two bob; but that there”—and he moved his thumb in the direction of a door to the right, from whence was streaming an endless succession of people, still chewing or, one stage later, picking their teeth—“that there’s where the blokes go: two courses fur a bob.” He was very polite, and he delayed his pressing business with his teeth to give me the fullest information possible, even to the affair of the “serviette,” as he called it; but he did not take off his hat. The Australian is an inwardly chivalrous person—most wonderfully so, considering how his female belongings have elbowed him off the pavement. He never speaks of—or to—us with that sort of tolerant sneer with which the Englishman tries to pass off the humiliating fact that he was born of woman—that for him a woman’s hands had performed the first, and in all probability will perform the last, offices. But he does not part easily with his head-gear.