There are, of course, hotels in Melbourne, two moderately good and immoderately expensive, ones, and several smaller fry. But it is in the Coffee Palaces that the ordinary people congregate, and it is from the ordinary people, after all, that one can best judge of a nation; the highly educated—I will not say intellectual—and leisured classes being much the same anywhere. Therefore it is in one of the Coffee Palaces that I would advise anyone to stay who really wishes to study the life and character of the Australians. There comes the shrewd commercial traveller, who, in such a scattered country as this, is a person of wide experience, with by no means the safe and easy road before him that is trodden by his English compeers; while from him you are often able to draw some of the clearest and best-balanced judgments of the whole trend of the country and people that it is possible to obtain. Here, also, are the visitors from other States, with, perhaps, not too much money to spend, and the New Zealander and the Tasmanian, the country cousin, the cocky farmer, and the small squatter, gathering most thickly at the time of the Agricultural or Sheep Show, or during that great week when the race for the Melbourne Cup is run. The places are, of course, as their name implies, teetotal. If you want anything stronger than tea or coffee, or a soft drink, you give the money to the waitress, who sends out for it. But it is a lengthy progress, and one which all your neighbours seem to regard with such an intense suspicion that usually you content yourself with the truly national drink—tea. In the days of one’s youth one used to be told that tea and meat combined would inevitably turn to leather in one’s tummy. In Melbourne I feel that it must be the internal organs themselves which have turned to leather, so that there can be nothing more left to be feared, and one can even, after a while, drink tea and eat oysters at one fell meal with impunity. Of course, a good many children have succumbed to the united effects of boiled beef and tea, which is really the national food. But, then, it all conduces to the survival of the fittest, and until people will condescend to learn the art of vegetable growing, especially in drought-stricken districts, from the despised John Chinaman, it is as well to be prepared for the worst. The tea is usually drunk very strong and sweet, and most often without milk, many Australians having a deep-rooted suspicion of any fluid, even remotely appertaining to that cow which made their young lives such an intolerable burden to them. The workman, the artisan, the labourer, and dock-hands carry their tin billies, and a portion of tea twisted up in a piece of paper, out to their day’s work with them; and in the towns there is always a gas-jet or a fire to be found at which someone will let them boil the water. The swaggies and the wandering army of station hands,