I shall never forget my first bewildering day in search for lodgings. As each front-door was opened I was met by the same mingled whiff of cabbage and linoleum, the same complete indifference as to whether I took the rooms or left them; the same superb air of merely letting rooms at all out of charity, or as a sort of careless hobby; also, incidentally, because, by some odd chance, the house happened to be too big for its occupants. Indeed, this reason was so inevitably offered to me that in time I found myself receiving the odd impression that all the lodging-houses had sprung up, gourdlike, to their present proportions the very night after the lease had been signed. The question of attendance, too, seemed to be always a vexed one, and, in most cases, even by extra payment, quite out of the question; while the very idea of separate meals was received with a sort of horror, as if anyone who wished to feed alone must contemplate awful orgies of an unutterable description. For the most part the beds were big, the charges bigger; the washing-basin and the slaveys who opened the door incredibly small—that is, with the professional boarding-house keeper. There seemed no possible reconciliation between the small maid and the small basin, for there the question of attendance came in—though one landlady did vouchsafe the information that her maid “slopped the room” every morning. But it seemed as if the relations between the big bed and the big rent might, and indeed were, expected to be equalized if I did not mind “sharing my room with another young lady,” in one case my possible hostess’s daughter. I shall never forget my horror when this idea was first mooted to me, nor how, in my confusion, I protested that I “had never slept with another woman in my life.” On which the horror was transferred to the face of the prospective landlady, who retorted that—“if I was that sort, I might go elsewhere.” These are the people who flood the daily papers with glowing advertisements—perhaps that landlady would say: “And these are the people who answer them.” But still I would have you beware, for they are false as their fringes—luckily, almost as palpably so. Once, I suppose, they held any temporary dweller in Melbourne irrevocably in their clutches, but since the Land Boom—“the Boom,” as it is always called—which, in spite of all its horrors, had a most potentially humanizing effect on the people, a few capable gentlewomen have taken the work of the landladies into their own hands, and comfortable, well-ordered, truly home-like boarding-houses are springing up, which threaten to oust these pre-historic harpies from their lairs.