Oddly enough, even the Boer War has not diffused an idea, which is very general, that the Australian working-man is divided into two types—the luxurious, lazy, arrogant holiday-maker and the rollicking cow-boy sort of person. For myself, I should say that the town man, artisan or labourer, is much the same as in any other country, with the added—but quite unimportant—defects and virtues of his time and place. He is more cocksure, but he is also more self-respecting, than the labourer at home. He works less uninterruptedly, but he works harder while he is at it, though with less appearance of sweat and fever, merely because he is better fed, and all the conditions of his life are more wholesome, while his hours are shorter; but otherwise he is much the same as elsewhere. In the country districts the difference is far more pronounced. “Away back” the shepherd and cattle-man is more ignorant than most of his fellows at home, but he is more resourceful; he has more spirit and more pluck. If the country is not new to him, it was new to his father or grandfather, and it needed all their power of resource and adaptability to get on in it. I have said that the schoolmaster and schoolmarm in the back blocks face difficulties and meet with conditions almost incredible to their fellow men and women at home. The distance makes the outlook larger. An afternoon visit becomes a long day’s journey, an adventure, an undertaking. The Bush parson and the Bush doctor live a life completely different from the life of a country parish. The very fact of being so constantly on horseback, as they are, makes a difference. The many hours of open air, of sunshine and storm that are involved when they go to visit a patient or christen a baby—it all makes a difference, and a wholesome one too. Then the postman; think of the country postman at home! His leisurely ways, his thick boots, his slow, steady progress, his many pauses for gossip and refreshment, all dignified by a sort of consideration which the other yokels show him as a servant of the King. Then think of the mailmen in Australia, of their dependence on their maps, and their knowledge of the country, the danger they are in from thirst, from privation, from the chance of being bushed, and from blacks—not, perhaps, in Victoria so much now, but certainly up North, which very fairly represents many other places as they were fifty or sixty years ago. Only last year a mailman missed his way up by the Archer River, and turned up, nearly a week later, 120 miles farther south than he should have been, having gone right round Coen, for which he was bound, without striking his track. Again, quite lately another mailman in the same district was lost for fourteen days, having travelled round and round in a circle. When the police found him he was delirious, and fought them wildly, thinking they meant to murder him and steal the mailbag, which he had stuck to through all his suffering.