When I arrived there was a room ready for me and a hot bath, the girls themselves having started the bath-heater before they came to the station; and a fire of logs—a welcome sight, for there was a nip of frost in the air—and tea and thin bread-and-butter, and a nightdress ready aired, so that I need not trouble to unpack. Of all the warm-hearted kindnesses I have ever met with in this country, this preparation for the coming of a woman who was an absolute stranger—simply the friend of another friend, herself a new-chum—lingers in my mind as one of the kindest. To this moment I remember vividly the feeling of exquisite comfort with which I snuggled my tired limbs in among the bedclothes, after my bath, and lay there, with the blinds down, sipping tea in the dancing firelight. It is odd how often one can do with, and delight in, a fire in one’s bedroom out here; but days which have been blazing hot are apt to end with a cold night, and then the wood fires are so tempting, so cheerful and companionable. I recollect once staying a night with some friends on Mount Macedon, where the sitting-room boasted a really huge open fireplace, in which burnt an immense log, part of the trunk of a tree, banked up with smaller pieces. This monster burnt steadily all day till about eleven o’clock at night, by which time the middle of it had become a glowing mass of crimson, that finally broke, with a soft crash, a flare of sparks, and thick fall of silver-grey ash. It is a sound one grows after a time to listen for and love, this breaking of the burnt-through logs. Once up-country I was lodging in a little wooden shanty, through the cracks of which I could see the stars as I lay in bed. The nights were very cold, and I used to make up a good fire the last thing—the fireplace and chimney being the only part of the house built of bricks—to be regularly awakened after some hours by the soft crash of falling logs. Yet, though the nights were cold, the days were such a blaze of golden sunshine that my sheets—there were only one pair for each bed—used to be taken off, washed and dried, and aired in the sun, and put back again the same morning. But it is not only among the well-to-do people that the spirit of comradeship shows itself, as it did to me that first morning up in the back blocks—it is everywhere among all classes. People have done surprising things for me—people to whom I was a complete stranger—while among themselves, from squatters to swaggies, though they do not write essays on friendship, they will hold by a mate through good and ill—and most of all through ill. One instance, which, though it belongs to New South Wales, is so typical of this that I cannot resist quoting it, was lately cited in the _Sydney Bulletin_, which says: