Luckily for the Melbourne “char-lady”—I once heard a child severely rebuked by its middle-class mother for speaking of a washer-_woman_, and the female side of the Melbourne prison, referred to as “the place where the lady convicts are kept”—she is far better paid than her English sister, the minimum daily wage being four shillings, with dinner and sundry cups of tea, while she receives at least half a crown a week for attending to an ordinary small office or room, lighting the fire during the winter months, and sweeping and dusting it daily. It is wonderful how much of this sort of work a really smart woman can get through, and the one of whom I have spoken seldom did less than twenty rooms regularly each day—the offices the very first thing in the morning, or the last thing at night, and the living-rooms of the bachelors and more prosperous business girls between nine and twelve. After this she would race home, see to her own house, cook her children’s dinner and return about six to get a certain proportion of the offices ready for the next morning; doing her own washing, as she told me, on Sundays—a practice not greatly to be condemned, seeing how near a place cleanliness occupies to godliness. Her four children were always very models of neatness and cleanliness—as was their mother—indeed, the appearance of all working-women in Melbourne, of whatever class, strikes me as very far superior to what I remember it in England. One summer when I lived out of town and went to work every morning by the eight o’clock train, I used to marvel at the way the girls going to business in shops and offices managed to turn themselves out at such an early hour; and the amount of real work that it must have occasioned them to wash and get up their fresh stiffly starched print or linen dresses—which certainly could not be worn for more than two days—their dainty white cuffs and collars and other etceteras of the toilet. One particularly trim girl, I remember, confessed to me that she only possessed one set of muslin cuffs and collar, and washed and starched them regularly every evening when she got home, ironing them out before she left each morning. On the whole these girls are a far fresher, healthier set than those who live right in the town, as much, I suspect, from the better food they have when they are living with their people as from the better air. Indeed, without any exaggeration, it is worth while going to Flinders Street Station, or Princes Bridge, any day between eight and nine, for the mere delight of seeing the dozens of fresh, happy-looking girls that the early trains disgorge; then to watch them branch off in every direction—up Flinders Street, and down Flinders Street, and along Swanston Street—to their places of business. It is as if the puffing suburban trains were each a veritable part of the heart of the town, pumping bright new blood through every artery, in the shape of the grey and dust-grimed street.