She was a wise woman, that labourer’s wife, in more ways than one; an excellent help-mate, keeping her home spotlessly clean, and feeding her menkind—husband and grown-up son—thoroughly well—many a cup of tea and fresh-baked, featherlike scone have I enjoyed at her kitchen-table—but she insisted on her own rights and privileges, all the same. On Sundays her husband and son “lay in,” as she called it, till midday, while she gave them their breakfast in bed. But every Friday morning she “lay in,” and they lit the fire, prepared her breakfast, and took it to her in bed, cut their own lunches, and set off to work, leaving her to lie there quietly and rest till she felt inclined to rise and get herself a midday meal; usually a light one, in any case, for the Australian labouring classes mostly have their dinner, with hot meat and vegetables and, of course, tea,—when the men come back from their day’s work. But in every way there is more give and take, and not only between the sexes. One family I knew, consisting of four sisters who lived with their old mother in the suburbs and went up to town every day for business. They did not have to be at work till nine, and breakfasted a little after eight, the one servant bringing them all round the inevitable cups of tea at seven. On Sunday mornings, however, one of them always got the early tea, and took the maid a cup in bed. I do not in the least suppose that she was especially grateful—though doubtless she enjoyed it thoroughly—but neither did the girls expect her to be so. They simply did it because it seemed to them “fair.” And there you have the keynote of much which prevents the hardest work in Australia from developing into drudgery, or the poorest people from becoming downtrodden and hopeless; for, as far as is humanly to be expected, it is a fair country, while the people that are in it abide, at any rate, by this one great working ideal of “fairness.” CHAPTER VI VICTORIAN YOUTH DURING the first week I was in Melbourne I came across a notice in the daily paper among the police-court news, stating that “Percy So-and-So, aged two years and four months,” had been “arrested on the charge of being a neglected child.” “What a brutal country!” I thought. “Can it be possible that any human being can be found so hard-hearted and inhuman as to condemn a helpless child to any form of punishment, because by some tragic fate it has missed both a mother’s love and a father’s care?” Globe-trotters get all sorts of Adelphi-like impressions such as this, and then return home to rave in print about the barbarities and inefficiencies of other countries. Luckily for the correction of my ideas, however, I was to spend more than eight years in learning to understand this particular country a little better.