The Australian—both child and adult—devours enormous quantities of jam, particularly up in the back blocks, where butter is almost an unknown luxury; so much so that the cattle-men, shearers, and shepherds get their internal machinery completely ruined in time by the quantity of inferior boiled sugar and fruit that they consume, and which they have inelegantly christened “rot-gut.” But, still, one cannot live on boiled beef and damper alone, and as tomato sauce and jam are the cheapest relishes obtainable, every camping-place and hut is littered round with an inevitable medley of sauce-bottles and tins. Everyone loves “lollies”—as they are called out here, the word “sweets” only being applied to what we generally call “puddings,”—and Melbourne and Sydney are the only towns where I have ever seen grown-up people gathered in absorbed and wistful groups round the windows of the confectioners’ shops, both men and women, discussing the good things on show there as engrossedly as they would stocks and shares—or hats; this characteristic being so marked that I was actually told to observe it by the captain of the ship I travelled out on, who himself hailed from “the land o’ cakes,” while a young man here very rarely goes to call on a girl without an offering of a box of lollies, apparently not being so overweighted with a sense of his own sufficiency as he is at home. It is extraordinarily difficult to rid oneself of old ideas that one has imbibed in one’s bread-and-milk days: to lose that inherent English faculty of taking “short views,” which Sydney Smith recommends as a virtue, and look forward sufficiently far to realize what does really matter; what is, and what is not, of lasting importance. At the best the independence of the Australian child—or “kid,” as it is inevitably called—is piquant and rather charming; at the worst it is intensely irritating. Still, unless it resolves into rudeness, which in a child or adult is always repulsive, the idea of the deference due to age, merely as age, is after all only the result of our own idea of our own self-importance. If there ever was a youth that wanted to see “the wheels go round” it is the Australian youth, who must know the why and wherefore of everything. There must be a distinct reason, beyond mere years, to persuade him to show any deference to anybody, and some reason, beyond that of youth, for humility on his own side. The man who has kicked the greatest number of goals that year at football, or made the most runs at cricket, or ridden the Cup winner; who is palpably successful in business or pleasure—_that_ they can understand, but little else; _he_ is “a bit of all right,” but the merely fictitious value of age they “have no time for,” as they would say.