out to dinner. The one we
accepted was to a sensible Australian Christmas dinner; a typical one,
as it should be, and will be before the Commonwealth is many years old.
Everything cold except the vegetables, the hose playing on the veranda
and vines outside, the men dressed in sensible pyjama-like suits, and
the women and girls fresh and cool and jolly, instead of being hot and
cross and looking like boiled carrots, and feeling like boiled rags,
and having headaches after dinner, as would have been the case had they
broiled over the fire in a hot kitchen all the blazing forenoon to cook
a scalding, indigestible dinner, as many Australian women do, and for no
other reason than that it was the fashion in England. One of those girls
was very pretty and--ah, well!--

Christmas dinner in a greasy Sydney sixpenny restaurant, that opened a
few days before with brass band going at full blast at the door by way
of advertisement. "Roast-beef, one! Cabbage and potatoes, one! Plum
pudding, two!" (That was the first time I dined to music.) The Christmas
dinner was a good one, but my appetite was spoilt by the expression of
the restaurant keeper, a big man with a heavy jowl, who sat by the
door with a cold eye on the sixpences, and didn't seem to have much
confidence in human nature.

Christmas--no, that was New Year--on the Warrego River, out back (an
alleged river with a sickly stream that looked like bad milk). We spent
most of that night hunting round in the dark and feeling on the ground
for camel and horse droppings with which to build fires and make smoke
round our camp to keep off the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes started at
sunset and left off at daybreak, when the flies got to work again.

Christmas dinner under a brush shearing-shed. Mutton and plum
pudding--and fifty miles from beer!

An old bush friend of mine, one Jimmy Nowlett, who ranked as a
bullock-driver, told me of a Christmas time he had. He was cut off
by the floods with his team, and had nothing to eat for four days but
potatoes and honey. He said potatoes dipped in honey weren't so bad; but
he had to sleep on bullock yokes laid on the ground to keep him out of
the water, and he got a toothache that paralysed him all down one side.

And speaking of plum pudding, I consider it one of the most barbarous
institutions of the British. It is a childish, silly, savage
superstition; it must have been a savage inspiration, looking at it all
round--but then it isn't