, for Sunday, you know. They're useful,
too, for interviewing principals.'

One might have fancied that gloves were a kind of passport, or perhaps
a skeleton key guaranteed to open principals' doors. It was Mr. Smith
who first made me feel that there was a connection between morals,
respectability, and cold baths. To miss the morning tub, as Mr. Smith
saw it, was not merely a calamity but also a disgrace; a thing to make
one ashamed; a lapse calculated seriously to affect character. How
oddly that does clash, to be sure, with his views of a young man's
relations with the other sex! And yet, I am not so sure. Shocked as
many people would be by those views, they might admit in them perhaps
a sort of hygienic intention. It was that I fancy, more than anything
else, which did as a fact shock me. As companions, co-equals,
fellow-humans, I believe this curious man absolutely detested women. I
wonder what sort of a wife he had had! ...

When I come to compare my launch in Sydney with all that I know and
have read of youthful beginnings in Old World centres, I marvel at the
luxurious ease and freedom of Australian conditions. To put it into
figures now--my start in Sydney did not cost me a sovereign. I did not
spend two days without earning more than enough to defray all my
modest outgoings. My search for employment, so far from wearing out
shoe-leather, was confined to a single application, to one brief
interview. This was not at all due to any cleverness on my part, but
in the first place to the good offices of Mr. Perkins of Dursley, and
in the second place to the easygoing character of prevailing
Australian conditions.

On the morning after my first evening's dissipation in Sydney, I made
my way to the business premises of Messrs. Joseph Canning and Son, the
Sussex Street wholesale produce merchants and commission agents. This
firm had had dealings with Dursley's Omnigerentual and Omniferacious
Agent ever since his first appearance in that part, and it was no
doubt because of this that Mr. Perkins wrote to them on my behalf.
After waiting for a time in a dark little chamber containing specimens
of cream separators and churns, I was taken to the private room of Mr.
Joseph Canning, the senior partner, who, as I was presently to learn,
visited the office chiefly to attend to such out-of-the-way trifles as
my call, to smoke cigars, and to take selected clients out to lunch.
The practical conduct of the business was entirely