y wore their hats at an angle then
unfamiliar to me, with a forward rake. They must laugh or, at any
rate, smile sometimes, I thought. This is where _Punch_ comes from. It
is the land of Dickens. It is, in short, Merry England. But, as I
regarded the dingy, set faces from the railway's carriage window, it
seemed inconceivable that their owners ever could have laughed, or
screwed up the skin around their eyes to look out happily under sunny
blue skies upon bright and cheery scenes.

Since then I have again and again encountered the most indomitable
cheerfulness in Londoners, in circumstances which would drive any
Australian to tears, or blasphemy, or suicide, or to all three. And I
know now that many Londoners wash as frequently as Australians, or
nearly so. But my first impression of the appearance of those I saw
was an impression of sour, cross, unwashed sadness. And, being an
impressionable person, I immediately found an explanatory theory. The
essential difference between these folk and people following similarly
humble avocations in Sydney, I thought, is that these people, even
those of them who, personally, were never acquainted with hunger, live
in the shadow of actual want; even of actual starvation. In Sydney they
do not. That accounts for the don't-care-a-damn light-heartedness seen in
Australian faces, and for the dominance of care in these faces.

I still had everything to learn, and have since learned some of it.
And I do not think now that my theory was particularly incorrect. The
mere physical fact that the working men in Sydney take a bath every
day as a matter of course, and that in London they do not all take one
every week, trifling as it may seem, is itself accountable for
something. But the ever-present knowledge that starvation is a real
factor in life, not in Asia, but in the house next door but one, if
not in one's own house--that is a great moulder of facial expression.
It plays no part whatever in the life of the country from which I had
come.

As my train drew to within half a dozen miles of its destination, I
became vaguely conscious of the real inner London as distinguished
from its extraordinary dockland and water approaches. We passed a huge
and grimy dwelling-house, overlooking the railway, a 'model'
dwelling-house; and in passing I caught sight of an incredible legend,
graven in stone on the side of this building, intimating that here were
the homes of more than one thousand families.