d party to the eyes of English readers as
thoroughly typical Australians would be as unjust a proceeding as
was that of Dumas _pere_ when he declared that all the inhabitants
of Antwerp were _roux_ because he had encountered two red-headed
girls on his way to the hotel. No one is thoroughly typical unless
he be a savage or a peasant. Portia and her relatives retained their
own underlying individualities none the less that they had been
influenced in their outward bearing and modes of expressing
themselves by a long sojourn in the backwoods of Victoria, in daily
contact with all sorts and conditions of men--broken-down gentlemen,
English yokels, bush-hands, and the like. After all, the moulding of
character by outward influences alone is not a work to be achieved
in one generation, or what would become of the theory of heredity,
upon which everything is supposed to depend, more or less, in our
present scientific age? If these people strike the English reader,
therefore, as differing in certain respects from those he is
accustomed to meet in his daily walk through life, let him remember
that the differences which will strike him most are the merely
superficial ones resulting from an occasional departure from the
conventional rules of speech and behaviour that guide his own
outward conduct, and that in all the main essentials they are, _au
fond_, neither more like him or more unlike him than though chance
had willed that they should be born and brought up on the selfsame
patch of earth as himself. A difference in the vocabulary of the
native-born Australian, or long resident in Australia, of the not
too highly educated order, as well as a difference in his tone of
voice and enunciation, from that of a person belonging to a
corresponding class in England, is one of those facts, however,
which 'nobody can deny.' I am not going to enter in this connection
upon a disquisition respecting the relative merits of what Mrs.
James would have called 'hoefisch' English, and the English that has
been coined out of entirely new conditions by pioneers and
backwoodsmen. Suffice it to say there _is_ a difference, and Portia
was never more sensible of it than when she returned, as on the
present occasion, from moving among a London society crowd into the
Anglo-Australian social atmosphere of the Kensingto