istance
in the portrayal of a typical Australian.

In the slack-baked condition in which we find him, he merely repeats the
ordinary spectacle of green youth in the process of seeing life and
buying experience at the usual high figure. Compared with the real
squatter (who, ordinarily, is college-trained, and does not shear sheep
nor risk his neck unnecessarily), Bob, the son of rich 'Old Calverley,'
and nephew of an English baronet, is as an exaggerated stock-figure of
the stage to the commonplace blood and brain of everyday life. A
childlike trust in one's fellows, a reputation for good-nature, an
untamable taste for horseflesh and the pursuits of the Bush, belong to
every young squatter in a certain class of Australian fiction; they are
qualities which may be applied indiscriminately, with always some
effect.

The real squatter is a more civilised and reliable, if less picturesque,
person. He likes both work and pleasure, provided they be suitably
proportioned. His work is in the personal management of his properties;
his pleasure is taken in the large cities. He entertains no fantastic
prejudices against urban life, in proof of which he often spends his
later years in some city hundreds of miles from the scene of his early
toil and pastoral successes.

As a young man in London, he can be found with rooms at the Langham, the
Metropole, or some other of the half-dozen fashionable hotels known to
colonial visitors. There he will entertain his friends, joining with
them, in turn, the continuous movements of the society season. He
frankly lacks much of the ease and polish of the young Englishman, but
his natural amiability and good spirits largely compensate for these
deficiencies, while they preclude any feeling of discomfort on his own
part.

During his three or six months' stay in London (the combination usually
of a little business with a very full programme of pleasure) he spends
freely, and in his tour of the clubs plays here and there a little at
cards--perchance loses. Worldly beyond his reputation, and somewhat
Chesterfieldian in his principles, he consents to be a Roman while at
Rome. He has inherited the British hatred of fuss and personal
peculiarity, and none shall call him mean. But, unlike many of his
English friends at club and course, he has watched and taken some part
in the hard process of making money, and knows the difference between a
little gentlemanly extravagance and the reckless hazarding of