twice as dear in actual money, but the money
itself is worth at least twice as much as in England.

Really large houses of the size of the manor-houses and halls which are
scattered over England in tens of thousands, can be counted in Australia
in scores. Of these but few have any architectural pretensions. Houses of
this class cannot be built under L10,000 here, whereas in England they
would cost from L4,000 to L5,000 and can be bought still cheaper. If
there is any style which colonists particularly affect, it is the
castellar. Both in the large houses I have just been speaking of, and in
the ordinary wealthy man's house which has cost him from L3,000 to
L5,000, turrets and flagstaffs abound. The passion for flagstaffs must, I
think, be derived from the fact that most of the people who build these
houses have had a long sea-journey from England, and retain a little
ozone in their composition. There is also something assertive about a
flag. A man who has a flag floating on his house is almost sure to have
some character about him. Not unfrequently, when the builder of a house
intends to live in it himself, he wishes to imitate his old home in
England, or if he has risen in the world, some particular house of the
village or town he was brought up in, which he admired in his boyhood.
The man who builds for himself at least takes care to build soundly, and
to have his rooms large and lofty.

By far the majority of houses are built by speculators; which means that
they are very badly built, run up in a tremendous hurry, constructed of
the cheapest and nastiest materials, with thin walls--in short, built for
show, and not for use. Everything looks very nice in them when you walk
round just after they are built, and it is only after you have lived in
them eighteen months that you begin to understand why the owner was in
such a hurry to sell, and would not hear of letting the house to you,
even at a good rent. You know something of this in London, but not nearly
to the same extent as here. In these speculative houses there is often
some little attempt at ornamentation--a bow-window thrown out, or the
veranda lifted to form a Gothic porch, or the drawing-room brought out
beyond the rest of the house, so as to form what is known as a T cottage,
though it should rather be a P, with a protrusion of the drawing-room
representing the straight line, and the body of the house the loop of the
P.

But the favourite type of Australia