s, they both
sleep in one room, and not improbably share the same basin. Servants are
undoubtedly troublesome to a degree in Australia, but it is not
altogether a satisfactory feature in colonial life that the provision
made for their comfort is literally nil.

Having seen the L600 a year cottage it is almost needless to visit the
L300 and L400, belonging to clerks and the smaller shopkeepers. The style
is the same, but the quantity and quality inferior. For instance, the
drawing-room carpet is tapestry instead of Brussels; the dining-room
furniture is covered with horse-hair instead of leather, and so on. We
will go into the next cottage--less pretentious-looking and a little
smaller. The rent is twelve shillings a week, and it belongs to a
carpenter in good employ. Here there is no drawing-room, but the parlour
aspires to comfort quite undreamt of by an English tradesman. Our old
friends the horse-hair cedar couch, the gent's and lady's chairs together
with four balloon high chairs, turn up again. There is a four-foot
chiffonier, a tapestry carpet, a gilt chimney-glass, a hearthrug, a
bronze fender and fire-irons, and a round table with turned pillar and
carved claws. In the parents' bedroom are a half-tester bedstead with
coir-fibre or woollen flock mattress, two cane chairs, washstand,
toilet-table, glass and ware, towel-horse, chest of drawers, and a couple
of yards of bedside carpet. The two youngest children sleep in this room,
and three or four others in the second bedroom, where the bedsteads are
less showy and the ware very inferior. The carpet is replaced by china
matting. The chest of drawers does duty as a toilet-table, and there are
of course no such luxuries as towel-horses. Yet, take it all in all,
Chips has much to be thankful for.

With labour so dear as it is here, it is wonderful to think that a
working-man can furnish, and furnish comfortably, a four-roomed cottage
for L27; and yet this is what has recently been done in Melbourne by my
friend Hornyhand, who is a common labourer, earning only eight to nine
shillings a day, and paying about as much a week for rent. He is really
uncommonly well off, everything in his house being brand-new; and yet, as
he tells me, he is absolutely at the root of the honest social tree--the
worst paid of the working-classes. I think it worth while to subjoin his
bill. He certainly has not gone in for luxuries, but then he is of a
frugal mind. If he wanted it, his house