haul over the mountains to the wide,
straight, pastoral and wheat-growing West, and their calling and
rumbling made cheery music all the year round, excepting a short space
on Sundays; while at night, as they climbed the crests of the
mountain-spurs, every time they fired, the red light belching from their
engine doors could be seen for miles down the valley. Thus Noonoon's
train service was excellent, and a great percentage of the town
population consisted of railway employes.

What is the typical Australian girl, is a subject frequently
discussed. To find her it is necessary to study those reared in the
unbroken bush,--those who are strangers to town life and its
influences. City girls are more cosmopolitan. Sydney girls are
frequently mistaken for New Yorkers, while Bostonian ladies are as
often claimed to be Englishwomen; and it is only the bush-reared
girl--at home with horse, gun, and stock-whip, able to bake the family
bread, make her own dresses, take her brother's or father's place out
of doors in an emergency, while at the same time competent to grace a
drawing-room and show herself conversant with the poets--who can
rightfully lay claim to be more typically Australia's than any other
country's daughter. Of course the city Australians are Australians
too. Australia is the land they put down as theirs on the census
paper. She is their native land; but ah! their country has never
opened her treasure-troves to them as to those with sympathetic and
appreciative understanding of her characteristics, and many of them
are as hazy as a foreigner as to whether it is the kooka-burra that
laughs and the moke-poke that calls, or the other way about. They are
incapable of completely enjoying the full heat of noonday summer sun
on the plains, and the evening haze stealing across the gullies does
not mean all it should. The exquisite rapturous enjoyment of the odour
of the endless bush-land when dimly lit by the blazing Southern stars,
or the companionship of a sure-footed nag taking the lead round stony
sidlings, or the music of his hoof-beats echoing across the ridges as
he carries a dear one home at close of day, are all in a magic
storehouse which may never be entered by the Goths who attempt to
measure this unique and wonderful land by any standard save its
own,--a standard made by those whose love of it, engendered by
heredity or close companionship, has fired their blood.

These observations lead up to the fact tha