n have good pictures, but I hardly know anyone
who has any good engravings. Muttonwool can see no difference between a
proof before letters and the illustrations from the newspapers, which may
be seen pasted on the walls of every small shop and working-man's
cottage. That there is a taste for pictures here is undeniable. But that
is common to every child till it knows how to read, and will want a deal
of educating before it can be called 'art.'

We will now go into the dining-room, which is probably the best furnished
room in the house. It is not easy to make a dining-room look out of joint
provided you are not particular about the cost, though there is a very
wide margin between the decent and the handsome. The upholstery is much
the same as in an ordinary upper middle-class house in England--sofa,
sideboard, chiffonier, two easy and eight or ten upright chairs in cedar
frames and covered with leather, marble mantelpiece and clock, Louis XVI.
glass, and a carpet which is at any rate better than the drawing-room
one. If there is a breakfast-room it is a smaller edition of the
dining-room. The study is chiefly remarkable for the absence of books, or
for an inappropriateness to the owner's tastes which smacks of a job-lot.
The bedrooms are disappointing. Pictures and knick-knacks rarely extend
beyond the 'company' precincts. Muttonwool would think it a waste of good
bawbees to put pretty things in the bedrooms, where no one but the family
will see them. In these rooms he is _au naturel_, and with all his
good-nature and genuineness he is rather a rough fellow. The brute is
expelled from the drawing-room, but he jumps in again at the bedroom
window. As for the servants' rooms, anything is good enough for them.
Probably the master himself was contented with still less in his younger
days. The kitchen is ordinarily very poorly provided with utensils.
Ranges and stoves are only found in the wealthier houses, the usual
cooking apparatus being a colonial oven--a sort of box with fire above
and below, which is very convenient for burning wood, the usual fuel
throughout Australia.

I think this is about as much as need be said about an average wealthy
Australian's house; but before going on to describe middle-class homes, I
must ask you to remember that all large colonial houses are not furnished
on this wise. There are a large number of people in Australia, and
especially in Victoria, who have as good an idea of how to furnish a