fortune also?" He was as much amused as we were when we
explained that we were reformers and not fortune tellers. I have been a
great lover of card games all my life; patience in solitude, and
cribbage, whist, and bridge have been the almost invariable
accompaniments of my evenings spent at home or with my friends. Reading
and knitting were often indulged in, but patience was a change and a
rest and relief to the mind. I have always had the idea that card games
are an excellent incentive to the memory. We had an afternoon meeting
in the Melbourne Town Hall to inaugurate a league in Victoria, at which
Dr. Barrett, the Rev. Dr. Bevan, Professor Nanson, and I were the
principal speakers. Just recently I wrote to the Victorian Minister who
had charge of the Preferential Voting Bill in the Victorian Parliament
to ask him to consider the merits of effective voting; but, like most
other politicians, the Minister did not find the time opportune for
considering the question of electoral justice for all parties. I
remained in Victoria to spend a month with my family and friends after
Mrs. Young returned to Adelaide. The death of my dear brother John,
whose sympathy and help had always meant so much to me, shortly after
my return, followed by that of my brother William in New Zealand, left
me the sole survivor of the generation which had sailed from Scotland
in 1839.

CHAPTER XXIII.

MORE PUBLIC WORK.

For the co-operative movement I had always felt the keenest sympathy. I
saw in it the liberation of the small wage-earner from the toils of the
middlemen. I thought moreover that the incentive to thrift so strongly
encouraged by co-operative societies would be a tremendous gain to the
community as well as to the individual. How many people owe a
comfortable old age to the delight of seeing their first small profits
in a co-operative concern, or their savings in a building society
accumulating steadily and surely, if but slowly? And I have always had
a disposition to encourage anything that would tend to lighten the
burden of the worker. So that when in 1901 Mrs. Agnes Milne placed
before me a suggestion for the formation of a women's co-operative
clothing factory, I was glad to do what I could to further an extension
in South Australia of the movement, which, from its inception in older
countries, had made so strong an appeal to my reason. A band of women
workers were prepared to associate for the mutual benefit of the