working on the roads. Fearing that we should
come to want, I was most anxious to get
some employment before reduced to absolute
necessity, and I tried in vain to get some
engagement as a classical tutor, or a teacher
of any kind, in the town. After this, I tried
the merchants, and was very nearly getting
engaged as a clerk; but somehow or other
(chiefly because no one had time to listen) it
never came to anything. As to seeing
a Melbourne merchant for a minute's conversation,
you may call three or four times a
day for a week in succession, and never get
more than a glimpse of him. At last, seeing
nothing else, I engaged myself as a common
labourer on the roads, the wages being ten
shillings a day. This would have done very
well; but unfortunately I had had no training
in this way. The pain I suffered in the
back and shoulders was so extreme, and the
exhaustion every night so great—not to
speak of the dreadful effort it required to rise
at five o'clock next morning and dress myself
—that, after a week, I was compelled to give
it up. I now sell lemonade and lemon-kali,
at a little stand at the corner of Elizabeth
Street, near the Post Office, with a few cakes
in a basket, and a glass full of acidulated
drops and bull's eyes for the rising generation.
My wife gets work from one of the
milliners in Collins Street, East.

I always come home to dinner, and now and
then we laugh over some little adventure I
have met with in my illustrious vocation.
When the wind and dust make cooking outside
a tent next to impossible, I get a cup of
coffee and a chop at the London Coffee
Rooms; and on one occasion I went to the
National Dining and Lodging Tent, where
they profess to have a boiled, or baked joint
every day at one o'clock, with potatoes and
coffee, all for the small charge of eighteen-
pence. The dining department seemed to be
managed by a dirty girl of sixteen, and a
remarkably dirty little Irish boy, of about
twelve, was the waiter. The tent was rather
large, in comparison with the average, but it
was uncommonly full of furniture; especially
of beds and bedding. The whole surface was
occupied with wooden stretchers, on which
lay a confusion of odiously dirty and torn
blankets and coverlets; some of a dull yellow,
hammy colour; some mottled, and some of a
shade approaching to pale black, while over
all of them lay a fine bloom of dust. At one
end of the tent was the dining-table, covered
also with a blanket for a table-cloth; which,
besides being a fellow one to those on the
beds (and perhaps doing double duty) had
the additional advantage of being bestrewn
and besmutched with potato parings, islands
of stale mustard, grease, gravy, grime, and grit
of cooking ashes, broad plains and continents
of coffee and tea, which had been spilled, and
smears of wet brown sugar. Knives, forks,
and spoons, some without handles, were all
equally filthy. The plates, however, were
rather clean, and the meat good, though
impracticably tough. The dinner table was the
same size as the stretchers; and, with its
dirty blanket table-cloth, was perfectly in
harmony with the beds that surrounded it
so closely. None of the beds were made—all
in the same confusion as when left in the
morning by their respective occupants—and
three persons were still lying in bed; one of
them rather drunk, and soliloquising
occasionally. Two more beds had been fitted up
like berths, or bunks, in a cabin, which were
exactly at the back of the dinner table; so that
those who sat on that side had their elbows
always in the berths behind; and over these
two had been built four more, which placed
the uppermost ones so near the roof of the
tent that the lodger's nose must inevitably
touch it as he lay. How the lodger got up
there, I did not see; but I suppose he
clambered from berth to berth till he attained the
summit of his wishes. The brown sugar was
very dark, sandy, stony, wet, and conglomerated,
and the coffee was the colour of muddy
water, after it had been stirred. I half shut-to
my eyes, and made an excellent dinner.
After a man has worked on the roads, he finds
a good deal of his fine edge gone. As Hudibras
says, on being knocked down,

              "I am not now in fortune's power;—
               He who is down can fall no lower."

This tent life at Canvass Town is certainly
a very strange one. If it were really pastoral
—not even to hint at Arcadia—or simply
a life in the green fields, there is something
in human nature, however highly civilised,
that has continually made people of the
highest education and refinement feel a longing
fancy to get rid of stringent conventionalities,
and to return for a time to a primitive
state of existence. Kings and their courts
have often indulged in this, and all our picnics
are small indications of the same tendency.
But this will never do in a tent or
grotto in Australia. It is the last sort of
thing—particularly for ladies. Besides the
want of grass and green leaves—except in
the winter and rainy spring season—and the
consequent want of shade, even among the
trees, there is the Plague of Dust; and old
Egypt had few that were worse. The climax
of this plague is of course when the hot wind
sets in; but the ordinary wind, with its long
dust-storms, is quite enough to destroy
everything we associate with the pastoral and
romantic. At Canvass Town it is felt as quite
a curse. There is no excluding it. You can
keep out rain, even the heaviest, but dust
finds its way through the smallest crevices,
covers everything, is always between your
teeth, and insinuates itself under every part
of your dress. My wife has to wash the
children from head to foot in strong soap-
suds (we have to do the same with ourselves)
every night; and if we were all to do so
twice a day besides, it would be no more than