dresses his shop-window.  But the tradesman does not dress the drawing-room window of his private house.  Neither, therefore, the merchant.  Besides this, it cannot be too thoroughly understood that Australia is before everything a money-making place, and that anything like unremunerative expenditure with no possible chance of profit is considered foolish in all but a man who has made his fortune.  With money so dear, and the chances of turning it over rapidly so frequent and so remunerative, such expenditure becomes little less than a sin.  Everything ornamental not only costs twice as dear in actual money, but the money itself is worth at least twice as much as in England.

Really large houses of the size of the manor-houses and halls which are scattered over England in tens of thousands, can be counted in Australia in scores.  Of these but few have any architectural pretensions.  Houses of this class cannot be built under L10,000 here, whereas in England they would cost from L4,000 to L5,000 and can be bought still cheaper.  If there is any style which colonists particularly affect, it is the castellar.  Both in the large houses I have just been speaking of, and in the ordinary wealthy man’s house which has cost him from L3,000 to L5,000, turrets and flagstaffs abound.  The passion for flagstaffs must, I think, be derived from the fact that most of the people who build these houses have had a long sea-journey from England, and retain a little ozone in their composition.  There is also something assertive about a flag.  A man who has a flag floating on his house is almost sure to have some character about him.  Not unfrequently, when the builder of a house intends to live in it himself, he wishes to imitate his old home in England, or if he has risen in the world, some particular house of the village or town he was brought up in, which he admired in his boyhood.  The man who builds for himself at least takes care to build soundly, and to have his rooms large and lofty.

By far the majority of houses are built by speculators; which means that they are very badly built, run up in a tremendous hurry, constructed of the cheapest and nastiest materials, with thin walls—­in short, built for show, and not for use.  Everything looks very nice in them when you walk round just after they are built, and it is only after you have lived in them eighteen months that you begin to understand why the owner was in such a hurry to sell, and would not hear of letting the house to you, even at a good rent.  You know something of this in London, but not nearly to the same extent as here.  In these speculative houses there is often some little attempt at ornamentation—­a bow-window thrown out, or the veranda lifted to form a Gothic porch, or the drawing-room brought out beyond the rest of the house, so as to form what is known as a T cottage, though it should rather be a P, with a protrusion of the drawing-room representing the straight line, and the body of the house the loop of the P.