But the favourite type of Australian house is laid, out in an oblong block bisected by a three to eight foot passage.  The first door on one side as you go in is the drawing-room, on the other the dining-room.  Then follow the bedrooms, etc., with the kitchen and scullery at the end of the passage, or sometimes in a lean-to at right angles to the hinder part of the house proper.  This kind of cottage is almost universal in Adelaide amongst the middle and upper middle classes, and invariable in the working-class throughout Australia.  In the other colonies the upper middle classes often live in two-storied houses; i.e., ground-floor and one floor above.  Their construction is almost as simple as the cottage, the only difference being that the bedrooms are on the upper story, and that a pair of narrow stairs face the front-door and take up half the passage-way, directly you get past the drawing and dining-room doom doors.  The cottage is not high enough to strike the eye, but the squareness, or more properly the cubeness, of these two-storied houses is appalling.  They look for all the world like houses built of cards, except that the cards are uncommonly solid.  For my own part, I should never care to live in a two-storied house again, after experiencing the comfort of never having to go upstairs, and having all the rooms on the same floor.  At first one is prejudiced against it.  I was so, until during my second year in Australia I had to live on the third floor in Sydney.  It was only then that I realized the advantages of the simpler plan.

The strong light and heat of the sun has the effect of a window-tax in limiting the size and number of the windows.  A few French windows are to be found in Adelaide, but the old sashes are almost universal.  Of, late a fashion has sprung up for bow-windows, which, however pretty, have here the great disadvantage of attracting the sun unpleasantly.  Shutters are not much used.  Venetian blinds are more common.  On a hot summer day it is absolutely necessary to shut all windows and draw down the blinds if you wish to keep at all cool.  About five o’clock, if there is no hot wind, the house may be opened out.

Nearly every house that can afford the space has a veranda, which sometimes stretches the whole way round.  The rooms are usually lofty for their size, in winter horribly cold and draughty, in summer unbearably stuffy in small houses, the science of ventilation being of recent introduction.  Even in large establishments all the living-rooms are almost always on the ground-floor, both on account of the fatigue of going up and down stairs, and owing to the paucity of servants.  As a rule, the kitchens are terribly small, and in summer filled with flies.  How the poor servants manage to exist in them is more than I can understand.  It is no wonder they ask such high wages.  In a few larger houses a merciful fashion has been adopted of making the kitchen a mere cooking galley, the cook