Terraces and attached houses are universally disliked, and almost every class of suburban house is detached and stands in its own garden.  These gardens are laid out much in the English fashion; but there is little need of greenhouses, and unless you have water laid on to your lawn, it is difficult to keep it green in summer.  In Adelaide but few people try to keep lawns; the summer sun is too scorching, and towards February and March the gardens look dreadfully dried up.  But on the other hand, flowers of all kinds grow in abundance, and to a size which they rarely attain in colder climates.  The garden needs little attention beyond the summer watering and you can get flowers all the year round.  Fruit-trees grow with wonderful rapidity and bear most abundantly.

With the aid of the hills you get several climates within a small area, and in Adelaide especially the abundance of flowers and fruit is all that can be desired.  There is naturally some tendency to coarseness, especially in the fruit.  The price of labour makes it difficult to keep large gardens in good order.  For this reason few people keep large gardens.  Another thing that accounts for the smallness of the gardens attached to middle and working-class houses, which are often no more than patches, is the speculation in land.  The smaller the portions into which the speculator cuts up his building sections, the more he gets for them.  I myself on one occasion bought an eight-acre section of land in one block for L1,100, cut it up into blocks of an eighth of an acre each, and resold it within six weeks for a little over L2,000.  This land-speculation is quite a feature of Australian life, and at certain periods it is difficult to lose money by it.  Large gardens are generally long leaseholds or freeholds belonging to rich people, who will not sell during their lifetime.  At their death their gardens are cut up into small blocks and yield large profits.  Nor do I think that the love of gardening is at all common here; it is not a sufficiently exciting occupation.

Furniture.

I closed my last letter with an account of the way in which houses are built here.  I am now going to try to describe their contents.  And perhaps the best way to do this will be to describe a type of each class of house, omitting all exceptions, which are necessarily numerous where so large a field has to be covered.

We will begin at the top of the tree.  Whilst the ambition of the wealthy colonist not unfrequently finds vent in building a large house, he has generally been brought up in too rough a school to care to furnish it even decently.  His notion of furniture begins and ends with upholstery, and I doubt whether he ever comes to look upon this as more than things to sit on, stand on, lie on, eat off and drink off The idea of deriving any pleasure from the beauty of his surroundings rarely enters into his head, and it is not uncommon to find a man who is making L5,000 a year amply satisfied