As for the make of the chairs, they are to be found in plenty of English middle-class drawing-rooms even now.  The shape may be named the ‘deformed.’  The back is carved out into various contortions of a horse-shoe, with a bar across the middle which just catches you in the small of the back, and is a continual reproach if you venture to lean against it.  The wood of which the chairs are made is mahogany, walnut, or cedar.  The large round or oval table which stands in the middle of the room is of the same wood, and so are the card-table, the Davenport, the chiffonier, and that Jacob’s-ladder-like what-not in the corner.  In some houses the upholsterer has stuffed the room with useless tables.  Of course there is a fender and fire-irons, and probably a black doleful-looking grate, which during two-thirds of the year is stuffed with paper shavings of all the colours of the rainbow and several others which good Mother Nature forgot to put into it.  On the chimney-piece is a Louis XVI. clock and a pair of ornaments to match.  A piano, tune immaterial, is a sine qua non even in a middle-class house, but when Muttonwool has got all these things—­in short, paid his upholsterer’s bill—­he thinks a ten-pound note should cover the rest of his drawing-room furniture.  Household gods are terribly deficient, and it would not be difficult to fancy yourself in a lodging-house.  There may be a few odds and ends picked up on the overland route, and a set of stereotyped ornaments bought at an auction sale or sent out as ‘sundries’ in a general cargo; but of bric-a-brac, in the usual acceptation of the term, there is little or none.

As for the pictures, they are altogether abominable.  Can you imagine a man with L5,000 a year (or L500, for that matter) covering his walls with chromos?  The inferior kinds of these ‘popularizers of art,’ as the papers call them, have an immense sale here.  Even when a wealthy man has been told that it is his duty to buy pictures, the chances are that he will attend an auction and pick up rubbish at low prices, rubbing his hands over what he considers a good bargain; or if he wants to tell his visitors how much he gave for his pictures he gets mediocre work with a name on it.  A recent number of the Adelaide Punch has a caricature entitled ‘’Igh Art in Adelaide,’ which though of course a caricature, is worth quoting as showing how the wind blows:  ’Tallowfat, pointing to a picture in a dealer’s shop, loq.:  “What’s the price of that there thing with the trees and the ’ut in the distance?” Dealer:  “That, sir! that’s a gem by Johnstone” (a local artist of some merit)—­“twenty guineas, sir.”  Tallowfat:  “Twenty tomfools!” “What d’ye take me for?  Why, I bought a picture twice that size, with much more colour in it, and a frame half as thick again, and I only paid ten for it!  Show us something with more style."’ A few men have good pictures, but I hardly know anyone who has any good engravings.  Muttonwool can see no difference between a proof before letters and the illustrations from the newspapers, which may be seen pasted on the walls of every small shop and working-man’s cottage.  That there is a taste for pictures here is undeniable.  But that is common to every child till it knows how to read, and will want a deal of educating before it can be called ‘art.’