Let us now hie us to humbler abodes, and visit an eight-roomed cottage, inhabited by a young solicitor whose income is from L500 to L1000 a year.  Here the whole drawing-room suite is in cretonne or rep, and comprises the couch, six chairs, and lady’s and gent’s easy-chairs, which we saw before at Muttonwool’s.  The carpet is also ditto.  The glass, ornaments, etc., are similar, but on a smaller scale; and if there are any pictures on the wall they are almost bound to be chromos, for whilst Croesus sometimes invests in expensive paintings, the middle-class, who cannot afford to give from L100 upwards for a picture, will make no effort to obtain something moderately good, such as can be easily obtained in England for a very small outlay.  The gasalier is bronze instead of glass.  The real living-room of the house is the dining-room, which is therefore the best furnished, and on a tapestry carpet are a leather couch, six balloon-back carved chairs, two easy-chairs, a chiffonier, a side-table, and a cheap chimney-glass.  In the best bedroom the bedstead is a tubular half-tester, the toilet-ware gold and white, the carpet again tapestry.  Throughout the house the furniture is made of cedar.  The kitchen is summarily disposed of; Biddy has to content herself with d table, dresser, safe, pasteboard and rolling-pin, and a couple of chairs.  Her bedroom furniture is even more scanty—­a paillasse on trestles, a chair, a half-crown looking-glass, an old jug and a basin on a wooden table.  Even in the houses of the wealthy poor Biddy is very badly treated in this respect.  In Muttonwool’s house, if he keeps two servants, they both sleep in one room, and not improbably share the same basin.  Servants are undoubtedly troublesome to a degree in Australia, but it is not altogether a satisfactory feature in colonial life that the provision made for their comfort is literally nil.

Having seen the L600 a year cottage it is almost needless to visit the L300 and L400, belonging to clerks and the smaller shopkeepers.  The style is the same, but the quantity and quality inferior.  For instance, the drawing-room carpet is tapestry instead of Brussels; the dining-room furniture is covered with horse-hair instead of leather, and so on.  We will go into the next cottage—­less pretentious-looking and a little smaller.  The rent is twelve shillings a week, and it belongs to a carpenter in good employ.  Here there is no drawing-room, but the parlour aspires to comfort quite undreamt of by an English tradesman.  Our old friends the horse-hair cedar couch, the gent’s and lady’s chairs together with four balloon high chairs, turn up again.  There is a four-foot chiffonier, a tapestry carpet, a gilt chimney-glass, a hearthrug, a bronze fender and fire-irons, and a round table with turned pillar and carved claws.  In the parents’ bedroom are a half-tester bedstead with coir-fibre or woollen flock mattress, two cane chairs, washstand, toilet-table, glass and ware, towel-horse,