Australia supplies the world not only with fine wool, but with mutton also.  The modern invention of cold storage and its application in ships has created this great trade.  In Sydney I visited a huge establishment where they kill and clean and solidly freeze a thousand sheep a day, for shipment to England.

The Australians did not seem to me to differ noticeably from Americans, either in dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation, inflections, or general appearance.  There were fleeting and subtle suggestions of their English origin, but these were not pronounced enough, as a rule, to catch one’s attention.  The people have easy and cordial manners from the beginning —­from the moment that the introduction is completed.  This is American.  To put it in another way, it is English friendliness with the English shyness and self-consciousness left out.

Now and then—­but this is rare—­one hears such words as piper for paper, lydy for lady, and tyble for table fall from lips whence one would not expect such pronunciations to come.  There is a superstition prevalent in Sydney that this pronunciation is an Australianism, but people who have been “home”—­as the native reverently and lovingly calls England—­know better.  It is “costermonger.”  All over Australasia this pronunciation is nearly as common among servants as it is in London among the uneducated and the partially educated of all sorts and conditions of people.  That mislaid ‘y’ is rather striking when a person gets enough of it into a short sentence to enable it to show up.  In the hotel in Sydney the chambermaid said, one morning: 

“The tyble is set, and here is the piper; and if the lydy is ready I’ll tell the wyter to bring up the breakfast.”

I have made passing mention, a moment ago, of the native Australasian’s custom of speaking of England as “home.”  It was always pretty to hear it, and often it was said in an unconsciously caressing way that made it touching; in a way which transmuted a sentiment into an embodiment, and made one seem to see Australasia as a young girl stroking mother England’s old gray head.

In the Australasian home the table-talk is vivacious and unembarrassed; it is without stiffness or restraint.  This does not remind one of England so much as it does of America.  But Australasia is strictly democratic, and reserves and restraints are things that are bred by differences of rank.

English and colonial audiences are phenomenally alert and responsive.  Where masses of people are gathered together in England, caste is submerged, and with it the English reserve; equality exists for the moment, and every individual is free; so free from any consciousness of fetters, indeed, that the Englishman’s habit of watching himself and guarding himself against any injudicious exposure of his feelings is forgotten, and falls into abeyance—­and to such a degree indeed, that he will bravely applaud all by himself if he wants to—­an exhibition of daring which is unusual elsewhere in the world.