careful of his health. To-day it has been quite a hot wind, and you have been in it for hours.'

'And pray, have you kept yourself all day under a mosquito-curtain indoors ?'

'No-I am thankful to say mosquitoes don't visit us; and I have not kept inside either. It was not so very hot under the shade.'

'Nor an injurious heat either, my dear. The thermometer stands close to the hundred under that verandah. In India, with our moist warmth, we should have been done up altogether long before the mercury got there.'

'But don't you really think the hot wind bad?'

'That I don't. It comes dry enough, so that the perspiration is rapidly carried off; there is not the clammy skin as in India and Queensland. Then it is unattended with the malaria so common in countries less windy than this.'

'Why don't we have here the marsh and other low fevers so common even in England?'

Because, my dear wife, you are in another vegetable region. Here the botany reminds one of wood and not of juices. You complain sometimes that the trees here don't give the nice shade the English ones do. But did it never strike you that it is the decomposition of so much leafy matter which gives birth to malaria ?'

'I never thought of that. I see in our back paddock

that trees which were felled, as I am told, nearly fifty years ago, lie there still as hard as flint.'

'Yes, and will ring like metal when struck by the axe.'

'But why don't they rot away like our English trees?'

'I hardly know, unless it be that instead of being almost all carbon and the gases, they contain so much lime, flint, and other mineral substances, iron included. You know what a lot of ash you get from a wood fire. That is the stuff that keeps the trees from decaying

so soon.'

Then that must have a great effect upon the health of the inhabitants.'

'Certainly, my dear. And they say there is here an extra quantity of ozone, another element of health in the atmosphere.'

'I know,' said the lady, 'another cause for longevity. People are not so silly in their dresses, and prefer parties out of doors to stuffed crowds in confined rooms. What dreadful folly that old-fashioned system of balls, routs, at homes, and receptions seems to be now! If I were a girl again, I should prefer keeping my good looks, by the simple manners and healthy amusements of this island, rather than lose them by late hours, bad air, and spoiled digestion.'

'What a speech, madam! quite a speech! It is all true as gospel. And think how many a fellow in England, who haunts his club, is a martyr at parties, and gains an early acquaintance with a stomach and

a swollen toe, to say nothing of nerves and renewed bills, might come out here, live longer, and enjoy the life while it lasts.

His wife had evidently not heard the whole of this. The handkerchief was to her eyes, and she sighed deeply.

'What is the matter, my dear ?' said he anxiously. 'I was only thinking of our poor girl, and how even her life might have been spared had she come here.'

CHAPTER VI.

CHURCHES AND SCHOOLS.

'I SEE you are in no want of churches in Hobart Town,' observed the Captain to his official friend.

'No; we were heathens once, but call ourselves Christians now,' answered Mr Roberts.

'But so many for so small a place, and in a land consecrated to villany from its commencement, I never expected to see.'

'I dare say not.

Most folks at a distance take us in Tasmania to be a cross between a wolf and a sloth, not particularly tame and not particularly wise. Yet you must confess you walk about without being bitten, and fall in with fellows not exactly fools.'

'Right, most certainly, Roberts. Man for man, I'll back your population in point of intelligence against

any like-sized town of England. The order of your streets is superior to what I can recollect in the old land. Property is certainly as safe. Though what surprised me most was your propriety on Sunday.'

'What! and did you expect to find us as godless as the whites of India?'

'I can't help thinking, however, that your strict observance of the Sabbath may be owing to the presence of so many of my countrymen,' said Captain Douglas.

'Don't flatter your race too much, my dear fellow, you quite forget they are only so good while inhaling the fogs of Scotland. Let them breathe the clear atmosphere of the colonies, or labour with the moist, hot air of India, or even cross the channel into the novel region of France, and this national institution of church-going becomes a myth.'

'Then what is the reason of your virtues on that day?' 'The purity of the blood, of course. The island was for years the dust-hole of Great Britain. There was a striking mixture of nations and crimes. Herded together, the friction, I suppose, rubbed off the vices, which had so obtruded themselves through the skin, and left nothing remaining but the native good. Will that account for it?'

'I don't see why you should not claim the virtues, when Rome, with as queer an origin, became the model of justice.'

'You have doubtless noticed, Douglas, that the

places of worship have an architecture as varied as the denominations. Some, that arose when the Georges, those patterns of taste, illustrated the Fine Arts, have all the elements of beauty adorning the Georgian era of England. Don't you admire St David's Church, now?'

'It is assuredly more useful than ornamental, but quite an advance upon what I expected to see.'

'Perhaps you have a sympathy for the deformities of the Scots Church, or the pinched-up pettiness of the Roman Catholic St Joseph's. What think you of the four square walls of the Wesleyan Chapel, with its Grecian portico ?'

I am not in the humour to criticise what sprang up out of that terrible past. I am sure that those who worked to get these buildings up deserved all honour. As to taste, I expected to see the more modern illustrate the better style. The Independent Chapel of Macquarie Street, though not large, is in thorough good taste. My own later Presbyterian Church is better than the former. The last Episcopalian Church is in advance of the earlier.'

'Your magnanimous charity, as a new chum, is wonderful as rare. It is believed to be the solemn duty of every snob that comes into the island to express his pity for us benighted savages, while, at the same time, he can show no parallel progress in his own wretched, slow, little market town.'