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 £5,000 a year
amply satisfied with what an Englishman with one-tenth of his income
would deem the barest necessaries. The Australian Croesus is generally
very little of a snob, though often his 'lady' has a taste for display.
When this desire for grandeur has led them to furnish expensively, they
are unable to furnish prettily, and usually feel much less comfortable in
their drawing-room, in which they never set foot except when there is
company--than when their chairs and tables were made by a working
carpenter or with their own hands out of a few deal boards.