- tiful or popular, but women running a race for perfection
of figure, and submitting their charms to the public, is a still more amazing performance.
Wednesday, February 12.—An unusual thing in
Australian towns is that seed stores sell a great variety
of flowering plants; instead of buying sweet pea
seeds here, you buy sweet pea plants five of six inches
high. At one store in Adelaide, I saw a dozen different
varieties of plants put up in small bunches, and
offered at reasonable prices. . . . Australia and
New Zealand are very Progressive, when active and
powerful labor unions are concerned, but not a great
deal is done for the quiet and patient farmers; there
are no rural mail routes in either country. . . .
There are more banks, trust companies, loan companies,
etc., in Australian cities, it seems to me, than elsewhere.
In some sections of the large towns I see almost
nothing but financial institutions for blocks. . . .
The people here not only know I am from the United
States, but they know what section I am from. "You
are not a New-Yorker?" a gentleman said to me this
morning. I told him I was from Kansas. "My guess
was Denver," he said. He came within five hundred
miles of locating me. . . . At all the hotels, we
have noticed that the maids have false teeth. There
is something in the water that is injurious to teeth;
you see advertisements in the papers offering a remedy.
In Australia, probably you see three times as many
women with full sets of false teeth as you see elsewhere.
And dentists here are like dentists everywhere, in that
