Life in the Cities 119 



wares in the most imperfect English. More pe- 

 culiarly Australian is the rabbit-man, with his 

 stentorian yell of "Wild rabbits, oh!" and his 

 cart with a frame on which dozens of pairs of 

 slaughtered bunnies are hanging. One shilling a 

 pair is the usual price, and the rabbit-man does a 

 thriving trade in the face of an expiring Australian 

 prejudice against the rabbit as food. Australian 

 shops are much the same as shops anywhere else, 

 but the fishmonger and game-seller sometimes 

 festoons his shop front with strings of bright- 

 plumaged parrots, useless as food, but attractive 

 to the eye. Curious fish are on the marble slabs, 

 pink schnapper, and hideous flat-head, with sil- 

 ver barracouta like enormous mackerel, and piles 

 of tiny garfish. The game includes wild duck, 

 magpie-geese, and black swan, with a wallaby or 

 two and tails of the larger kangaroos. The wild 

 turkey which is really a bustard, and the finest 

 game bird Australia produces may occasionally 

 be seen, but it is now very rare and shy. The 

 game-shop and the fruit-shop serve best to remind 

 the visitor that he is in an Australian city; none 

 of the others differ in any particular from the shop 

 of a British city. 



A stroll through a suburban street in the cool 

 of the evening is quite another affair. Here the 

 houses are all single-storied bungalows, or villas, 

 as the Australians prefer to call them, each stand- 

 ing in its own plot of garden. Glance over the 

 famous pittosporum hedge, and you may see the 



