Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/145

 and Australia: the last named is more prosperous, and does everything a little better. Australians have a little of the swagger and strut you detect in Chicago people, whereas New-Zealanders are as modest as people living in St. Louis, or any other less prosperous and enterprising city.

—In the wash-room of the sleeping-car, early this morning, I met an American, a Boston man, who has been a gentleman farmer in Australia for twelve years. He told me he owned 52,000 acres of land, and that whereas he came here with nothing twelve years ago, he would not take a million and a half dollars for what he owns now. He originally visited the country on business, thought he detected great possibilities, and came here to live. He didn't know corn from barley when he began, but applied business rules to farming, and has succeeded. I expressed surprise as to his large land-holding, whereupon he told me that in the interior there are sheep farms five hundred miles square, or as big as the state of Kansas. This land is leased from the government at a penny an acre. Artesian wells three thousand feet deep are being bored, and these wells are greatly improving the arid districts. There are plenty of stock farms in Australia 150 to 200 miles square The Boston man pays a good deal of attention to dairying, although he is interested in all branches of farming: fruit, vegetables, grain, stock, etc., and employs 280 men. Farm wages are lower here, judging from what he told me, than in the United States. He has no