Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/152

 * The eggs used at Menzie's hotel are labeled. The two I had for breakfast were marked with a rubber stamp in this fashion: "A. J. Paine, The Sisters, Teremo; February 6, 1913." This morning, while at St. Kilda beach, we looked at the many ships in Port Melbourne, and distinguished a big blue funnel. It belonged to the "Anchises," of the Blue Funnel line, and we will live on it for three weeks, beginning next Wednesday. It started from Sydney a week ago, but we will join it at Adelaide, for which city it sails tonight I was talking today with an intelligent Australian, and he says that in three or four years the cost of living here has increased one-fourth, owing to the advancing prices for labor In both Sydney and Melbourne, I found crowds around employment agencies. This surprised me; I thought every man who wanted work here, had it In coming from Sydney by rail, we saw hundreds of piano-boxes along the way. Each box contained an advertisement for the Steck piano. It was a new use for empty piano-boxes Here, when a doctor charges a big fee for an operation, the newspapers make a fuss about it. The Sydney papers were full of a sensation of this kind the day I left there. It is a fashion that might be copied by American papers; great outrages are perpetrated by some doctors in the United States, and nothing is said about it I have heard a great deal about rabbits in Australia; they are said to be so numerous as to be a curse. Still, while riding through the country yesterday on a railroad train, I saw two boys out hunting. One of them had three rabbits, and the other had four. Considering the rab