Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/165

 *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.

—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