Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/216

 * Another great machine invented in Australia is the jump plow. Much of the land in Australia is full of either stumps or stones. The jump plow jumps the stumps or stones by means of a clever device, the main feature of which is a hinge attachment. Most of the Australian plows are in gangs of six to twelve, all of them supplied with the jump attachment So far as I was able to judge from what Mr. May said, our wheat yield is one-third or one-fourth greater per acre, without fertilizer, than the wheat yield of Australia; but our land costs a third more In Australia, when a young woman is called upon regularly by a young man, he is known as a "follower." In the section of country where I live, he would be called the young woman's "steady," or steady company Nine-tenths of the passengers on this ship are Australians or New-Zealanders, en route to England, and most of them will return home by way of the United States, a route considerably shorter than by way of Cape Town or the Suez Canal. Most of them have interviewed me about routes, and I am now getting even with those American railroads against which I have grudges Today we are off the southern coast of Madagascar, but a drizzly rain is falling, and we cannot see a half-mile from the ship. At noon the distance to Durban is about the distance from New York to Chicago, which is made by railroad train in eighteen hours, but we shall not make it under three days and nights, as we steam only 330 miles a day. This is our fifteenth day at sea, without sight of land, and neither of our double engines has stopped once since they were started at Adelaide I believe