Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/36

 is a tolerably big one. This is the summer season here, and the show will return to the United States in April In the fruit stores in Sydney you see strawberries, cantaloupes, peaches, green corn, tomatoes, etc. At home you hear a good deal about low prices in Australia. I only know I paid fifty cents each for cantaloupes, which are known as Rock Melons here, but they are particularly large and fine. Strawberries were fifty cents a quart, but they were extra good. I am told that the people here do not care much for Rock Melons. The melons we bought we carried to a restaurant, and the woman who served them had never tasted melons, and thought we had queer taste A thing that attracted our attention in Sydney was an unusually large number of young women. At one of the bathing beaches I saw a party of twelve, and nine of them were young women. We entered Sydney harbor early Monday morning, and the bathing-beaches were already crowded; there seems to be more merrymaking here than in American cities. On Monday and Tuesday the parks were crowded, as were the bathing-beaches. And the parks here are wonderfully fine, and the zoölogical garden I visited was the best I have ever seen. The impudent English sparrows may be seen here in great numbers, and in the parks they enter the cages of rare birds and rob them of their feed Adelaide is very polite, but she says the people here look funny to her; that it is a constant source of amusement to her to walk the streets and see the people. She says the women wear afternoon dresses in the morning, on the street. Along the docks this morning, we came upon a big crowd witnessing the departure of a