A Backblocker's Pleasure Trip

Moss Yale--the last refreshment room. We had our money's worth at this place Here we began to meet with Sydney excursionists, for hereabouts was one of the beauty spots of Australia--a wild, luxuriant, romantic belt, in which were gorges a thousand feet deep, and numerous droning waterfalls. We were getting home--and the subject of conversation had drifted to the city and country girl. We had a long argument about them, and while agreeing that both were charming, the argument crystallised into the fact that they weren't the same girl. One of the most noticeable differences between them was to be observed in their home life. One moved in an atmosphere of placid domesticity; the other in a continuous social whirl. Home training, as the country girl understood it, was a negligible quantity with the average city girl. On the same parable she could hardly be said to have any love of home. Her interests day and evening were out of doors--outside the family doors, that is; which does not necessarily mean in the open air, for anybody else's house, if there were congenial spirits there, was preferred to her own in leisure hours. She loved to gad about in fine clothes, to air them by the seaside, in public parks and gardens; to fly around in trains and trams and vehicles; to go boating with young fellows on rivers and harbours. Theatres, concerts, picture shows, and sports of various kinds helped to make up the continual round of entertainments that became to her an important part of existence. She led a butterfly kind of life, fluttering from one attraction to another; and she suggested the moth also--chasing the gleams of brightness in the night hours. She no sooner returned from one amusement than she was thinking of where or what she could go to next. Rarely did a thought occur of what she could do at home.

This gay butterfly, who was smart and charming in a social way, did not throw many compliments to her rustic sister, whom she regarded as being behind the times. But the country girl on changing places soon adapted herself to city ways. On the other hand, it took the city girl a long while to adapt herself to country life, and to succeed in that sphere. The secret was in the home training.