roughly washed out, or scalded with hot water, and the basins merely get a perfunctory rub with a greasy cloth after the slops have been emptied. The towels are often in rags, and the soap is seemingly as hard to find as the Holy Grail. Of the condition of the bath-room—when there does happen to be one, which is not often—common modesty and decency forbids me to speak. The defiant disregard of the first principles of sanitary laws in the disposition of closets and other conveniences, shocks the stranger and disgusts every traveller.
"What matter?" muses the publican. "It's the bar that pays. Travellers are only a nuisance. Them there arrangements wor good enuff for me, ever sence I wor a kid. Oh, hang travellers!—let 'em leave it or lump it. Gim me the good thirsty 'uns!"
Such is the normal state of affairs in many inns in New South Wales. As for the cookery!—that, alas, is simply nasty; there's no other word for it. The kitchens are polluted and vile. The surroundings are odious. The atmosphere of the bar and common rooms reeks with the odour of stale beer and sickly tobacco fumes. Bacchus in New South Wales is no longer the rosy radiant god, but a combination satyr—part swine, part slobbering Silenus—and wholly repugnant to every clean instinct. Of course, I am not forgetful of some bright exceptions to this description.
Here in New Zealand, however, I have not yet seen a dirty bedroom. The various utensils for
