The next things which interest us when we travel are, first, the people; next, the novelties; and finally the history of the places and countries visited.  Novelties are rare in cities which represent the most advanced civilization of the modern day.  When one is familiar with such cities in the other parts of the world he is in effect familiar with the cities of Australasia.  The outside aspects will furnish little that is new.  There will be new names, but the things which they represent will sometimes be found to be less new than their names.  There may be shades of difference, but these can easily be too fine for detection by the incompetent eye of the passing stranger.  In the larrikin he will not be able to discover a new species, but only an old one met elsewhere, and variously called loafer, rough, tough, bummer, or blatherskite, according to his geographical distribution.  The larrikin differs by a shade from those others, in that he is more sociable toward the stranger than they, more kindly disposed, more hospitable, more hearty, more friendly.  At least it seemed so to me, and I had opportunity to observe.  In Sydney, at least.  In Melbourne I had to drive to and from the lecture-theater, but in Sydney I was able to walk both ways, and did it.  Every night, on my way home at ten, or a quarter past, I found the larrikin grouped in considerable force at several of the street corners, and he always gave me this pleasant salutation: 

“Hello, Mark!”

“Here’s to you, old chap!

“Say—­Mark!—­is he dead?”—­a reference to a passage in some book of mine, though I did not detect, at that time, that that was its source.  And I didn’t detect it afterward in Melbourne, when I came on the stage for the first time, and the same question was dropped down upon me from the dizzy height of the gallery.  It is always difficult to answer a sudden inquiry like that, when you have come unprepared and don’t know what it means.  I will remark here—­if it is not an indecorum—­that the welcome which an American lecturer gets from a British colonial audience is a thing which will move him to his deepest deeps, and veil his sight and break his voice.  And from Winnipeg to Africa, experience will teach him nothing; he will never learn to expect it, it will catch him as a surprise each time.  The war-cloud hanging black over England and America made no trouble for me.  I was a prospective prisoner of war, but at dinners, suppers, on the platform, and elsewhere, there was never anything to remind me of it.  This was hospitality of the right metal, and would have been prominently lacking in some countries, in the circumstances.