accepted, otherwise not.  What a glorious opening for my ambition and for my literary proclivities came to me in July, 1878, when I was in my fifty-third year!  Many leading articles were rejected, but not one literary or social article.  Generally these last appeared in both daily and weekly papers.  I recollect the second original social article I wrote was on “Equality as an influence on society and manners,” suggested by Matthew Arnold.  The much-travelled Smythe, then, I think, touring with Charles Clark, wrote to Mr. Finlayson from Wallaroo thus:—­“In this dead-alive place, where one might fire a mitrailleuse down the principal street without hurting anybody, I read this delightful article in yesterday’s Register.  When we come again to Adelaide, and we collect a few choice spirits, be sure to invite the writer of this article to join us.”  I felt as if the round woman had got at last into the round hole which fitted her; and in my little study, with my books and my pigeon holes, and my dear old mother sitting with her knitting on her rocking chair at the low window, I had the knowledge that she was interested in all I did.  I generally read the Ms to her before it went to the office.  What is more remarkable, perhaps, is that the excellent maid who was with us for 12 years, picked out everything of mine that was in the papers and read it.  A series of papers called “Some Social Aspects of Early Colonial Life” I contributed under the pseudonym of “A Colonist of 1839.”  From 1878 till 1893, when I went round the world via America, I held the position of outside contributor on the oldest newspaper in the State, and for these 14 years I had great latitude.  My friend Dr. Garran, then editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, accepted reviews and articles from me.  Sometimes I reviewed the same books for both, but I wrote the articles differently, and made different quotations, so that I scarcely think any one could detect the same hand in them; but generally they were different books and different subjects, which I treated.  I tried The Australasian with a short story, “Afloat and Ashore,” and with a social article on “Wealth, Waste, and Want.”  I contributed to The Melbourne Review, and later to The Victorian Review, which began by paying well, but filtered out gradually.  I found journalism a better paying business for me than novel writing, and I delighted in the breadth of the canvas on which I could draw my sketches of books and of life.  I believe that my work on newspapers and reviews is more characteristic of me, and intrinsically better work than what I have done in fiction; but when I began to wield the pen, the novel was the line of least resistance.  When I was introduced in 1894 to Mrs. Croly, the oldest woman journalist in the United States, as an Australian journalist, I found that her work, though good ehough, was essentially woman’s work, dress, fashions, functions, with educational and social outlooks from the feminine point